After my colleague Rachel Gold referenced Dan Pink’s book, “A Whole New Mind,” I had to pick it up. I was delighted to see that EMPATHY is one of the critical skills for leadership and success in the coming age of what Pink calls High Concept, High Touch.

Empathy is the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes and share that person’s joy or pain on an intimate level…like a Vulcan mind meld! Women seem to have the upper hand on empathy skills, but men and women can learn it. Empathic professionals are very good at reading a client’s body language and unspoken feelings in order to deliver service at a high level. They can read between the lines. They can tell if something is going well or going sour. It improves their patience in challenging situations.

You may have experienced a meeting in which there was a palpable tension in the room. You could tell that the client or your colleagues were “off.” As a young professional who may not be leading the meeting, how could you use empathy to head off a potential disaster? Here are some options to engage the client without stepping on anyone’s toes:

“You look like you have a question, Jeff.”

“Before we move on, is everyone clear on this point?”

“Does anyone have other ideas?”

“I just want to make sure, have we missed anything here?”

The last question is great for wrapping up a client meeting, deposition or interview. Ask it. Then wait. By providing an opening, you allow the client to put any final concerns on the table before you move forward. This is one way to practice empathy, ensuring that your client is comfortable and preferably excited about moving forward. If things are a little too quiet, you might be missing something.

Question: Why do you think empathy serves client relationships? When might it go too far?

What is good design and what difference will it make for your firm or business? You know good design when you see it. It’s appealing, welcoming, easy to navigate and compelling. It helps customers find you and want to interact with you.

People process visual information up to seven times faster than words. While your firm’s key messages are a critical part of your brand, design elements add a whole layer of story that human beings have a visceral and memorable reaction to.

Design includes your fonts, colors, logo glyph, photos, paper and the other visual elements on your business cards, sales kits and website. In most professional service firms, design extends into
your office decor.

All these visual elements add up to an impression of who you are, how good you are and how much you are worth. Most of our clients sell trust. Good design quietly builds trust without saying a word.

Nowhere is design more important than in smaller firms. Good design gives your marketing efforts a tailwind. Weak design does nothing. Bad design makes everything you do feel like heading into the wind. When every dollar counts, you need a tailwind to push you along.

How Good Design Works
FactRight LLC (www.factright.com ), a comprehensive database of tenant-in-common (TIC) deal information, is the first database of this type in the country. They have to not only get noticed, but persuade their prospects to use new technology. FactRight sells this information to broker/dealers and other financial types who demand all the facts and a high degree of transparency.

Since they were selling high-end information to serious people, their first impulse was to be very conservative. While this would raise no eyebrows in the industry, it would also not increase awareness or interest. The financial services industry is afloat in conservative-looking navy and gray folders. Yawn.

Since transparency is the number one key message for FactRight, they let their designer create business cards and a mailer on see-through paper. It looks really cool and fresh; people noticed it and commented. When they mail out their information prior to a call, the information is remembered. This not-so-conservative approach gave them a marketing tailwind and made all of their messages more memorable.

Why Good Design Happened
Note that above I said “they let their designer.” In most cases, professional service firms’ design process involves a committee. And you know the old adage about donkeys – they are horses designed by committees. Rarely does good design happen by committee.

As a matter of fact, I often tell clients at the beginning of a new website or brand that with proper information, a good graphic designer will give you a design like Sophia Loren’s face: interesting, memorable and unique. With a little tweaking and centering, a few font changes and a little bit from a logo the third oldest partner likes, you get the pretty but not-so-memorable Wonder Woman Lynda Carter’s face. If you keep going, adding a more conservative color and pleasing the receptionist, comparing it to every logo you have ever seen and acting on the advice of your college roommate, you get Michael Jackson’s face: way too many opinions and not enough taste.

If you want to create interesting, fresh and appealing graphic design for a marketing tailwind, you may have to do things differently than the usual firm decision-making. This is a process we have seen work:

1) Limit your decision-maker group in-house to no more than three of your team.

2) Know who your audiences are, what your pieces need to be used for and what your most important key messages to communicate are. Give this information to your designer.

3) Collect some samples of things you like and think are effective. Show them to your designer.

4) Step back. Let your designer work.

5) Look at the initial concepts your designer has chosen. Ask the designer to share with you the process and ideas behind each design. If any concepts are a “no,” say so immediately. Blending – taking a font from one design and an element from another – is usually a bad idea.

6) Let the design(s) settle in. Think about them for a day or two. Post them up in your office. Show them to a few people whose taste you admire. Warning: that is a few. Each and every one will have a different opinion and it can create a Michael Jackson.

7) If none of the designs is perfect, give the designer feedback on your thoughts. One of the most common pieces of feedback we receive is that the front runner is not conservative enough.

Consider that conservative, always and in every case, means boring. If you can afford boring, go ahead. If you need a tailwind for your marketing dollars, jump at a fresh idea and be willing to stand out.

9) Listen to your designer. Just as your best clients take your professional advice, be willing to consider the advice of marketing and design professionals.

Taking a Chance

One firm we recently worked with that was smart enough to take a design chance is Ambrion (www.ambrion.com). Ambrion works in accounting and finance and offers temporary, permanent and consulting placements.

While they had a perfectly acceptable corporate look, it offered no edge against the excellent and aggressive competition. We came up with the concept of “Strike the perfect match,” which is what this recruitment firm really takes pride in — finding the right people to match not only the skills needed but the culture and values of the workplace.

Because it is a crowded market and they needed their marketing dollars to make a big impact, we created a theme offire burning away the paper to reveal gold. This theme runs from their website and advertising to their memorable and fun business cards. Forthcoming is a brochure in the shape of a matchbook.

Is it conservative? Not really. Is it memorable in a crowded field? Yes. This is the only recruiting firm that plays verbally and visually with its brand. If you get an Ambrion business card you will definitely notice. The other firms seem overly corporate or folksy in comparison. Ambrion took a risk and made each marketing message much more interesting.

Mug Shots?
Another area to differentiate yourself through design is in your use of photos. Most stock art photos remind me of diet food — it looks sort of right but really has no substance. Even worse are the mug shots, taken in the office by someone’s pocket camera in dim light, which are supposed to feature the partners of a firm. On the other hand, you can spend the money and get a visual impact that pays. We know that the number two page hit on legal websites, for example, is the attorney bios. That is because most of us sell through referrals and so when we get a referral we look that person up on his or her website.

Say your banker gives you referrals to two CPAs she knows. Click onto that first bio and see a middle-aged man looking like a criminal up against a wall — red glints in his eye, tie askew, a painful smile. Click on the second bio and see a relaxed and friendly man who looks smart, kind and together. Which would you call first? Photos are an investment that pays in the information world.

If you want to see some great photos, I suggest visiting www.ingenuitymarketing.com and clicking on “Meet Us.” Each of
us is holding a picture in a fun way. I am holding a photo of the team, suggesting I founded the company; this was the idea of our Art Director Kristin Smith and is quite an honor to me. We continue to play on this theme with our recent office move postcard (“Thank Heaven for 7-Eleven”) photos and with a variety of other mailings we have done.

Our clients tend to be bottom-line people. While many of them know they respond to clean, crisp design, few of them deal with it in their own firms on a daily basis. It is hard to know, if your core competency is finance, accounting or law, how to make decisions about marketing when you have had little training in that area. Yet you have to make sound business decisions about websites, brands and advertising. Graphic design makes an impression; if you don’t know what impression you are making, find out.