deadlines

Deadlines are the reality of any business. Reputations can be built or lost on meeting or failing to meet critical deadlines, regardless of the quality of your product or service. A deadline is a serious commitment.

No matter how big or small the project it is important at the outset to understand your customer's deadlines and how your contribution fits into their overall plans. Your contribution may be a small thing but it can be the critical thing that enables your customer to meet their commitments. Failure to meet deadlines can have a significant financial impact not only on your own business, but on your customer's business.

There are some customers who "always need things urgently" - when those timeframes are unrealistic because they do not understand the amount of work involved to meet the commitment it is best to be upfront about what is achievable within their timeframe. Some customers overstate their urgency, yet the task priority in their overall schedule is actually a low priority. I have come across situations where customers have needed things urgently, have rearranged schedules and worked late nights to meet the customer's timeframe only to discover that it is only weeks later that the customer actually downloads the images. To understand the customer's urgency it is also necessary to understand how mission critical it is to deliver the product or service within those negotiated deadlines and what impact that would have on your customer if the deadline is not met or negotiated to a more realistic timeframe.

When negotiating deadlines, it is also important to have a clear understanding of what you value to uphold in the delivery of your product or service. Or to put it in another way, what are you willing to compromise in order to meet your customers' deadlines? I think there is a small sweet spot between time and quality delivery. If it is going to take you a long time to deliver a service or product to a customer then service or product had better ooze with quality and excellence. If you are going to consistently meet fast turnaround times, then either you better have fail proof and well organised systems in place, or be prepared to take short cuts along the way.

One of the killer phrases in any service oriented business is ASAP. There are a lot of hidden assumptions and expectations in ASAP and more often than not your customer's definition of ASAP may be very different to your definition of ASAP. Unless your customer has a good knowledge of what is currently on your plate or has a in depth respect for or interest in what is on your plate (all scenarios highly unlikely), your priority and urgency to meet their expectations in the most part will miss the mark. It is not unrealistic to expect that a customer will assume that they are your first priority over and above other customers. It is better to have the discussion that moves away from some vague ASAP to very specific timeframes and mutually agreed commitments.

When negotiating deadlines it is important to be aware of the phenomenon known as the planning fallacy. It is suggested that regardless of experience or knowledge about a task, we have a tendency to underestimate the time it will actually take to perform a task with a bias for optimism, where as an outsider would overestimate the time needed with a pessimistic bias. According to this definition, the planning fallacy results in not only time overruns, but also cost overruns and benefit shortfalls. Bill Gates is quoted as saying "Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years." This view is reinforced by a procrastination researcher, Timothy Pychyl who found that people tend to overestimate how long it will take to complete short tasks and underestimate the time longer projects will take—in other words, the planning fallacy. (By the way with all that procrastination, I wonder how Timothy gets any research done!)

To set realistic deadlines, it is important to understand how much you actually do get done in short periods of time (say 10 minutes). The second key advice commonly stated is to build in a fudge factor of between 25% to 50% of time required to complete a project. Plan for the unexpected - take into account that you may have a low energy day, or another project, or unforeseen problems with the project you are working on. The third piece of advice is that if you want to build a reputation of quality customer service and on-time delivery, then do yourself a favour and negotiate deadlines that are not going to flatline you with stress or fatigue before you reach the deadline, and consistently meet your deadlines with confidence.

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Flying Solo Tip 070365 : Manage your deadlines to manage your reputation.

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smells fishy

Well these don't smell fishy, but waft with the seductive scent of Jasmine that has been drifting through the courtyard these last couple of days with the advent of spring. Today I was working on a series of images for a new customer and about to be launched business that specialises in handcrafted personalised perfumes and colognes. Pretty cool, huh? Yet today I was distracted by a flood of very personal bitter sweet memories which have nothing to do with Jasmine or personalised perfumes.

It has been well documented the powerful link between smell and memories. The Fifth Sense and organisation that supports people with smell and taste disorders explains that "Upon detecting a smell the olfactory neurones in the upper part of the nose generate an impulse which is passed to the brain along the olfactory nerve. The part of the brain this arrives at first is called the olfactory bulb, which processes the signal and then passes information about the smell to other areas closely connected to it, collectively known as the limbic system." The limbic system is the part of our brain that houses memories.

A smell can quickly evoke memories, but also is important to our enjoyment of food. Did you know that the flavour of our food is almost entirely detected in the nose and not by the tongue. The nasal cavity contains around 12 million different oderant receptors, each sensitive to slightly different chemical structures. When molecules in the air enter the nose and contact the various oderant receptors, a "picture" of the chemical composition of the air is generated and sent to the brain, which we experience as smell.

The Queensland Brain Institute conducted some research in 2014 which further investigated the link between smell and long term memory. It suggested that our preferences for different foods and beverages are linked to our sense of smell, and that long-term scent memories modify how odours are perceived. In a nutshell: our smell experiences shape our preferences.

So food, smell, and memories with their emotions are closely linked. Once again, understanding the physiology of what is taking place as we function from day to day and make certain life choices can also suggest what needs to take place to loosen up those bonds to create new or different experiences for the future. To do so we have to go back into the brain and do some rewiring.

I have a personal (and somewhat embarrassing) life experience that will bring to light the power of smell. When I was about 4 or 5 years old, I was visiting my grandmother at dinner time. Now I adored my grandma and she was an amazing cook - her kitchen always smelt amazing. This night she put in front of me a huge plate of white food. I asked what it was and she told me "mashed potato" because she knew that was one of my favourite things to eat. Well I sat there and started to eat - it didn't taste like mashed potato and it didn't smell like mashed potato. When I questioned her, she told me again with no uncertainly that I should "Be a good girl, eat it all up, it is mashed potato". Now who am I to question my grandmother, I ate it up but it just didn't seem right. When I had finished the meal she then told me that it was fish. I could not believe that my grandmother had lied to me. That feeling of betrayal must have been so great that in my 4 or 5 year old brain a memory had been preserved and over the years much more got linked to that memory. From that day I could not face eating fish, refused to eat it and over time even the smell of fish would take me back instantly to that childhood emotion of betrayal. It was the first time I found out with absolute certainty that even the people who love you and who you deeply love will lie to you.

Ironically on the first wedding anniversary of my first marriage, my husband took me out to a very fancy and expensive restaurant to celebrate. He wanted to be the complete gentleman and decided he would order the champaign, the wine and the meals. My meal came out - a complete rainbow trout with it's murky eye just glaring at me. I wanted to throw up. It was a seafood only restaurant, so I enjoyed the wine instead.

As the years have passed, I know how ridiculous that my food choices have been profoundly affected by that single memory of being in my grandma's kitchen. However, early this year I made a very conscious decision as part of my healing journey. A decision that I would once and for unravel that synaptic Gordian Knot that linked the smell and taste of fish to the emotion of betrayal. At one of the workshops I went to, I reworked that memory of being in my grandmothers kitchen over and over again, until I could fill that memory with appreciation and gratitude, and to leave no trace of those bitter emotions. In doing so, I broke the bond between fish and betrayal. As a result, last Saturday night when I went out to dinner with a friend, we went to a seafood restaurant. I ordered and thoroughly enjoyed the crab cakes. I wanted to cry they were so delicious - this is what I had been missing out on in the past because of some over hashed, over used, olfactory emotional link.

When we travel along a journey of healing, it is sometime funny the little things that emerge to be worked on. It might smell fishy, but I am OK with that.

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Flying Solo Tip 069365 : Some memories emotionally haunt us and pervert our decisions and life choices. They are nothing more than trapped emotions that tie us to the past by reinforcing pre-exiting neural pathways in our brain that have no place in the enjoyment of our todays.

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goofing off

At the risk of sounding like a boring person living an un-fun life, I cannot remember the last time I goofed off a planned day of work to spend the afternoon with a friend over a bottle of wine. With the onset of spring it was an absolutely gorgeous afternoon to sit in the sun shooting the breeze, and nurturing the bonds of friendship.

One of the things that concerned me during my corporate career was my networking skills. Having worked predominantly in male dominated industries or companies and in most cases I was the the first female to be hired by the organisation in a senior role, I often felt an outsider looking in. It became apparent to me that for the most part men network differently than women.

Men typically build networks on potential needs that is "Who do I know who has what I need right now" and then asking for it. Men seem to build alliances around power, money, status and favours. I have seen groups of men tolerate someone in their group not because they respect or value them as a person but because that person was attached to something that they may need in the future. I have sat in countless executive meetings where the majority of the time was a ritual of chest puffing, comparing yacht sizes or trying to outdo each other with their drinking adventures rather than applying their intelligence to organisational issues or the business at hand. I witnessed time and time again incompetent men being promoted or financially rewarded based on the value of their networking and political skills rather than on merit and performance.

I believe that one of the difficulties of being a woman in these kind of environments is that women typically are more interested in building mutual long term connections rather than transactional arrangements. In 2015 The Wall Street Journal published an article about the differences between male and female networks and networking skills. There are also some other invisible social constructs that are at play. Professional success for women is dependent on "documentable and measurable competence" or basically, a proven track record. For men, it seems opportunities became available not on what they know but who they know ... it is a way of keeping everything in the boys club. Time and time again, I experienced this different set of rules compared to my male counterparts. But to be fair to the guys there was even another socially conditioned risk. When two senior male executives go out to lunch for hours on end or go for a game of golf during office hours, it is perceived as "doing business", however if a female and male executive go out the lunch the rumour mill has already started churning before they have left the building and that can be potentially damaging to both. I too have experienced those situations. Sadly it is one of those invisible barriers to building a network as a woman.

As much as I have been working on my networking skills this year and trying to broaden the number and diversity of people in my circle of business and personal contacts, I am still more interested in building connections and deeper friendships than just having a lot of people that I know because they have something or know someone that I need to fast track my business.

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Flying Solo Tip 068365 : From time to time it is OK to let go of the reigns of responsibility for a little while.

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