Tomicide Solutions December 2008: Building and Maintaining Your Personal And Professional Power In Business Development
By Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan
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In "Let's Get Real Or Let's Not Play", author Mahan Khalsa uses a quotation from a friend of his...
"If you're not ready to walk, you're not ready to talk."
That is, if you're not ready to walk away from business, regardless of the money involved, you're not ready to talk to prospective clients about business.
So, what are we talking about here?
Well, we're talking about our power of doing business on our own terms. We can also call it our boundaries.
You see, many people regard the word "power" as a negative one. We've all heard the phrase...
"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."
But I don't think it's the power that corrupts. What corrupts is when people with the wrong character traits are given power.
When human slugs (They have no backbone and leave a trail of slime behind themselves) are put into powerful positions, they get corrupted.
Just think of Bernard Madoff, the former chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market or even the Enron leadership.
Or the three car bosses, Robert Nardelli of Chrysler, Alan Mulally of Ford and Richard Wagoner of General Motors, with begging bowls in hand, flying their private jets to Washington and begging the government for $25 billion of bailout money to save their companies from almost certain bankruptcy.
Power is often associated with controlling and manipulating other people and misusing our positions.
In the words of Ann-Louice Lögdlund, lead singer of the Swedish avant-garde metal band, Diablo Swing Orchestra from their 2006 record, The Butcher's Ballroom (Track 4: Rag Doll Physics)...
"But I Do And I Don't Want To Care Anymore
If I Close My Eyes Would It Spare Me The Sight?
Of Decay, Corruption, How We Nurture Destruction
And Everything That Will Doom Us All."
How easily we can jump on the path for short-term pleasure and gain, even if that path leads us to certain doom.
Naturally, we tend to relate power to decay, destruction and corruption.
But it can also mean the ability to influence people to make them take action in their own best interest.
Many high-tech projects fail not because the hired high-tech experts are idiots but because more often than not clients fail to fulfil their sides of the agreement. According to a McKinsey study, 75% of projects don't return profit to sellers, and 50% of solutions don't deliver the value the buyers expect to receive in the first place.
And very often the business development folks can see this even before prospects become clients, but they just follow the company's mandate...
"When money is on the line, we bend over backwards to anyone."
Which is very close to the hooker's mantra...
"I do anything for anyone for money."
Clients have big dreams and aspirations but no guts to actually take action to turn their dreams into reality. And that is the point when our power is called upon to confront the facts and find a way out of the plateau.
Power consists of two ingredients: 1) Knowing and 2) doing. Clients usually know what to do but get so buried since they are busier than a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest, they simply don't take the necessary action to move forward, so they remain buried.
Power also comes with its shadow of potential for abuse in forms of being self-centred, blaming, money-oriented - "it's all about the dough, stupid" mentality. When people are in search of power, we tend to think they are power-hungry, controlling, dictatorial and manipulative.
These negative attributes can give power a negative meaning, and with that in mind, we just have to get rid of the negative elements and focus on the positive meanings of power.
So, let's discover power as an essential positive tool in our business development relationships. Remember, as business development professionals we must be powerful to choose clients whose lives we can impact in a positive way. As the saying goes, some shores are set out for shipwreck. Some clients are not to be helped, and we'd better know the difference.
The question is just how we apply this power. Do we use power over clients or power with clients?
The Types of Powers We Can Develop
1) Power Of Skills
Over the years of both formal and informal education, we have piled up a truckload of skills and knowledge. Furthermore, through repeated applications we have turned all those skills and knowledge into valuable know-how. And when that know-how comes with the courage of using it powerfully, it can be very valuable and very attractive to others. That is, to the right people. People want to benefit from your expertise.
However, it is important to know that while expertise can put us in front of potential buyers, it can't keep us there for long. When we use this know-how to provide insights, wisdom and new perspectives to clients, we are valuable. When we use it simply to merely pitch our stuff, we are commodity, purchased solely on price like sacks of potatoes. This is a very important power but to make lasting relationships we must use much more than expertise.
2) Power Of Authority
You are in a power position because your client's organisation has given you certain responsibilities. You offer business solutions (Not merely technical solutions) which the people of your client's company are supposed to follow and implement. There is one important caveat here: This power is temporary, so we'd better not build anything significant on it. Therefore we must use the power of authority sparingly.
The permanent part of this power is how you come across as a professional. You must come across as confident but not arrogant. I know there is a very thin line between the two. I also know that, coming from Europe, what counts as confidence over in Europe, counts as arrogance here in Canada.
But this is not the people's fault. It's just years of systematic conditioning by a socialist/semi-communist government.
A few years ago I learnt a great phrase from Gill Wagner of Honest Selling...
"I guess we've just found a reason for not doing business together. Would you agree?"
I love this phrase because it's honest. But very often I've received this response from prospects...
"How dare you to talk to me like that? Who the hell do you think you are?"
I know most people don't have the guts to face reality, but I've never realised it can be so bad.
3) Power Of Reward
These are rewards you can offer to people. This power includes money, recognition, gifts, improved relationships, etc. We must know which rewards best motivates people. According to various research, some of the five greatest motivating factors - thus can be used as rewards - are: 1) Interest, 2) Performance, 3) Opportunity for development, 4) recognition and 5) autonomy. Interestingly money ranks at 10th place. Even if we consider certain inaccuracies, we can see money is not even on the top of the list of motivators. There is one important point here though: Lack of money is the greatest demotivator.
Even in an employee environment, "Full Appreciation for Work Done", "Feeling "in" on things", "Sympathetic telp on personal problems" and "Job security" precede money. It's only dumb managers who believe that money is the #1 employee motivator. Maybe this is why Peter Drucker noted many years ago...
"90% of what we call 'management' consists of making it difficult for people to get things done."
4) Power Of Relationship
This is the ability to develop lasting relationships with a broad range of people. This and the power of skills are the most important powers we can practise. This power helps us to develop relationships with peers based on mutual trust and respect. This is also a very fragile power, thus must be continuously nurtured. Without this skill power is pretty useless. This is where the majority of high-tech professionals fall flat on their faces. They have degrees and various certificates up to their eyeballs, but they are pretty poor at building and nurturing relationships
5) Power Of Punishment
We can practise this kind of power by taking something away from people they want. It may be in the form of withholding information, open communication. It can be physical and/or emotional hurt. We all have this power and unfortunately end up using it without realising that we're using it. However, when we use our position and/or the confidential information bestowed upon us, we are running the risk of severing the relationship with clients and their people. There are some actions that appear to be punishing to people, but it is in the organisation's interest. If you are hired to install a new voice mail system, you cannot give in to the emotion that the receptionist might lose her job as a result of having a voice mail system. If a CEO is stupid enough to replace a live receptionist with a cold (but relatively cheap) machine, that company deserves to go broke, and the secretary is better off to jump ship when the company just starts "stinking" but before it starts sinking. All in all, do your best to filter punishing power out of your daily repertoire but leave enough of it for very special situations.
Many years ago one of my drill sergeants said...
"If someone pulls a knife on you, you'll pull a rocket launcher on him. And if someone tries to put you in the hospital, you'll put him in the morgue."
Of course, Newton said it more eloquently in his third law of motion...
"To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction."
But if you make the reaction a tad more powerful than the action itself, well, you can't go wrong. Or as Han Solo put it in Star Wars...
"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side."
Well, mind your blaster and keep it at the ready. Using Boy Scout parlance, "Be prepared".
6) Power Of Association
This is about the connections you have built over the years. In this network there are many people who are crucial to your success and are willing to listen to you and help. As a result of being connected to influential people, more people will pay attention to your work and what you say.
If these people have the seven powers we are discussing here, some of that power becomes available to us too. However, we must use it very carefully. So, whichever power the people you associate with use, you will be regarded as a person who uses the same power(s). If you are associated to people with power of punishment, you will be seen as a punisher.
This is why it's vitally important to have a perfect client profile and do business only with these perfect clients. Otherwise we may get associated with inappropriate businesses that treat their employees, their clients or their communities in a nasty manner.
Summing It Up
Some people think that it is inappropriate to use all of these powers but either knowingly or unknowingly we use all of them. But which powers serve us best to improve our clients' performance. I believe if we truly have the client's best interest at heart, not merely wanting to sell the next "solution", we are likely to use all of them. We use skills and relationships mainly, and call upon the other powers when we see fit.
There is one more factor to consider regarding powers. That is the client's perception. It is important that both you and your clients are aware of the power you are using and respond accordingly. If we consider, for example, the power of skills, we can see that our value goes up and down depending how our clients perceive the existence or the lack skills. When we use more of this power, we get more involved and push back if necessary.
We know that our strength as professionals depends on the appropriate use of these powers. However, power can also be a strange zero-sum game. The more we have, the less our clients have. In a way it is just like encountering a dog. If the dog perceives you to be weak, he will get the upper hand (paw) on you. If you stand your ground, the dog will cringe back and stops barking. Sometimes clients try to put us up on pedestals, and we must resist the temptation. The higher we are on our pedestals, the lower in the ditch we perceive our clients to be. This is a dangerous situation, for they become dependent upon us. We end up feeding them fish, instead of teaching them how to fish.
Avoiding Misusing Our Professional Power
Every now and then, inadvertently though, we may misuse some of the powers we possess as professionals. Denying this basic fact would blind us to the truth, that is, to everything we both in our own and in our clients' lives.
Let's get bone honest with ourselves regarding our work. And we can only be honest if we bring out our dark sides to the light and examine it - if not under a microscope (my dark side would scare me shitless), but at least - under a magnifying glass (This is scary enough for a start). And the microscope can come later.
Let's look at this list of what we all do consciously or subconsciously to get ahead in our professions and lives:
Distorting the collected data to make the problem more outstanding and urgent, and in doing so pushing the client into panic-stricken action to eliminate the problem.
Pretending we know more about clients' situations than they do.
We believe we must have all the answers, otherwise we look like idiots.
Using expertise to sell alternative methodologies that will not necessarily improve clients' condition but makes extra money for professionals. One example is many computer consultants who are also partners - euphemism for commissioned-based product peddlers - for IBM or Microsoft and a bunch of other companies. The sad thing is that they voluntarily forego high-margin knowledge work in order to push higher volume low-margin "things" .
And we can this stupidity in warranty work...
"We provide free labour and charge only for the parts."
It should be the other way round. Charge for the knowledge work (and please don't call it labour) and give away the parts. It's the part that has failed not the knowledge behind it. So provide the parts for free but charge for the applied knowledge of fitting it in.
But would you partner with a high-tech firm that tries to shove "boxes" down your throat? Many buyers can see this and send the message to the high-tech firm:
"Shove it up your arse, box pushing man. We need real experts, do you understand?" (Paraphrasing one of Frank Zappa's songs, in which Frank meets the devil, a.k.a. the one and only Terry Bozzio)
Some professionals are unclear about their limitations. My pet peeve is when computer repair people call themselves IT consultants. Where is the problem here? There is a world of difference between replacing a crashed hard drive and designing an IT infrastructure that supports a car manufacturing plant's production line.
Learning from each engagement is one thing and it is fine, but taking on a project we know nothing about, but we hope we can learn on the client's shilling is somewhat unethical.
And we professionals don't do these things because we are a bunch of unscrupulous bastards. We are simply humans with some need to elevate our egos and images. Lots of us have done personal development workshops to subordinate our egos, but it will never totally disappear. Some of the reasons are ego, expertise, vanity, power, control, aspirations, recognition, anxiety and - last but not least - fear and greed.
Manipulating the Facts
Manipulation is about pushing our own agendas. Look at some large accounting firms that do business consulting. They have "cobbled together" an - according to them very unique - approach, trademarked it, and use it over and over again. After all, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, doesn't it?
The other manifestation of this problem is computer consultants who become commissioned salespeople. They call themselves "strategic partners" for computer manufacturers but the meaning is the same. Many of them have no intention to solve clients' problems, but only to sell more "boxes" and get the commissions from manufacturers. That is okay, but that is not high-tech consulting but techno-peddling.
For some firms this is a very subtle process, for some it is more open and obvious. As professionals we have quite a bit of trust and power bestowed upon us. It is up to us how we use it. We are there to achieve certain ends, and together with the implementing team we have to figure out the means to those ends. We want to be both provocative and accommodating. We are at the client's company to initiate some sort of change. Change means ambiguity, and most people are scared shitless when we talk about change. Well, the mention of ambiguity may even kill some of those people. Well, many of them rather die than change, and some of them actually do in amazing style and elegance. I buried many of them myself during my gravedigger years.
So, on the one hand we are provoking people to change, but we must also check how much they are willing to change in a certain space of time. Are they ready for this change? And sometimes we do have to manipulate (this may not even be the right word here) clients to make them see the unadulterated truth: Just think of Hans Christian Andersen's story The Emperor's New Clothes.
Clients may live in blissful ignorance, but due to dysfunctional company culture, nobody dares to point out the obvious, so they carry on marching barefoot and butt-naked.
What happens here is similar to telling alcoholics that they have drinking problems. They work up a rage to be ready to kill you. If you have been thrown out of executives' offices for some "The Emperor's New Clothes" type comments, then you know what it means. Most companies desperately try to avoid going to areas where they really need to go. Just as alcoholics get emotionally triggered by talking to non-drinkers, and broke people get upset by chatting with bankers about investments, many executives get angry when we point out problems at the company. They think we just called them incompetent nincompoops and they hate us for it. Realistically, they've just revealed their fragile egos and low self-esteems.
So, at this point we can use a bit of good manipulation, and instead of pointing out the obvious by citing the "emperor" comment, through good questions we hold up mirrors in front of them, so they can discover their own nakedness. We just have to point out that the mirror tells as it is.
"Fred, what do you think that dangling bit is?
"Hell, I'm naked! That's my daddy button!"
With a bit of guidance, clients can discover many problems and this is where they really buy into the idea of eliminating these problems.
Pretending to Be Different
This is interesting. Many professionals think they have their personal and professional selves, and they can be different. I believe we have only one "Self", and that one Self is impacted by both personal and professional issues.
As Gandhi said many years ago as humans we're non-compartmentalised beings, and behave pretty much the same way both personally and professionally.
It also relates to my belief that every business problem starts out as a personal problem, usually low self-esteem. This is why we tend to take incredible amount of crap from jerk clients instead of putting our boots to their arses and kicking them out of our client rosters.
So what causes this difference between our personal and professional lives? I reckon it is very often the fear of loss. We detect some shortcomings in ourselves, and we want to compensate for them. But we sometimes overcompensate.
Look at a person who is a brilliant consultant but she has just found out about her husband's mistress, and now the whole relationship is going apeshit. We can say her personal life is on quicksand, and it can nosedive anytime.
She is likely to use any method with her clients to maintain the "business as usual" perception. After all, she is an educated, highly competent consultant, and nobody is supposed to detect this little personal issue. Well, people do detect it for we act them out subconsciously.
This is when exaggeration comes in. We also refer more and more to past big clients, credentials, awards we have won, etc. And since we use exaggeration more and more extensively to balance the mess in our personal lives, after a while we will not even know the magnitude of that exaggeration. We just keep repeating it.
How can we solve this problem? I reckon the best way is to clean up our own personal lives. When we are happy, healthy, enthusiastic, we act it out both personally and professionally.
Superiority
Dealing with an organisation's technical problems can distort our perspectives after a while. We can't help it. We become part of the client's company's culture and politics, and can easily turn into "Yes" people.
We all know this, so to avoid this trap we often click into a superior mode. We believe that we know it better because we are outsiders and have seen this or similar situations before. Besides, it is the client's company which is in deep trouble anyway and we've been called in to help. And we want to help. We send a message that we know it better and clients should not even think about trying to solve this or similar problem without consulting with us first.
With this action we are building dependency on us. Also, we tell clients things they want to hear, so they can keep us as their "hit squads" in case they need extra votes.
Deceiving Clients
Deceiving clients is mainly about pursuing personal agendas and getting paid for it. This happens when many technology companies implement new technologies they don't fully know yet, but use it as projects to make even the learning process profitable. The other manifestation of this disease is when some technology firms take on projects, relegate them to freshly hired unskilled staff and invoice the client for expert work at expert rates.
Is it legal? Well, yes. Is it ethical? No bloody way. Is it widely practised? You had better believe it.
The other form of deceiving clients is telling them what they want to hear. Yes, you can lose the gig for pointing out: The emperor has no clothes, but if you get thrown out for an honest comment like that, then what is the point in working with a moronic client like that anyway?
On Summary
Power and control, contrary to common belief, are good things. No, they're great things. But it depends how we use them. When we use power to empower ourselves to conduct our businesses and live our lives in an authentic way and use control to keep ourselves in check, they are good things.
They become bad when we try to use them to manipulate people around us to do what's good for us regardless of whether or not it's good for them. This also reminds me of Karl von Klausevitz's definition of war...
"War therefore is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will."
Over the years I've received many emails pointing out that I'm wrong to compare business to warfare.
But am I really 100% wrong?
I've never talked about crushing the competition.
Regarding warfare, I've always talked about giving our best and brightest to help our organisations to succeed and achieve market leadership. I'm talking about an insatiable appetite to pursue excellence with as much dedication as solders use to pursue victory.
And if in this pursuit we use our powers correctly, then there is a good chance we can achieve great things. And since the world is not a zero-sum game, we don't achieve these things at the expense of others. Everyone has the opportunity to do it. Will everyone do it? No.
And just to support my example, the military turns out to be the most trusted institution based on a 2008 Gallup survey. Maybe this is why "military service" is the #1 "skill" employers are looking for when hiring new employees. I think I've read this either in Fast Company or Wired.
Our gain is not other people's loss. We inflict gains and losses upon ourselves. Short of killing us, no one else can do that to us.
So, I suggest we review how we use these powers and the result is using it that way. Then we can fiddle around how to improve the situation.
Attribution: "This article was written by Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan who helps privately held information technology companies to develop high leverage client acquisition systems and business development teams in order to sell their products and services to premium clients at premium fees and prices. Visit Tom's website at http://www.varjan.com.
