Many of us in some way or another are charged with providing some level of expert advice, be it on social media strategy, content development, customer service or what shoe goes best with that little black dress.
In these situations, people are outsourcing expertise to us. We become extensions of their brains, their tastes, their goals. It’s a heady responsibility to be sure, and one that nobody should take lightly.
As we take this on, it would serve us to consider what additional responsibility we have to the person we’re serving? Sure, it’s easy for them to say “I can’t be chuffed to deal with this right now, you take care of it and call me when it’s done”, but are we truly doing that person a service by taking over the entirety of the process? Even if they have no interest in learning what we know, do we have a responsibility to make sure they take something away from the experience beyond the deliverable?
I think it all comes back to the framework of the interaction. If we are treated as vendors (if we set ourselves up to have that kind of relationship), the expectation is that they provide us with a request, cash and materials and we provide them with what they’ve asked for.
This works for generally tactical, process-based endeavors. If you need your house painted, you choose the color, and hire some people to come in and paint the house in that color. There is, of course, a craft to that process, and there are expert house painters, but generally if I hire a house painter, it’s because I’m outsourcing the expertise that comes from experience to them. I certainly don’t expect them to show me how to paint.
However, for something as overarching as ‘how to communicate’, we need to take advantage of the opportunity to help re-frame the discussion away from a vendor-client relationship and slowly toward something resembling an exchange of information, learning (on both sides) and describing the why of what we do, so that next time they know just a little bit more, recognize that it’s not so hard, and begin to take some responsibility for their own communication.
Otherwise, we might as well be painting houses.
