When to Fire Your Client

Dwight is of course free to disagree with me on this post. It’s his site after all, but then again, he gave me the keys…

I read a lot of things outside of my specialty because I learn things from people smarter than me and let’s face it, there are lots of those around. This time it was Search Engine Journal of all places. Yes, Search Engine Journal is nerdy even for accountants.

But…

They’ve got an incredibly coherent article on When to Fire Your Client. There are times when you’ll take cash flow, even if it’s from folks who ultimately cost you money. 2008-2010 was like that for a lot of firms. Then there are times where you need to recommend some clients to your toughest competitor so that you can get unstuck and grow the business. Let the competition crow about the win, even as the life is slowly being sucked out of their organization.

Anyway…

Their five key indicators that it’s time to fire your client are:

1. They Stop Respecting You
2. They Don’t Value Your Time
3. Questioning Your Time
4. You are working for pennies
5. Where did the ROI go?

If you hit three out of five they recommend that it’s time to take a hard look. Item 1 is the roughest from my point of view. There’s nothing like wondering why folks asked you to come down if they are going to hold up a counterpoint to every one of your recommendations.

Read the full article for the details behind the recommendations at Search Engine Journal.

Project on the Rocks: Ain’t No Big Surprise

In the article “Blowup” contained in  Malcom Gladwell’s book "What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures”, he  discusses the failure of complex systems. His point is that we engage in a ritual of disaster (around nuclear power plants, air traffic control systems, shuttle launches) where we study all the myriad and minute pieces of evidence we compile from the disaster, we develop theories on why it occurred, then we make new rules/procedures/laws to prevent the same disaster from occurring.  The underlying principle is that we can learn from our mistakes and prevent future disasters – put another way, we identify an anomalous event or situation that we believe caused the disaster, we make certain we recognize it in the future and we go away knowing we will be permanently safe.

But what if we aren’t?  What if the systems are just so complex that these trigger mechanisms aren’t anomalous but are inherent to the systems. What if any complex system will fail, time and time again, and you just can’t prevent it? 

Keep that thought in mind.  Now think about the largest ERP, CRM or infrastructure project you are running.  Are these less complex?  You have 10’s and in some cases 100’s of people, working on individual tasks, all of which are interconnected in inputs, outputs and completion dates.  Not all of them report to you.  Not all of them are doing this full time.  Not all of them share your same motivation or primary interest.  Not all of them really care.  And not a one of them will take the blame if the project goes bad – that particular little nugget of concern is held by only three people – the sponsor (who will blame the next two guys), the P&L owner from the consulting operation (me) and the project manager (many of you).

It’s really more surprising when these projects succeed then when they fail.

Do we give up?  No, of course not.  I am paid the medium sized buck to manage exactly this kind of risk.  But I am beginning to rethink how I manage it.  Specifically, I am trying to be less hierarchal and less rigid in the command and control process under the theory that decentralized process and decision making is less brittle and, therefore, more likely to deal with the inevitable failures more quickly and more flexibly.  By doing so, the problems are dealt with while still small as opposed to letting a string of connected issues develop into a huge mess.

Here are my thoughts:

1.  Reduce command and control:  Rather than having a highly structured organization with a single CandC PM, I’m thinking about much smaller working teams with defined deadlines and little task management.  Let them figure it out provided its documented and delivered, on budget and on time.

2.  Know that you will fail:  Don’t plan on perfection, plan on failure.  You will miss deadlines, and you will miss requirements.  Admit to it, acknowledge it early, make certain everyone knows about it, then adjust to it rapidly.  Put another way, don’t fight the failure – work within it.  Or, stop the Tae Kwan Do and move to Aikido.

3.  Don’t get all hyped over SureStep, PMI, SDLC, etc:  Use very simple pieces of it, make certain it works for the business, but don’t get religious over it.  It’s a roadmap of the interstate highway, not a treasure map to the fountain of youth.  Stop working the methodology and work the business problem.

4.  Hire thinkers, not skill sets: I’ve been promoting college hires for years now and have experienced tremendous success in making such hires.  That’s because we hire thinkers and teach them skills rather than hiring skills and try to get them to think.  Skills need command and control, written policies, methodologies.  Thinkers take care of customers.

Again, these are my thoughts and, in the spirit of TheDofR, I’d love to hear you thoughts as well.

Avoiding Signoff Hell

This article is much more partner focused than my normal blog posts at DynamicAccounting.net so Dwight has graciously given me the opportunity to guest post here.

If there is one thing that project managers and consultants dread, it’s getting client signoffs. I don’t mean signoffs on sales documents. I mean signoffs on the completion milestones as the project progresses. Let’s face it, signoffs are a form of confrontation and most people hate confrontation. This leads to reluctance to ask for signoffs. Couple that with clients who withhold signoff in a bid hold partners hostage and end users scared to take responsibility for anything and it’s easy to end up in signoff hell.

Every partner has been through signoff hell and I think that we have found some ways to at least mitigate the problem for everyone. I make no claim to having created these processes, I’ve simply seen how well they work and tried to document and refine them. My experience is using these techniques with Dynamics GP implementations but there is no reason why they won’t work with other products. The process steps are:

1)      Figure out if there is a problem. – Use signature tripwires early in a project.

With a new client, how does a partner figure out if this client will have a problem with signoffs? The answer is to use tripwires. Early on, in the first phase of a project, build in several artificial signature points. Make them meaningless items that anyone would sign off on. Use something like reaffirming already confirmed dates, signoff that the kickoff meeting happened, etc. Whenever possible push these signatures lower in the client organization. This also builds confidence when asking for signoffs because a signoff is expected.

• If multiple levels of people at the client organization sign off without a problem, you may be able to safely move to signoffs at major milestones.
• If people balk at signing these innocuous documents, it’s time to increase the amount of signatures required on this project.

2)      Houston we have a signature problem. – Increase the volume and frequency of signatures.

The solution to the problem of obtaining client signatures is to get more of them, more often. I know that this sounds counter intuitive but it’s not. The core problem is that users see signoffs as scary events with potentially negative consequences. The key is to turn signoffs into a routine.

• Communicate that for complete project documentation, there are going to be a lot of little items to be signed off on. Failure to provide timely signatures will impact the timeline and the cost. Communicate this often, especially in front of senior management.
• Get every little thing signed. After a while, management gets tired of the roadblocks and they get tired of hearing about it in the status meeting. In this way, the client figures out how to make signatures happen.
• Workout with management who can provide alternative signatures to deal with signature bottlenecks from vacation or business travel.
• Steer documents that could be signed by several people to the one(s) most likely to sign.
• Don’t skip the big milestone signatures either. These are much easier to get signed with a pile of signed sub-steps behind the document. This signature also provides some protection should a partner miss getting a sub-step signed.

Partners will have to push a little. Some people refuse to take responsibility no matter what but they start to look pretty silly pushing minor signatures up to their manager over and over.  Usually, a manager at the client fixes this for a specific problem user.

3)      What if they still won’t sign? – Ask what the items and concerns preventing signature are.

When the client still won’t sign a particular document, it’s time to dig deeper. Clients often have very good reasons not to sign documents. The concern may be open items, completeness or understanding of a process. The key is to understand what it will take the client to sign.

• Ask the client, what items or concerns are keeping them from signing the document. This forces a clarification of the issue. The key is to get direct answers not vague generalities.
• Address those items if possible right then and there and get a signature.
• If addressing the open items immediately is not possible, split the document to be signed into two documents, one for signature and one for the open items. This keeps progress moving while providing peace of mind that a critical item won’t be missed. It also forces documentation of the specific issues or missing elements. This provides a commitment to sign once these items are addressed.
• Alternatively, ask them to sign and note any exceptions. This doesn’t provide the same level of comfort as two documents but it does force documentation of the specific issues to be addressed.

Part of this process is to get problem items to move to the surface quickly. Some of these items may need to be escalated to the client or the partner’s management. It’s easier to resolve difficult items when they are found earlier and frequent signatures requirements force these items to the top.

4)      What not to do. – Don’t manipulate.

All of this advice assumes a competent, professional partner working hard to implement ERP software. This is not a license to bully or manipulate clients

• Bullying users to sign a document is unethical, don’t do it. The point of this document is to help build a culture at the client that is comfortable overcoming fear and moving forward with the process. Bulldozing through the process and bullying people to sign will not provide the desired result.
• Don’t manipulate clients by sliding in a difficult document with a pile of easy to sign documents. An ERP implementation should be an open process. Slipping documents past customers won’t work for long.
• Don’t end run an approver. If there is a primary approver for a document and they are available, don’t use an alternate approve just because they are more likely to sign. Also, don’t go over an approver’s head to get a signature. Ultimately, you may need to go to a manager to overcome a user who is blocking the approval process, but that is different conversation. You are not trying to raise the approval up a level; you are trying to keep the process moving forward.

The best part of this approach is that it works just fine with Microsoft’s Sure Step project management approach. Getting a signature on each Sure Step document is a great place to start. You may need even more granular signatures depending on the project and the client. There is relief from signoff hell and it’s not as hard as people think.

Objective Measures: Client Satisfaction

As the second part in this series, I’d like to discuss how to objectively measure client satisfaction.  We’ll do this in 4 parts:  Why We Do It, Ways to Measure It, and the Way I like to Do it, and What to Expect.

Why

I’ve posted before about the cost of new client acquisition.  Given that new clients cost you more to get, keeping the clients you have is, in essence, higher margin revenue since you typically don’t have the associated selling costs.  However, its hard to keep clients if you don’t know you are keeping them happy.  Hence, objectively measuring customer sat helps you determine if you are merely doing good enough or if you are truly delighting your client.  So, you measure to know and you need to know to keep.

Ways to Measure

Start with what questions you care about.  Put another way, if you could sit down with the client in person, what questions would you want them to answer?  Is it about on-time delivery, excellence in project management, quality of deliverables, overall excellence?  Or is it simply “Are you delighted?”.

Next, what’s the scale against which the answer is made?  Do you want free form text so they write what they want or do you want a 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent) measure?  The first often give you great data, the second is far easier to analyze and parse.  You can use a combination – that way the free text gives the client a more open forum to express issues outside of the context of the measured questions.   If in doubt, go with the 5 or 10 point scale and a single Other Comments field – its easier for everyone to understand.

Next, the platform.  You can use products like SurveyMonkey, Zoomerang, Eloqua, or ConstantContact to automate the data collection process.  The first and second are single purpose and pretty cheap.  The last two are marketing automation tools that will help you tie the results into marketing data.  If you are just starting, try just using email to reach out the client, and then move up to automated surveys later.

Next, track and report the results.  Report to your team, your clients and use it in marketing.  Store the history and watch the trend.  Most importantly, set the benchmark (and no, its not 100% satisfaction – that isn’t cost effective) and manage the result to the benchmark.

Last, how to start:  pick a small sample of clients, tell them what you are doing, and ask them to participate.  Start small, and work in progressively through your entire org.

Way I Recommend

This isn’t the way my company does it today, but here’s what I recommend:

• Ask one question -   “Are you completely satisfied with our work and would you recommend us to our other business associates?”  If the answer is a yes, score it as a 5.  If the answer is a no, schedule an in person follow up to discuss the details.
• Ask this question after every major project and after the completion of any discrete piece of work.  For example, if you are conducting a 3,000 seat Exchange rollout, do it after the project is over and you get sign off.  If a customer calls with a request to create 3 new FRx reports (the Dynamics financial report writer), call when they are done.  You can do mid-project surveys, but I prefer to handle that via project management rather than survey.
• Ask the question to both the person(s) that controlled the project, the person(s) who derived business benefit from the project and the project sponsor(s).  Typically, this would be the client’s project manager and the CIO/CFO.  At a minimum, you must survey the folks that hired you, worked with you and paid the bills ON THAT PROJECT.
• The person asking the question CANNOT be the project manager or anyone from the consulting or sales staff that was involved in the project.  It should be an independent party, but not a clerical staffer.  Alternatively, you can automate it (see above) – we do to good result.
• Prepare a standard follow up document but ALWAYS do the discussion in person and include the account owner from your company. The standard follow up document should have at a minimum one question related to timely delivery, quality of the deliverable, quality of project mgt, accuracy of sales expectations, accuracy of invoicing and accounting, knowledge of the consulting staff and overall impressions (ex:  On a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being Very Poor, 5 being Excellent").  This give you the scoring mechanism for anything less than a 5.
• Take the result back to the office and MAKE CHANGES BASED ON THE FEEDBACK.  If you don’t you’ve wasted your time and made the client believe you really don’t care what they think.
• Once the change is made, call the client and tell them what you did based on their feedback.  Set a follow-up meeting in no less than 3 – 6 mos (assuming you’ve done work with them again) to review and see if you’ve improved.
• Lastly, tie comp plans, all the way to the consultant level, to customer sat scores.  This is a pretty complex issue which I don’t have room to explore in this post, but may in a later post.

Two critically important things to remember:

1. Don’t do any of this unless you are willing to talk to the “no” people AND make changes
2. You have to do the follow up in person.  Phone if you have to, but in person makes all the difference.  Done right, you can actually sell additional work in the meeting.

What to Expect

First, your initial response rate, unless you bug them, is going to suck.  We regularly get 85% response rates, but it takes nearly a .5 FTE during our survey cycle to get to that (we typically survey around 100 customers each time. 

Second, expect surprises.  We found out our invoicing inaccuracies, which weren’t many, caused significant sat issues.  This lead to a really good improvement process around our use of Dynamics GP (which is still ongoing), which made us better for our clients AND more internally automated.

Third, expect them to keep dredging up the past.  Even though you are surveying on the last piece of work or the project you did, they’ll tend to rank you based on the overall experience with you.  Done well, the above is a good way to get them to admit success – don’t forget the personal contact.

In closing, I can’t stress this enough:  this process is about helping you to improve so you can serve your clients better so you can bill more time at lower cost to you.  It must be done as personally as possible, and must be done with a commitment to change.  If you aren’t ready to change and communicate that change to the client, don’t do it. 

Bad Client! Bad, Bad Client!

In a previous post, I came down hard on consultants who hide behind the phrase “I did my job” when, at the end of the day, we have a seriously damaged client relationship.  But, in that post, I ignored one precious and important fact of life:

Some people are assholes.  And some of them are your clients.

We all know the signs and behaviors. They never do anything wrong; its always your fault.  They never deliver anything of poor quality; you just didn’t explain it right. They are never late on deadlines; you just weren’t clear on when you needed it.  They don’t think your training was worth anything, but they didn’t pay attention in class.  They second guess every recommendation you make,  but never have any useful input.  The cancel meetings at the last minute, but won’t sign the change request to approve the cost overruns that causes.  They sign a contract with you, but then don’t abide by the terms.  They always want something for free.  They don’t pay bills on time, abuse you and your staff and generally make your work life a misery.

Well, here’s how you fix that problem:

Fire them. 

That’s right, fire them.  This is about the only time you’ll see me give advice that doesn’t entail some degree of “the consultant needs to up their game and do better”.  You can’t fix these people.  They have some kind of deep rooted need to make you feel like crap and, if you drill down on it, they probably do it to everyone else they work with.  Most likely, they have empty and lonely lives and leave work only to be greeted by a houseful of neurotic, asthmatic cats.  But, whatever the cause, you can’t fix them and life is too short to continue working with them NO MATTER what they generate in revenue.

So, give yourself a break, get rid of them, and spend your newly free, relaxing time finding someone who really gets the value you provide and who will be a good partner.

“I did my job” – “Yeah, but we suck”

It is inevitable that someone occupying my position is going to deal with escalated client issues from time to time.  To determine the root cause of the escalation, I spend a lot of time with staff, project management and their counterparts on the client’s side discussing what happened, when and why. I work very hard to be objective, non-threatening and non-defensive in these discussion.  But, what I notice is that I reach an inevitable stopping point where everyone gets to essentially the same comment, i.e.:  “I did my job”.  Maybe, but I’ve got a pissed off client who is not going to pay their bill.  Therefore, we didn’t get the job done and, therefore, we suck.

Here’s the most important things I think we can do to avoid this trap:

1. Relationship build:  As doctors can tell you, if your client likes you, you don’t get sued.  In our industry, having a strong personal relationship with a client almost guarantees a reduction in finger-pointing and a faster, quicker resolution to problems. At the end of the day, if you hit your targets (“I did my job”) but the client doesn’t like you, you’ll never see the client again (“You suck”).

2. Admit Mistakes, but Present Solutions:  Recently, I badly mis-scoped a BI project.  When it became apparent, I sat down with the two primary business owners for the project, admitted my mistake (“I suck”), told them how I was going to fix it, the financial ramification to them (in this case, none), and what I needed to help me hit the reset target.  Were they annoyed, yes.  Did we get the job done and are they a reference:  absolutely.  I didn’t say “Hey, I did my job”;  I admitted the mistake and told them how I’d fix it (“So we can suck less”).

2. The Scope, Only the Scope and Nothing But the Scope:  Immediately after taking over my current position, I had a conversation with two senior teammates about a significant client sat issue.  They told me that we had gone beyond the call of duty on multiple occasions to move the project along when the client wasn’t getting the work done. Therefore, we “did our job”.  Actually, what we did was enable continued poor delivery discipline for the client, spent their money in the form of project overruns without asking for permission, and stepped outside of our legal framework by delivering services for which they had not contracted (“We sucked”).  If you need to pick up a client’s slack, ALWAYS make certain you clearly advise them of the problem (“Your not getting things done”) and resolution (“I can do it for you for an extra $x”).

3. Don’t Hold the Grenade:  If you see something going wrong in a project, raise your hand.  If you are going to be late, let the team know.  If you don’t understand what you are doing, ask for help.   Whatever you do, don’t stay silent, burrow in or plow through since everyone around will assume everything is okay when its not.  Put simply, communicate, communicate, communicate.

4. Mistakes Don’t Mean You’re Bad, Just Human:  This is tough.  If the client is an ass, or your company’s culture doesn’t support learning from mistakes, admitting you made one can drop a world of hurt on your shoulders.  In the long run, acknowledging the mistake (or better, finding it and surfacing it yourself) then learning how not to make it in the future will increase your future performance (“10% less sucking this week and every week”).

5.  Lastly, Remember Why We Got Hired:  At the end of the day, the client doesn’t hire us because we know the technology.  The client hires us because they believe we will make their business life easier and more productive since they won’t need to worry about doing this project by themselves.  If, as consultants, we don’t constantly reinforce that feeling (and this is really what “Doing our job” means), then we will always suck.

Managing in a Downturn – Part I – Existing Client Management

A company for whom I used to work spent, in one year, an average of $40,000 per customer acquisition.  Assume labor margins run 45% (on the higher side in our space when you factor in management salaries), and you quickly see that the first deal with a new client has to be about $89K in services just to break even.  Whereas, the next deal with that same client will cost…anyone?…Buehler? 

Well, not quite $0 but certainly less than the fully loaded cost.  And, before anyone gets up in arms about $40K being excessive, do this math:  Take the total cost of all sales salaries/taxes/benefits/401k Match (including sales operations), add to it commissions, add to that marketing and advertising (including any SEO, click through, site maintenance costs, etc.).  Add to that all direct selling expenses (meals, airline, mileage, social events, football tickets, etc).  If you are owner operated, don’t forget to allocate a portion of your compensation based on time spent in selling and marketing activities.  In essence, total all costs spent to bring your company to the attention of a new client.  Divide that total by the number of new clients acquired in the year.  Do it for the last three years.  Prepare to be shocked. 

With that point made, its clear your best source of new, higher margin, revenue is existing clients.  And, in theory, you’ve served them well in the past so you should have a leg up in selling them additional services in the future.  The question becomes, how do you do it?  Here are my suggestions, based on the assumption that the services team will own this effort rather than having the luxury of an existing client sales force.

1. Rank your Clients:  Identify your top X (10, 20, 100, etc.) clients based on a combination of past revenue production, client size (gross revenue, employees, desktops, etc), and your best guess on the total opportunity size in the next 12 months.  You’ll have to determine the best way to weigh the components in the ranking scheme (and how you rank them), but you must get it to a simple A (“we need to talk to them right now”), B (“we need talk to them this year”), or C (“we’ll talk to them when we’re done with everyone else”) scheme. 
2. Assign Account Owners:  Assign someone to own the call plan on each A account.  For B’s, discuss them only after you have started execution of a call plan around the A accounts.  The people you assign should be senior project managers, directors or the equivalent.  More importantly, they should be capable of talking about the client’s business, understand your value prop, and have the requisite knowledge and experience to pace through the following steps.
3. Develop a Q1 Contact Plan:  In Q1, meet every A client.  Ask to meet you primary contact, but also ask to meet with related business owners (esp. if your focus is CRM, ERP or any other business related app).  In the meetings, don’t sell, listen.  Ask them about what challenges the coming year will bring, ask about the current business plan, ask them about what they fear in the current economy.   
4. Meeting Follow-Up:  After the meeting, deliver a brief document that both outlines the meeting discussions, but also presents 3 things you can do to help them with the business challenges they have in the coming year.  Meet with the same team to present the follow-up plan.

The point behind this is simple: target your services to their business challenges rather than just trying to sell them “stuff you do”. 

In my current company, we actually have the benefit of an existing client sales team.  One person in particular, is VERY good at getting client meetings where she simply asks “How are we doing, how can we do better and how can we help you?”. She almost always takes a PM, Director or Senior Executive with her so as to have a technical resource with her to add immediate value in the discussion.   When combined with disciplined follow-up, its amazing how well she does at mining new opportunities our of her current account list rather than having to chase down new, expensive accounts.

Do You Like Your Clients?

I think everyone that manages a consultancy knows that high customer satisfaction leads to longer term, stickier customers who generate consistent, high margin revenue with little to no marginal selling costs; creates a better working environment for consultancy staff; and generally make life more pleasant.  I have nothing to add to why customer satisfaction is important nor do I want to give you another pre-baked list of how to achieve high customer satisfaction.  Rather, I’d like to ask you a simple question:

Do you like your clients?

Let’s face it, folks:  over the long term, you can’t hide who you are or how you feel so if you and yours really don’t like a client, they aren’t going to be happy and the client is going to go unsatisfied.  It may not be intentional, but over time you’ll pay less attention to them, provide them less priority in scheduling, return their phone calls and emails just a tad slower and, eventually, they’ll get the message and go elsewhere.

I’ve had a ton of really, really great clients. The best ones are the ones to whom I somehow connected personally, contributed to their personal success, and shared their mission and core values.  I think of these clients as the great loves of my professional life.  I feel great affection towards every one of them and, if called, would drop almost anything to help them (in fact, during 9/11/2001, I did just that for one of them).

I’ve also had a few about whom I just felt neutral.  I went it, did good, professional quality work, but got out and didn’t keep in touch.  In some cases, I felt I was just being treated as a vendor rather than an advisor and so my opinion didn’t matter very much; in others, I just didn’t connect with the culture or my sponsor.  Others…well, who knows.  I think of these as the casual dates that were nice, but didn’t go anywhere.  If they called, I’d be friendly, professional and help if I had time.

Then, I’ve had a very few clients that I just flat out didn’t like.  And you know what…at the end of the project, they didn’t like me either.  In one situation, I found the client’s internal culture to be too blame ridden to manage; in another, I had a massive personality clash with the executive sponsor (I’m certain she’s a good person, but I seemed to bring out the worst in her).  In one, the client insulted me in the first meeting in front of the entire project team (I can be a little sensitive to insults at times).  I think of these as my dates from hell.  If they called I’d ignore it, but frankly I know they’ll never call.

Its easy to imagine who would rate me highest on customer satisfaction.  So, all you need to increase client sat is to do business with people you like – that should work, right? Economically, most of us can’t afford to be that choosy, so what can we do instead?

About the only answer I’ve found is to develop a better understanding of the client’s mind set and behaviors so their actions can be understood in the context of same.  Some ways you can do this are:

1. During the sales cycle, spend some good, quality time asking them about the make up of their project team, how they manage their people, and how decisions are made.  This gives you some early insight into how they will work with you and how they’ll make decisions.  Pass this information along to your team before your first full project meeting.

2. Observe their culture and try to match your team to it.  That means that you need insight into both your client’s and team’s mind sets.  As an example (pulled right from my life), don’t send a anti-hunting, big city girl to West Point, MS to work with a company that sells hunting gear.  I know that seems obvious, but when you make hundreds of staffing decisions a day, you can easily make that kind of small (yet costly) mistake.

3.  Spend time with your client outside of the project.  In every one of my great clients, I always managed to spend time with them talking about their business, their goals, what we could do better, and, in some cases, just themselves.  As a result, I gained a deeper appreciation for what drove them and they got to see that I really cared about them and their success. That came in handy when we had to deal with any conflict inside the project.

The purpose behind all these suggestions is to develop a personal understanding of your client company and their people so you better understand their behaviors, mind sets and attitudes.  It may not help you like them better, but if you understand them at least you can manage to it.

Egos, Conflict and the Consultancy

I saw a great article today by Thomas Hoffman from CIO.com’s RSS feed (it was written by Hoffman in June 2008 and originally published in Computerworld).  The title is “Narcissists at work: How to deal with arrogant, controlling, manipulative bullies”.  In it, Hoffman documents his interview with Jean Ritala, the co-author of “Narcissism in the Workplace“.

In the post (and related book), Ritala doesn’t deal with narcissism as a garden-variety swollen ego, but rather deals with it as a significant, and corporately problematic, emotional disorder defined as “…a condition characterized by an inflated sense of self-importance and an extreme preoccupation with one’s self.”

The NIH lists the following as the symptoms of a narcissistic personality disorder:

1. Reacts to criticism with feelings or rage, shame, or humiliation
2. Takes advantage of others to achieve own goals
3. Has feelings of self-importance
4. Exaggerates achievements and talents
5. Is preoccupied with fantasies of success, power, beauty, intelligence, or ideal love
6. Has unreasonable expectations of favorable treatment
7. Requires constant attention and admiration
8. Lacks empathy

What struck me is this list is a behavioral primer for almost every “mostly-successful” entrepreneur, C-Level and senior consultant with whom I have ever worked. 

I’ve found that these people are “mostly successful” as they generally receive significant financial rewards or advancement, but are considered high maintenance to work with or less than desirable to work for.  For entrepreneurs, they tend to never get a business beyond 50 people or about $20 million.  For C-levels, they tend to hit the VP (often sales), CIO or COO slot in their 30′s, but never get to the CEO seat and often change jobs every few years.  For consultants, they tend to be VERY product knowledgeable, but I usually see a recurring pattern of two-year job shifts combined with significant contract work.  Overall, I generally see these people peak in their 30′s and 40′s and never do much beyond that.

Exceptions exist of course.  And, not everyone that has some of these characteristics is a narcissist in its strict definition as an emotional disorder.

You may now ask, “So what? They’re assh*les.  Move on”.  The problem isn’t them, its what they do to you and the organizations for which you work. 

In a consultancy, these people kill project teams results, guarantee write-offs, destroy customer trust, and foster peer level conflicts via being critical, lying, taking credit for other’s work, and pointing the finger when things go wrong.  If you see this behavior, DON’T excuse it as the price we pay for finding skilled people or driving high billed hours – get HR involved, document the behavior and correct it or get rid of the person doing it.

In a client, this kind of person will make your life a bleak living hell as your ability to manage to scope is limited by their particularly self-involved world view.  Every issue will be your fault, every problem your’s to solve, every success their’s to claim.  My usual course of action is to document (and document and document), find another champion inside the client to help me manage the person, and, if I can’t work around them, I pull our team.  If I can’t, next chance I get I jack their hourly rate as a “jerk fee” but then get us out as quickly after that as I can.  I’d love to say that confronting them with the behavior, esp. in an intervention-style environment works, but my experience shows that it doesn’t when they work for the client.

Inside your own leadership team, this behavior will manifest itself in very clear ingrained behaviors.  Managers will point fingers rather than accept responsibility, accountability will become impossible, and your best people will leave, particularly those that report to the person manifesting the narcissistic behaviors.  Those that are left behind will either be stuck for personal reasons (usually financial) or will be the second tier who are not energetic enough to find the best solutions to problems (if they could, they’d quit).  Overall, you team’s performance will decline over time (or at best, never improve).  From the top down, follow the same advice I give for consulting staff.  However, if the problem is above you (esp. in the CEO seat), your choices are limited since HR will usually be ineffective talking to the owner or CEO.  Some people will respond to upward coaching (calmly, thoughtfully and respectfully done) especially when its done from long time trusted staff member or peer.  However, if the traits are too deeply engrained, you’ll find that the choice is not how to change them but how you change your job.

By the way, I’ve been accused of 3, 5 and 6.  Especially by my wife:).