*%#$ One Last Thing…
JUST — I can make the case that this is one of the most deflating and problematic words in the “working” world.
On the surface, it’s another word regularly used in basic conversation by everyone, but out of the mouths of certain people, it’s blood boiling four letter word.
At this point you’re asking yourself what exactly am I talking about — am I right? Just think about…
See what I did there? How’d you feel about that? A little agitated?
That’s my point, by adding that word into a sentence where you’re asking someone to do something, you’re immediately diminishing what’s required by them to do whatever is that you’re asking them. “Just” acts as device to simplify a request. Suggesting that whoever is doing the task should be able to do it quickly, and/or without much effort.
Having worked in relationship management for the majority of my career, I’ve seen exactly how dropping “just” into the mix can extract the morale out of an already exhausted team. For context, I’m typically the person between the doers and the requesters, in my specific case the agency team and the client team. To be fair, I’ve seen the drain occur on both sides of the relationship — creative teams being asked to just make a few adjustments then the deliverable is finalized, and clients being asked to increase their budgets by just a few thousand dollars. In many scenarios “just” is being used to simplify a request, but not maliciously. The hope is that by using a causal tone the request will be easily accepted — no push back or conversations about scope creep.
We can all pause for a moment to recognize how at some point this four letter word has made us wince as we begrudgingly agreed to a request that we genuinely wanted to disregard.
So what do we do?
My purposed solution will not only keep relationships healthy, but will also deepen trust and understanding between teams. The solution is explicit transparency, we need to be direct about the situations and accepting of the implications.
How this works is, instead of saying “I know we thought we were finished, but just tweak the animations in the presentation to bit a slower” you can say “during presentation rehearsal we realized the animations aren’t on pace with the presenter, can the animations be reduced by 3 seconds? Ideally we’d like this back by ‘XYZ’ time, let me know what’s possible.” — see the difference? Being honest about the situation made the request understandable, gave reasoning about why there’s an additional round, and set the expectation for timing — all things someone needs in order to accept the request.
Putting this into practice
Transparency, put all the cards on the table.
Talk timing, ask turnaround times and when confirmations are needed.
Process, align on how things are going to get done.
Money, understand the financial impact of the moment. (This really should be the second topic in the discussion.)
Be someone who people enjoy working with, be upfront when you’re asking people to do just a little more.
Peace.
(Totally not the four letter word you were anticipating.)