Dispatches from The Ideosphere

The chemistry with your customers or potential customers can change over time. One time, I was proposed to be one of the team leaders on a transformation program at a large university. At the oral presentation of our proposal, I fervently spoke about how we would work together during the multiyear project. We, the proposed team leaders, met with customer executives and senior members of the faculty over lunch and discussed the importance of the program. After I returned to the Austin office, my managing partner called me to say that the firm was selected but the customer did not want me to be a team lead because I was “short and abrupt.” Yes, this news bruised my ego, but hey, there would be no commuting halfway across the country each week for the next couple of years. I found out later that they even gave me a nickname: “The Preacher.”

Fast-forward a year and a half. The transformation program was now in trouble, and my boss sent me back there to interview for the overall program leader position. The customer asked me to come on board and we successfully completed the multiyear program. So, at a later time they actually did need someone who had the faith and enthusiasm of a preacher and who could be short and abrupt when necessary.

Be sensitive to chemistry and timing with your customers. They may not think you are a good fit at first, but you may be asked to help at a later time when conditions change.

Sometimes it is better to not serve a customer, especially when their expectations are unreasonable. One time I met with an executive at a major regional transit authority who wanted a new payroll system implemented in 90 days.

I said, “Honestly, it can’t be done.”

His face grew beet red, and he threw me out of his office. He hired another company who promised to meet the unrealistic 90-day time frame. After the implementation was six months late, the executive and the firm he hired were dismissed. I was glad he was not my customer.

At times you have to fire a customer. At one large enterprise, my team was often retained by several departments to provide various services. We developed Service Level Agreements to set expectations for the levels of service. However, we had a unique situation where we experimented with a hybrid approach of having a local customer support staff coordinate with our team. This wasn’t a win–win. The person in the department would step in, cause problems, and then point the finger at us.

After several occurrences, I invited the department head, a peer of mine, to lunch. After describing what had been happening, she looked up and said, “You’re firing me as a customer, aren’t you?”

I replied, “Yes, I am” and explained to her (and later explained to my team) that we did not have to provide services to everyone, especially if they are a pain. I did buy her lunch, and we did not charge them anything since the arrangement did not work out.

One client, Sharon, said that she could not afford to retain the firm to implement a new payroll system. She wanted to hire contract programmers because they would be cheaper. I cautioned that, although their hourly rate would be lower, they would not bring the project management expertise and experience to help her be successful. Fast-forward nine months. The payroll system implementation was late, and the interface to the accounting system did not work correctly. After this happened, she called for our help.

I asked, “Why did you not just call us in the first place?”

Sharon’s reply was, “We needed to burn our fingers on the stove first.”

Flustered, all I could blurt out was, “Why? For the love of God, why?”

At the end of the engagement, Sharon said that she and her staff really valued the professional relationships with my consultants and that “our team’s chemistry was a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”

Another rolling-the-grenade example was a client executive who did not want to move her staff to a shared workspace with my team. Her staff was located on the third floor, and my team was officed on the 11^th floor. This building literally had the slowest set of elevators on the planet. You had to schedule 20 minutes on your calendar for an elevator ride (one way). I pleaded with her to let us work together in one space to facilitate better communication. No, she did not want to ask her staff to move.

Her staff was testing a new payroll system, and my team provided technical support and fixes. The first week or two, her staff would email my team with perceived problems. It would usually take a day for them to send the issue and for my team to log the item for resolution. Then, a day or two later, a response would be sent back to her team. Sometimes, the problems were simply not knowing how to navigate the new system, and other times, fixes were needed. Well, by the third week, tensions were running high between both groups. Her staff was frustrated by how long it took to get a simple answer, and my staff was flummoxed because they knew that if they were co-located they could solve many perceived problems on the spot.

Her staff’s frustration finally exploded: “KABOOM!” Now, the client executive agreed to move her staff to the 11th floor so we could all sit together. The results were magical. When issues would arise, her staff could just lean over and ask someone nearby what they thought. Hundreds of nonissues were resolved through the normal course of daily interactions. And actual problems were logged because they did need to be fixed. The morale of both groups improved dramatically, and the project’s progress lurched forward.

She also had a beat-the-vendor policy directive from her executive leaders. My client was rewarded by her executive leaders when she extracted free services from vendors. So, each week, my client counterpart would ask for free stuff. Often, she would try to guilt me into providing additional services at no cost by saying, “A firm like yours should have known that we would need this scope of work.”

I replied, “Well, we did recognize the need; however, you did not ask for it in your request for proposals. If we had added this scope of work beyond your request, our bid would have been higher than the others, and we wouldn’t have been selected. I’ll be more than happy to develop a change order.” We repeated these Kabuki theatrics throughout the engagement. Given that they were such a pain to work with, we doubled the budget contingency in the change orders from 15% to 30%, and she understood why.

She would also yell at me when things went wrong. Once, the response time for a new payroll system function took more than two minutes from the time you pressed the “enter” key to when the response was displayed. After she stopped yelling at me, I said we would look into it. One of my technical experts found that a switch was incorrectly set. When the switch was reset, the response time was under a second. It was a simple fix, and there was no call for yelling, but you will eventually have a customer like this. So be ready: stay calm, and fix the problems.

Later, we compared every item on 3,400 earning statements from the old payroll system with every item on the 3,400 earning statements generated by the new payroll system. We had hundreds of discrepancies on the first test. The client was furious: “There are too many &*%#@ problems!”

I tried to calmly respond, “We will investigate and explain every single discrepancy.”

The first group of discrepancies related to how the data was converted. After we fixed the conversion data, half of the discrepancies went away. Second, we resolved a large number of discrepancies by adjusting the software settings. For example, one employee had 12 child support deductions, but the maximum child support deduction setting was at 10. After we increased the number of deductions allowed to a maximum of 15, the problem was resolved. Next, there was a discrepancy due to a different interpretation of a tax rule that was allowable and explainable. Finally, we found that one problem was due to the old payroll system, which had made an erroneous calculation. I made a deal with her: Please stop yelling at me when things go wrong, and I’ll fix the problems.

At the end of this 18-month project, my team of 11 consultants got up to leave the project site, and not one person on the client’s team said good-bye. Later, I said to her, “I’ll never work for your agency again.”

She laughed and said, “I don’t blame you!”

Here are the thoughts that I shared with a strategic vendor partner on what makes a great consultant:

• They exceed client expectations.
• They build long-term business relationships and become a trusted advisor.
• They have a passionate desire to learn about the client’s business, strategy, and objectives.
• They offer options to solve problems and recommend tailored solutions.
• They demonstrate personal integrity, initiative, empathy, and competence.
• They are patient and respectful: a humble practitioner.
• They are willing to tactfully take a stand.
• They thrive under pressure and deliver on time and on budget.
• They ask for help and apologize when necessary.
• They ask good questions and actively listen.

These are also the traits of exceptional employees.

You have to communicate clearly and completely what you do or do not appreciate about their work. If you don’t ask for help, your account representative (or their supervisor) may have no way of knowing you are dissatisfied—and so can’t fix your problem. If they fail to address your needs, it’s time to move up the company’s management chain until you get a satisfactory resolution—otherwise, never retain them again.

When we were nearing completion of the $32 million facility, we budgeted for network equipment. However, the current line of equipment we budgeted for was about to be superseded with a new, much more capable offering. We wanted to move up to the next generation of equipment to extend the life of this investment by several years. Our network vendor decided to deeply discount the next generation equipment to the amount we had originally budgeted for the current line of equipment so we could take advantage of the technical enhancements for many years to come. The motivation for the strategic vendor was to have our enterprise be a great reference for their new offering, which we were happy to do. Our account representative said, “I want to say thank you for your business and partnership over the years. Our business relationship has really strengthened over time, and the respectful and fair nature you demonstrated toward us was a major part of that.”

Ask your strategic vendor partners to help you solve business and technical problems. Ask them to bring industry knowledge regarding business trends, future technologies, and their competitors. Show them your organization’s strategy and values, and ask them to share information, provide insight into future services, and offer solutions.

If you want to have a positive impact as a changemaker in an organization, you need to identify the most powerful people. Start with the organization chart, and create a power map. Power mapping is a technique to visualize the most powerful and influential people. On the organization chart, circle the CEO and the executive team. Then look within each organizational area to identify peers and influencers.

Michael Boyles wrote “Power Mapping: What It Is & How to Use It” for the Harvard Business School Online’s Business Insights blog. He said that you need to identify central individuals “within a network who are the main source of information and advice. They don’t necessarily hold the greatest authority or [the] most impressive job titles but have significant influence because of their control over company information.”

Once you identify the central people, you need to understand what they value. They may value tangible resources, such as space in buildings, or intangible qualities, such as experience, safety, status, and affiliation. Boyles says the two most common mistakes when building a power map are omission and commission: “Omission [is] neglecting to identify individuals who are as powerful when they’re central and highly influential. Commission [is] assuming people are more powerful and influential than they actually are.”

In one large enterprise, the chief of staff for the CFO was a central individual. She had worked in the enterprise for more than 25 years and had the complete confidence of the CFO. She built a vast network throughout the enterprise that would help her and the CFO solve significant issues relating to the allocation of financial resources. In a similar enterprise, the chief of staff for the CFO was relatively new to the organization and mostly worked on one-off projects. When I met with her to understand what she valued, she actually said that she was not very influential and advised me to not waste my time meeting with her. Great advice!