Frog Twaddle

A few weeks back, I was faced with the challenge of dealing with a difficult client. This particular client is known for flip-flopping their position and making outrageous demands. Before I dive into the crisis, a little background.

I lead several projects for a private company that does government contracting. In this particular case, we had landed a contract that would ultimately cost our company money but eventually lead to other, more profitable opportunities. We had won the work away from a prior vendor that was underperforming—missing deadlines, delivering low-quality work, etc. During the honeymoon phase with our new client, everything was good. We gave folks raises, mentored the site leadership, and oversaw the delivery. For a while, our hard work seemed to be making a difference.

More than a year into the contract, we noticed that one of the incumbent staff members was underperforming and causing several delivery issues for the team. We tried several things to help get our staff member back on track, including additional training, mentorship, corrective action plans, and many, many conversations about what needed to change and what was expected. By the time we started considering separation, we had a mountain of evidence that this individual was not up to the task—nor interested in improving.

To compound the issue, we were getting multiple complaints a week from the difficult government client about our employee's lack of performance. More than once, the government client asked us to bring someone new onto the contract. But just as frequently, we were hearing how great this employee was—from the same government client. Our senior leadership was regularly taking “beatings” over the poor performer. Given the client’s continuous flip-flopping and emotional outbursts, it felt as though there was no winning.

That’s when the light bulb went on for me. No matter what we did to correct the situation — whether we continued trying to turn the poor performer around or removed them from the contract — the difficult client was not going to be happy. That meant that regardless of our decision, the outcome with the customer’s satisfaction would be the same and could therefore be discounted in our decision-making process. Once I realized this, we were free to make a rational decision based solely on the employee’s performance.

What we actually ended up doing in this case is not important. What’s important is that we were able to dramatically simplify the problem by removing the concern that had made this situation a crisis.

After we made our final decision and let the client know what was going to happen, there was, predictably, an emotional backlash. Surprisingly though, in that moment, I was completely calm and at peace with the decision. I was confident that I had done the right thing for our company AND the client.

A week later, I was reading an article in the Harvard Business Review with my morning tea that really solidified my confidence. The article was an interview with Jacinda Ardern, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand. In it, she recounted her time as PM and the multiple crises she dealt with. She spoke about dealing with COVID and realizing that doing something no other country had tried was the path of least regret. She didn't know if her decision would put them ahead of other countries trying to protect their citizens (it was an information poor environment after all) but at least she knew it wouldn't make them worse off.

While nowhere near as consequential as the pandemic, I realized that’s what I had instinctively done with our difficult government client. Realizing I could not change the perception or emotional state of the client freed me to be rational and make a decision I was comfortable with. That’s precisely why, when the client did predictably blow up, I was calm. I was confident that we had taken the best path available to us.

There’s another time I was exposed to this lesson. During my high school years, my parents took my brother and me to see the very terrible movie Rhinestone. (No, really. Don’t see it. It’s bad.) In the movie, Dolly Parton’s character is a country singer who has to get Sylvester Stallone’s character, a cabbie with little musical talent, to become a successful country star in order to win a bet.

At the end of the movie, Stallone’s character is bombing on stage, and he sees that he’s not going to win over the crowd by following Dolly’s instructions to the letter. So he takes a deep breath and mutters to himself, “If I’m going down, I’m going down MY way.” He tells the band to pick up the tempo and changes the way he sings the song to something more like rock than country. The crowd loves it, and Dolly’s character wins the bet.

When dealing with a crisis, my experience tells me that one successful strategy is to take the path of least regret. Or, as Stallone would say, “go down MY way.”