Ever have a time when you need a client or co-worker to respond to a request, and they’re dragging their feet?   Bet you felt like Nancy who asked me this question recently: 

I’m frustrated when clients won’t get back to me in time.  How do you communicate timeliness and urgency to a client so that they respond, without sounding bossy or making them feel ignorant?

This is a great question because so many of us face this speed bump, whether you’re an entrepreneur or you work in an organization. The common denominator is that you need to get someone to respond to you with a decision, information, or input in order to meet a deadline and stay on track. Here’s what works for me.

To avoid sounding bossy or making the other person feel ignorant, put your frustration aside for a moment and decide to treat them like a mature, responsible adult. Given your past experience with them, they may not be, but treat them like that anyway because I’ve found that when you do, others often rise to your expectation…at least for the moment. With that mindset, your communication needs to have 2 critical elements: information and motivation.

When it comes to information, you need to remind them about the facts about the project or situation, specifically WHAT you need by WHEN.  Do it quickly, say in 1 -2 sentences. You don’t want them to have to think hard about it. But information alone isn’t enough. If it were, they would have responded and you wouldn’t have this problem. Neurologist Donald Calne said, “The essential difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to ACTION while reason leads to CONCLUSIONS.”  In other words, your head says, “Yeah, I get it.”  Your heart says, “Let’s do something about it!” Likely your client or team member or boss is intelligent enough to KNOW he or she needs to get back to you, but they haven’t so you need to leverage their EMOTION to get them to take action!

         Watch my latest Gotta Quick Question video here to
         learn 3 strategies to engage people emotionally that
         have worked for me:  Headlines, Consequence and Humor.

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Look forward to connecting soon!