More than that, you need to step into their shoes. Doing so will pay multiple dividends. You’ll gain insight into your clients’ needs, you’ll be exposed to novel ideas, and most important of all, you’ll discover newfound motivation through seeing the real-life benefits of your efforts. 

A pioneer in this field is Adam Grant, professor of management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and author of Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success. He points us to a study in 2001 by Rajesh Sethi and Carolyn Nicholson at the Clarkson and Stetson Universities, on the characteristics of highly successful product development teams. Sethi and Nicholson found that a key characteristic of these teams was their use of customer input. Such feedback doesn’t just help in the development of new products, the pair concluded, it also helps to “motivate and energize.”

Why? We’re not robots. It’s easy for the long-term impact of our work to be obscured by short-term tribulations and diverted by short-term gains encountered during the creative process. When we hear the perspective of our audience, it reminds us of why we started our project in the first place.

This energizing influence is most powerful if you can meet your end-users face-to-face. Consider an influential field study Grant conducted himself. The research involved undergrads working as fundraisers: their task, often thankless, was to ring up alumni and ask them to donate money.

One day an anthropology student was invited to the callers’ workplace and spoke to them for 15 minutes about how she’d used a research fellowship made possible by the fundraising office to finance her travel and data-collection. The trip (and thus, the fundraising center) had effectively helped her career.

A month later, the fundraising callers who met the student had achieved an average five-fold increase in the amount of money they raised weekly compared to callers who weren’t there the day the student visited.

Grant says the contact with the student had a beneficial impact on the fundraisers’ performance via several mechanisms. The workers:

• got to see first-hand the impact of their work
• enjoyed a sense of the student’s appreciation for their efforts
• picked up ideas that improved the creativity of their selling techniques,
• better empathized with the needs of the student (and thus, all customers).

Intriguingly, many of the fundraisers denied the student visit had made any difference to them, which suggests these effects can act at a subconscious level.

Making the time to interact with your clients will similarly help you take their perspective. As happened with the fundraisers, this could generate new leads that will improve your work; and you’ll enjoy a boost from connecting with your clients on a human level. After all, the joy of helping others is a powerful motivator. 

Of course it’s not always possible to meet clients face-to-face, but there are still benefits to be had from simply taking the time to remind yourself of the people who will gain from your work. To illustrate, Grant highlights the unpublished findings of radiologist Yehonatan Turner. A few years ago Turner found that including patients’ photos in medical files led radiologists to be more meticulous in their analysis of the patients’ scans. The radiologists said the photos helped them empathize more with the patients.

Grant has proposed other ways you can take the perspective of your clients. For example, you can visit online communities that are frequented by your end-users and see the kind of problems they raise. You can use social media to connect directly with your client base and get a feel for their needs. If you work in a company, make sure the department that interacts with customers is not isolated from other teams. Encourage them to provide anecdotes and reports on a regular basis.

Also, be present when people experience your product or work. For example, mingle discreetly with the audience who are viewing your art. Sit in on an introductory workshop for the software that you created. Visit a newsstand and watch how browsers respond to your latest magazine cover. Even if your creative role is far removed from real world applications, you still gain motivationally by reminding yourself of the end-users in this way.  

Although you may be churning out plenty of new ideas and products, without considering the perspective of your end-users it’s possible your output and drive are sub-optimal. Re-connect with your clients, assume their perspective, and not only will you gain practical insights, you’ll also inject your work with new meaning and purpose.

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How about you?

How do you reconnect with your customers?