Perality may not be a word but it has taken Norman Bacal a long way in his career as a Toronto-based entertainment lawyer and the former co-managing partner of the Heenan Blaikie law firm. You may want to adopt it to advance your career if you’re in professional services or another field where dealing with clients is important.
Perality comes from combining perception and reality. He considers it a two-headed beast that can slay professionals. “You must learn to appease perception or it will eat you up and spit you out. Perception doesn’t care one little bit about reality. It’s on its own mission. The value of your service is determined by the client’s perception. Never by your reality,” he writes in his book Take Charge.
It doesn’t matter how hard you work or how smart you are. It’s about how the client perceives your service. You must manage expectations, setting them at an attainable level and clearing the bar high.
He learned that early in his career when a client asked for a memo by the following Wednesday. Young and enthusiastic, he was all over the project. But the more work he put it, the more unanticipated issues popped up, until he felt like he was playing Whac-A-Mole. He went without sleep for two days and delivered the perfect response, but on Thursday.
His perception was that he had gone above and beyond, delivering a terrific, indeed, perfect, memo. The client was less impressed: “In my business, Wednesday means Wednesday. And I don’t think I am rushing to pay any part of your bill.”
His mistake – and he has seen it repeatedly with lawyers he has overseen – was not to call the client as soon as the complications mushroomed and indicate what had changed. They could then share in the decision of how to handle the situation, adjusting the client’s perception to Mr. Bacal’s reality.
“Setting and exceeding expectations that govern Perality is an issue of communications,” he writes. “One would expect lawyers to be excellent communicators because that’s what we do for a living. Ironically, when it comes to managing client expectations, lawyers and so many other professionals are poor to horrible communicators.”
He learned another lesson on perception and reality from that same client. This time it was over a corporate reorganization. Mr. Bacal listened carefully, came back to the office, and wrote it all down, to ensure he was on time and within budget. When he completed the project, the client’s response was that it was not what he asked Mr. Bacal to do. “I was certain it was – my reality. Did that matter? Not one iota,” he says. The next day he bought a Hilroy notebook and since then takes contemporaneous notes, which he double-checks with clients before starting the work.
Being effective requires you to understand what is important. And he feels most big-name law firms fail to teach their associates how to distinguish between the important and the trivial. That leads them to get lost in negotiations, treating each item as equal, and wasting time on matters of little consequence such as whether a semicolon should be changed to a period in the agreement. Find out from the client what is important.
Nobody’s perfect. Mistakes will occur and reporting an error you made on a file, he advises, is a test of character. “Hoping it will go away on its own, pretending you’re not responsible, or finding someone else to take the blame are all failures of your fortitude,” he says.
His uncle Harry Bacal, a renowned Montreal pediatrician, believed that a career is a river: You should find the current and then follow it. Mr. Bacal notes that early in a career people are told to follow their passion. But that’s not reality – or what happened – in the careers of the many people he interviewed researching his book. “They followed the river, keeping a keen eye out for opportunities that presented themselves along the way,” he says.
Quick Hits
- Time is supposed to slow down in summer. But since we often are trying to cram more in, including hectic vacations, time can seem scarce, notes productivity consultant Laura Vanderkam. She urges you in such scarce periods to be generous with your time, in particular giving it to those you love.
- Digital marketing pioneer Ann Handley finds herself using artificial intelligence for these five tasks: Brainstorming, connecting ideas, content summarizing, reimaging content for social media purposes and subject lines – “Give me seven good subject lines” is a helpful command.
- Executive coach Marcia Reynolds says your conversations can be transformed by four words. To avoid assumptions that are wrong, ask when things are vague or unclear, “What do you mean?”
- Aim for the middle way between mindfulness and mind wandering. Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman and writer Carolyn Gregoire say mindfulness helps us see what’s around us but must be balanced with giving the mind space to dream, fantasize and roam free.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.