It’s been a long journey to get to where we are as a business so during my blog I’d like to share some of the tales of both the good and the bad points of building this team with you from time to time. You never know, one day you might read something useful!

This particular post is about the management technique that, in my opinion, is the easiest and simplest thing you can do as a person that manages or leads others. It’s also the most effective management technique I’ve come across and yet it’s the thing that most people neglect to do with those that work around them! It’s so simple and yet I still get it wrong to this day. If you’d spare me a few minutes to read on, then hopefully all of that will come to make sense!

Even though Burton Beavan is (just) an accountancy practice based in Cheshire; I firmly believe that the principles of this post apply to any business of any size, anywhere.

This blog is about one of those small epiphany moments I had quite a while ago. To set the scene, I was just busying myself away in my office, under the same time pressures that we all face every day.

One of my senior managers dropped into my office unexpectedly, he’d built himself up into a bundle of frustrated energy and he wanted a word with me.

So from my selfish perspective here’s what I was thinking at that moment –  I’m not sure what time I’ll finish tonight (it’s Friday) and the last thing I need is more stress. I could really do without this interruption but before I start to huff and puff I manage to stop, take a deep breath and smile. As Alan Mullett once said at a fantastic seminar of his – ‘ITS SHOWTIME! – (Basically, no matter what your personal circumstance, you must always show a positive front to the team, don’t drag them down with you)

So my manager was having an issue with a client, a client that we actually got on with well on a personal level – but the client was expecting too much of us. One of our company values is to try to exceed expectations wherever possible but this was far and above what any reasonable person should expect.

So we started off with the problem; the history of the situation, how it came to be and what should have been done differently in the past. We looked at it from their point of view, from ours, from a neutral one and we were still both satisfied that although we could have done things differently, our intentions were always correct and that we just couldn’t do what the client wanted this time.

The ‘selfish’ (and easy) point of view here was to satisfy ourselves that we’d done our bit, that the fault wasn’t ours and that the client needed to understand that it was theirs. We couldn’t do it, we just say no, end of discussion.

In our world, that’s not good enough, that’s not excellent service, that’s ‘terms and conditions’ standard service that everybody hates. So what could we do next? ‘No’ is a word that we try not to have in our vocabulary unless there is no alternative course of action.

My manager thought an email was appropriate but he wanted me to write it. As it happened I’d have picked up the phone there and then but I wanted to let him get his opinion out in the open, however he felt comfortable doing so. As I typed what I thought he wanted to say, he pointed out bits along the way that changed my interpretation into his own thoughts, he ended up dictating the entire e-mail himself.

As we got to the end of the email he decided that an email wasn’t the right way to do things, it should be dealt with by a phone call, an email wasn’t personal and we couldn’t convey what we were really thinking, we needed to just talk it through with them.

So now he called the client but he wanted to do it whilst I was there so I could be sure what had gone on and had been said. I sat and listened to him explain to the client in an expert manner what the problems were, what the situation really was and what we had to do next to get it right. His balance of understanding and instruction was perfect, better than I could have done for sure. The client understood fully, he was not upset and so we made a meeting date for the following week to get it all sorted face to face. Problem solved and everyone was happy.

So just reflect on what happened. He came to me with a problem, rather than tell him what to do or to send him packing to sort it out himself I just let him tell me what he wanted to do, how he wanted to do it and I let him do it there and then. Effectively he got his thoughts out on a page then called the client and resolved the issue by himself, I did nothing but let him work the problem through in his own time.

As he left my office my manager says ‘thanks for that, I feel so much better now’. I found the comment strange as he fixed the issue himself without any involvement from me (remember that he dictated the email and spoke to the client). So flippantly I just said ‘why say thanks, I didn’t do anything’. His reply leaves an indelible imprint on my future;

‘Yes you did, you listened.’

Those five words have made a bigger impression on my future dealings with our staff than the last five business books I’ve read. Don’t ever forget the simple things where people are concerned; they’re always the most important.