GETTING WHAT YOU WANT - And Kicking Consultant Butt

Have you ever been frustrated because you’ve been telling management for years about certain problems and then they go pay a consultant 250 bucks an hour to tell them exactly the same thing?

No doubt you’re assuming your management is stupid, reckless with company money, and are feeling insulted by their ignorance.

Sorry about this, but the stupid one in the equation is probably you.

When I start mentoring management staff, often I need to tell them things they really don’t want to hear. But you need to hear it if you’re ever going to improve and get what you want personally and professionally.

First, if you’ve communicated problems to your management, how did you do it? Was it one of the following?

Drive-by or verbally in a meeting to your manager.

Drive-by or verbally to non-managers.

Drive-by or verbally to a group of managers.

In a status report.

In an Email.

Here are some of the “hard truths” in regards to getting management to listen to what you have to say.

First, do you look and present yourself professionally? Consultants generally do not show up to presentations in jeans and a wrinkled polo shirt.
They look like highly-paid, important, professional staff. I realize you may say “clothes don’t make the man”, but they do in business.

Second, do you report to a manager in charge of quality? Then your ability to sway management outside of your immediate manager is about nil. It’s your management’s job to present proposals for improvement. If your manager is bad at this, you have a few options. You can always find a new job. Or you can present something (see below for presentation information) that is sufficiently convincing that your manager will present it upwards. One thing to be clear about from the get-go is that if your idea(s) do not coincide with your manager’s vision or desires, it doesn’t matter how “right” you are. They will not move upwards and will not be adopted. If this is untenable to you, it would be best to move on to a company more in keeping with your own beliefs and vision in terms of QA.

Jumping over your manager’s head is generally regarded as political suicide and I would not recommend it. You *might* end up getting your incompetent manager moved or replaced, but it’s more likely you’ll be the one to go. No manager, including your manager’s manager, wants a backstabbing position climber on their staff. While you’re stabbing your manager in the back, the manager you’re talking to will be noting your behavior. Most of the time it will boomerang on you. They’ll normally tell your manager about you right away and your best option will be to start packing up your office.

But say you either have a manager you would like to have take one of your ideas onward/upward or you’re a manager yourself that needs to convince your own management to move in a certain direction. What do you do to compete with those highly-paid consultants?

The difference between you and a highly-paid expert consultant is usually their ability to persuade and their presentation skills. YOUR ace in the hole is that you know more about your own company and the issues it faces than they do. So you need to be persuasive and to present information in a way that makes it easy for your management to say “yes”. It’s as simple and complex as that.

The key to successful negotiation for ANYTHING is to make it easy for the person you’re trying to convince to say “yes”.

Consultants present professional proposals, in writing. They check with every group that might be impacted by a given change/improvement and ensure their comments and desires are reflected in the document. They include metrics, statistics, and graphs. They have a nice one-paragraph summary with the concluding recommendation re-iterated. And most of them will prepare a Powerpoint presentation to go with it. What they do is verbally give a presentation, and hand their document over at the same time. The idea is that you’re building rapport and understanding through just talking and that all the comforting documentation is available right in their hands for later review if desired. Most upper-level executives do not have time to read 40 page documents. But they want to know you’ve done your homework and that if there is something to justify, you’ve done due diligence. And consultants ALWAYS have a ballpark figure as to what something will cost to implement.

You need to realistically assess your speaking and presentation skills. Ask some of your peers and staff how you “come across”. Some people never become good at those things, but most can become competent. If the people you ask hem and haw around, not looking you in eye, you’ll know you need to do some work on speaking and presentation. My suggestion would be to find a local Toastmasters chapter and learn to be an effective verbal communicator. You’ll be handicapped without the proper skills.

Say you need an additional two people on your staff. The company is in a “hold pattern” and it’s beyond difficult to get new staff. Who do you think will get the staffing – the manager that does a drive-by and tells their management they have to have an additional two people? Or the manager that sets up a meeting, hands over a document, and explains that they are 57% overbooked, with 32% growth anticipated, and will be unable to accept additional work after (say, May) without additional staffing? It will normally be person (B). They’ve provided all of the justifications and it will be easier for their manager to say “yes” than to say “no”. And you’ve provided them with something professional they can present to THEIR management.

Choose your moments intelligently. If your manager has a dozen other critical issues on their plate and your proposal doesn’t either solve one of those issues or is more important than those issues, it’s unlikely you’ll get the attention you need. At the same time, a proposal that solves a critical current issue is going to be considered.

Be pro-active. Many times a consultant or consulting firm is brought in to handle a problem or set of problems THAT HAVE NOT BEEN SOLVED. That means that as issues or problems come up, you or your group should be analyzing them, determining how they can be solved, and presenting solutions to management. In writing. The most successful managers don’t necessarily enjoy putting together proposals or suggestions/solutions in writing, but they do it because it makes them more effective.

A tip for all managers or management-wannabes is that you should never, EVER drop into a superior’s office and dump problems with no solutions into their lap. They may go ahead and solve your problems for you, but the resources they respect and depend upon present problems and potential solutions to those problems.

Another difficult truth is that if you are part of a group that is viewed as ineffective by management, no one in your group is going viewed as having the qualifications necessary to fix the problems. In other words, you’ll be tainted through association. Hard to hear, isn’t it? But true, nonetheless.

I’ve seen many managers fail because they focus their attention on what groups OUTSIDE their own QA group “need to do”. The most common problem I hear is “inadequate specifications”. Welcome to reality. Most specifications are inadequate. If you wait to do YOUR thing until they do THEIR thing, you’ll wait pretty much forever. A general truth is that it is easier to clean up your own house than to force someone else to clean up theirs. Look at the way things “really are” and determine what your own group can do based on that reality. We get bad specs here. But our error rate in production is under 4%. It used to be over 46%. Bad specs are nothing but an excuse to not improve and to place the blame elsewhere. Intertia is a dangerous thing. Where are the analytic skills of your staff? Have they been trained? Do they ask the right questions? Would exploratory test technique help? And on and on… Once you have done everything you can do internally to solve problems and have experienced some successes, your reputation will be improved and you’ll be more likely to be able to influence groups outside your own. It is also significantly easier to get your management to say “yes” to internal updates/changes/expenses than to push changes to other organizations.

You can reduce the likelihood of your management hiring outside help by proactively tackling problems and constantly improving your own organization. But if the unthinkable happens and a consultant is hired, a future blog will talk about actually using those consultants for the benefit of your group.