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Hidden Agendas and Hard Messages This entry was posted on 4/13/2007 4:55 PM and is filed under Leadership,Organizational Assessment,Consultants' Tools. How do you ever know when to give up, throw in the towel and walk away from a client, a project, an employer, an organization? What do you do when you believe that hidden agendas are in play? No one has an easy answer to this question. I was confronted with this dilemma recently. I have been consulting for 27 years, yet I still lose sleep over client engagements from time to time. I almost walked away from this one. Here is what happened. I was about to begin an organizational culture assessment when I began to suspect that the underlying but unspoken agenda was to get rid of one of the leaders in the company. The stated purpose of the audit was to find the strengths and weaknesses in the organization (including those of the leader) and to make recommendations for addressing the weaknesses while fulling leveraging the strengths. However, as I prepared for the assessment, I began to pick up on cues that led me to believe that something might be amiss. I did my best to determine how or whether to proceed. I decided that my path forward should be to confront my misgivings directly with my clients. (Of course this is always the best approach!) My clients and I had several very frank discussions in which we set our boundaries with each other and reached consensus on how we would proceed and how our data would be used (e.g. who would see it, how and what decisions would be made based on it.) The discussions were not always comfortable, yet we did not back away from them. We did carry out the organizational assessment. While our clients heard some hard messages from the data, they handled the feedback professionally and without defensiveness. They seemed to have concluded that we did do a professional job of collecting the data even though some of it was hard to hear. Now we are in the process of helping them address the issues that we uncovered. We don't always agree on interpretations of information nor on preferred actions. Nevertheless, we seem to be making progress in moving towards goals that are clearly on the table and desired by most if not all of the stakeholders. This is one time when I am really glad that we did not walk away. However, if we had not had the frank discussions upfront with our clients, the entire process could have led to nothing - or worse could have led to results that would have tarnished our credibility and could have hurt people within our client organization. This was a tough one that seems to be turning out ok. However, at other times we have been confronted with situations where the clients were not willing to communicate directly with us. In these cases, we did walk away. The key is in knowing when to stay the course and when to choose to leave. And, of course, we must always have the courage to confront the hard issues from the start. |
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