The Everlasting Honeymoon With Your Customer
One of the most exciting benefits for a free lance consultant is the ability to start a new assignment. Every first day feels like a glorious new beginning. There is no list of issues that you have to resolve, no deadlines that need to be reached and no concrete expectation of the added value you are bringing to the team. But eventually this will change. The customer pays you a rate and that needs to be compensated with visible results. Depending on the type of work, the initial honeymoon will come at an end.
Quickly you will compare your current assignment with those in the past. You may realise that certain team members are not pulling their weight. The internal procedures may include steps that seem obsolete or less efficient. The arrangements for travel allowance may not be as generous as initially agreed. The allowed working hours might not be as flexible as hoped. The actual tasks appointed do not meet the level of your expertise. Sooner or later you will have to conclude subsequent negotiations are necessary.
For example, I had started a contractual assignment for a consultancy firm for a customer who wanted to implement a warehouse management system. After a few weeks the project manager informed me that the budget has run out. But it could still happen that I could continue and finish what I started later in the year. So I agreed to honour the signed contract and stay on for the remainder of the contractual period, but in the meanwhile I would need to continue to work at one of their other end customers.
Quickly I realise that this other customer had a very strange cultural barrier. Everyone had to start at 8am and was not allowed to leave before 5pm. The argument was that employees had this contractually restriction and free lance contractors should therefore not cause any potential friction. Also the received tasks were too easy and there was not enough to keep be busy throughout the day. As I was not a required resource, I was never fully accepted by the team. Soon I realise that a decision needs to be taken: should I stay or should I go?
There is a choice to make when you feel undervalued, underappreciated and/or underutilised. You need to find out to what degree you can negotiate to make your current position more agreeable. When the customer is willing to make concessions, would that be enough for you to feel comfortable with the adjustments you need to make in return? If so, then both you and your customer can start to build a future based on mutual benefits. Then it would be likely that a contract extension will be offered weeks before it will be due. By then you can start to earn a masters degree for customer satisfaction.
To summarise, every assignment starts with a honeymoon phase. But eventually you see differences between your expectations and those from your customer. Then you need to negotiate how all parties involved are able to adjust to master a sustainable level of a mutual satisfaction.
Key words are honeymoon, negotiation, adjustment and mastery. These four levels are also used to explain how people can overcome a culture shock, most common when deciding to live in a foreign country. But the similarities with accepting and completing a successful contractual agreement are striking.
Allegedly there are three specific attitudes towards dealing with a culture shock, being the ‘rejector’, ‘adaptor’ and ‘cosmopolitan’. Obviously the rejector will have a hard time with any assignment as the inevitable negotiation phase will not lead to a satisfactory result, because in the end the customer is king. The adaptor would take customer service a bit too far and make any attempt possible to bend over backwards, which eventually lead to an uncontrollable amount of stress. The cosmopolitan approach balances between the adaptor and rejector, by showing the willingness to embrace the culture of the customer while allowing to keep his/her own identity.
When you are aware of these honeymoon, negotiation, adjustment and mastery phases, you can find your own unique method to achieve the state of mastery as quickly as possible. But that requires that you make important decisions before showing any interest in an offered contract opportunity. You need to know under which conditions you would be able to behave as a cosmopolitan. For most married consultants a choice of working in another continent will not be logical. Those who want to continue to build career would not prefer to accept an assignment that is not challenging enough. Those only interested in the financial gain could fall into the trap that the associated sacrifices could undermine their perception of happiness.
Knowing what you want to get out of an assignment is the first step. Although you can guess what the customer wants, making assumptions could be a mistake. Ask your customer how you can add value. By listening you learn their expectation. Then you can quickly move towards the negotiation and adjustment phase, sometimes even before you even start the assignment. Then you achieve instant mastery, which may feel as an ever lasting honeymoon.
