Learnings on the Job - Politics 301
More than half of being a good consultant is navigating the waters of corporate politics. When you’re dealing with Directors and above, life can be a daily forest fire. As one of my clients likes to say, “the big swirl”.
The president of the company I used to work for always reinforced what it was to consult for a client, “If we’re good consultants, we’re like our clients Samurai.”
Noble warriors charging into political minefields, and usually being the first to suffer the fire of internal retributions. Sometimes leading the victorious charge, other times fumbling through a prickly political maneuver that goes sour. And even taking one on the chin for your client, in their battle, and licking your wounds later over drinks.
A good consultant is like a skydiver, jumping headfirst into that tempetuous air between internal marketers, IT staff, agencies and contractors, — all playing in an amorphous dance of dollars, diplomacy, and danger. It’s easy not to realize how new it is to all of us still today. Or what a complex dance we’re trying to coordinate.
Digital marketing has been here more than a decade now, and there are always new elements, new players, new tracking, shifts in preference, growth in bandwidth and the band plays on. Explosive movements continue to erupt online, a Google killer lies in wait in some dark grassy knoll. And agencies and consultants that don’t keep up get left to wither in dry, lonely fields.
The digital marketing evolution plows right through the world of the corporate and individual id. Reputations. Personal pride. Questioning of one’s expertise. What does a brand really mean to its market today?
The clash between IT and marketing continues to spill over from the run-up days of the web. Mammoth web systems continue to be put in place to facilitate massive scale customer session loads, all while needing to support ever evolving marketing functions. And no one has been trained to do everything they used to do offline in a new faster world.
To deliver value and success for your client, that’s the game. Making sure yours is the first “A paper” should be on your mind everyday. And being virtuous in your value leads to greater topics.
Diplomacy, for one, is a practiced skill. Knowing when it’s your turn to speak, knowing when your opinion matters and when it doesn’t. Understanding when everything is on the line because your clients reputation is at stake. It’s a subtle skill to learn over years of dealing with c-level clients.
Patience is a virture as well. You shouldn’t be in a hurry to exit a job in which you are adding daily value. Every day that you are there, and in turn value you deliver to your client, the more likely you are to stick around.
Listening will never fail you. You have to know and track what’s going on in the corporation, what’s the buzz, what are people reacting to? Who does your client need to impress to get a promotion? Who might you be presenting to if you’re taken up to “the show”, the infamous CEO, CTO, CMO meeting, with twenty-seven attorneys in the back.
Observe the players, how they play, and trust your gut in telling you how to kindle a relationship with them. Know when it’s right to sit back, watch, and learn what not to do. The biggest mistakes you could make as a consultant are likely to be made by someone within the organization, or another vendor, if you are practicing some of our earlier exercises in patience.
Learning is a daily exercise, you must stay that half step ahead. No questions on this allowed.
Now that corporations are realizing their first decade of web investments won’t be enough, and new investments will always need to be made, internal marketers find themselves faced with an ever mounting list of Web 1.0 and 2.0 issues to deal with.
And they are piling on fast. Most large corporate marketing staffs are tracking hundreds of campaigns a year. Almost always with limited staff compared to traditional marketing groups.
And the final exam essay for Politics 301 is the dreaded “you never want to get it” smear factor when a project goes horribly wrong, or someone higher up than your client, thinks it did. Because once the taint is on your shoulders, whether individual or agency, it is almost never shed from the organization’s belief system. You’ll likely be in new pastures soon, without a reference.
And since I brought it up, Web 2.0 is dead to me. Web 3.0, 4.0, 5.5, 6.2, it’s just not right. We’re evolving faster than software features. Why should we compare ourselves to a release candidate? We shouldn’t. So you won’t hear me use that arcane numbering system ever again. That’s a promise.
And so to summarize…diplomacy, patience, listening, and observing are the key to surviving as a consultant. Staying a step ahead in the dance, keeping your sword swift and sharp, and learning, ever learning. For the foreseeable future, you won’t slow down because as soon as you do, your world, your whole market can move right past you. No more playing catch up. It’s time to stay ahead of the curve.
May grace and elegance effuse from your next productive meeting. Until next time.
© 2008 Keith Boswell