Focus on your clients
After Bell left a meeting with one of her firm’s clients, one of her employees came up to her and commented that she was shocked by the amount of details Bell knew about a particular area of focus that had come up in the meeting.
“Some people believe that once you’re in a certain leadership role that you’re out of that level of detail, yet that, to me, is what our business is all about,” Bell says. “It’s about serving clients; it’s about being relevant.”
Staying relevant requires you to make sure that you never stop learning and seeking information. Bell has a natural level of curiosity that leads her to always be looking at herself and how she can improve. This curiosity keeps her grounded, and it also helps her do a better job of focusing on her people and her clients.
“You’ve never arrived,” she says. “It’s always a journey. The more you learn, the more you know what you don’t know.”
She says it’s important to be self-aware, and one way to focus on becoming more self-aware as a leader is to become inquisitive.
“Ask questions,” she says. “To me, it’s not just self-aware from a personal perspective but aware as a business about what you’re doing and the implications.”
For example, an important aspect of Ernst & Young’s business is its level of service quality it offers to clients.
“That’s about getting feedback, and by getting feedback, you become more self-aware,” she says. “We’re on a constant mission to improve our services.”
By focusing on learning more, you also become more attuned to what drives you and who you are as a leader. When you’re more conscientious about these things, it helps you to better relate to your employees and clients and create a more open environment for everyone.
“You have to be who you are and sincere and having that passion for what you do,” Bell says. “To me, in any business, whatever your clients needs are, you want them to be met by people who are passionate about serving the client or the customer. It’s showing that passion and being genuine that can be infectious.”
Passion can come in many different forms, but she says one way to exude passion to your clients is to prioritize them.
“I was told at some point that when a client calls, you don’t answer the phone — you dive on it,” she says. “It’s about having a passion for serving clients and developing the people. It’s really that symbiotic between people and clients. You can’t — I can’t at least — elevate one over the other because they’re so interrelated.”
One of the most important things to do in interacting with your clients is to make sure that you are, above all, meeting their needs.
“You have to ask them,” Bell says. “Sometimes you can have a sense, but you clearly have to ask. To me, there’s nothing more important than asking for feedback.”
Bell says that while technically there may be other things that are more important in the grand scheme of running a business, her point is that you can’t overlook the importance and magnitude that asking your clients for feedback carries.
“From a service perspective, I don’t think you can assume,” she says. “It’s important to ask for feedback.”
A lot of executives like to ask their clients what keeps them up late at night, and while Bell doesn’t like this cliché, she says there is some merit to what the question is getting at.
“It starts with, ‘What’s going on? What’s going on in your business? What are the key drivers?’” she says.
When your clients do talk to you, it’s important to really listen with both ears to what they’re telling you so that you can be agile and quickly adapt to how their needs are changing.
“Listen and have a strong enough relationship that you can have an ongoing dialogue, and listen as things evolve,” Bell says.
And remember that it’s not about you in this business — it’s all about other people.
“Focus on the clients’ needs as well as the development of the people who are serving them because, again, they’re intertwined.”
How to reach: Ernst & Young LLP, (404) 874-8300 or www.ey.com
