Don’t Open that Box!
“So how has your week been?” I asked, as we started the Zoom call.
“Not that good, to be honest,” the client replied.
“Really? OK, so what’s been happening?”
“We had to get a major proposal out this week to a big prospect and the guy I’ve got working on it is useless.”
“In what way?” I asked.
“He just can’t seem to see that it’s not right. It’s not long enough for my liking and doesn’t go into enough detail about our processes. That’s important to me because I’ve worked bloody hard on them. When I tell him to go back and do it as I want it, he looks at me questioningly and then argues with me.”
“What does he say?”
“He asks me if I really think it’s that important to put in every step because the client is probably not interested in all the detail, but just enough to show we can get the outcome they want. He’s always questioning everything.”
“Then what happens?”
“Well, then I just fly off the handle and yesterday, I ended up shouting at him. You see, getting this contract is so important to me and I know they’re going to want to every i dotted and every t crossed.”
She kept talking for a good while longer and all the time I was listening, it was becoming more apparent that she was a perfectionist, a stickler for detail and wanted her team to be the same. She was suffering from the Business Demon, Nigla (aka Niggler), and it had really burrowed into her brain. She was fussing over petty details, becoming uncomfortable with her team, which led her to getting annoyed with them, and her anxiety levels were climbing higher and higher.
Nigla was having a great time inside her head.
Nigla is another insidious, contemptible little demon but despite its size, the damage it can cause is pretty grim. It flutters around you at first before burrowing its way deep into your thinking.
It can drive you to losing a good team, stopping people interacting with you and basically, annoying the pants off people around you. It will kill your productivity, stifle your creativity and innovation, and can stop any business progression.
The name derives from dialectal Norwegian of a few hundred years ago, where the word ‘nigla’ meant to be stingy or busy oneself with trifles. How true that is.
My client was doing exactly that, busying herself with trifles when she apparently knew that was what the prospect wanted. She had never asked them, but she wanted to ‘exceed expectations’ and go ‘over and above’ with a view to impressing him. An admirable sentiment but not necessarily delivered by diving into detail.
In many instances, your customer doesn’t care. They just want to know that you have the product, a robust delivery process, the technical capability, and the dependability to fix their problem and by so doing, add to the productivity of their business and ultimately, their growth.
You need to recognise Nigla when it starts fluttering around you, rearing its ugly head starts winding you up. You find yourself getting annoyed, uncomfortable, and insistent about ‘things being done your way’. This stops any ingenuity and evolution in your own thinking, let alone that of your team.
Do you find you are trying to add excessive detail, being fussy and finicky where it’s not actually needed?
We’ve worked with many business owners to firstly recognise it and then take action to draw it out of your head and into the open. Then you can swat it to the ground and then stamp on it so it never comes back.
For those of a more delicate nature, you can put Nigla back in its box, seal the lid and seal it tight. (We’ll even provide the box).
You know the drill:
Phone us on 01373 837 331, or email us on info@be-astute.co.uk and let us help you vanquish this Business Demon.
Bill and Mark/November 2022