Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I've got an audio excerpt from an answer I provided on my YouTube channel. You can check it out at thejonathanstarkshow.com and it'll redirect you to YouTube if you're into watching videos. Otherwise, you can just listen to the audio here on the podcast. Enjoy.

Hey, Jonathan here. I've got a question from KKM312 and the question is, what could you do if someone on the team or at the client was sabotaging you or working behind your back? I'd love to learn how to handle that professionally and some options for responding. This is tricky and I don't have enough information to give a super specific answer. I mean, the general answer is through communication because this does happen, especially when I've seen it happen plenty of times when someone inside of a usually a larger organization brings you in as a consultant and not everybody at the company is bought in on having an outsider there. A lot of times they really resent it or they are intimidated by it. So things can happen from my past experience. Things can happen like someone who's a critical stakeholder but didn't have decision power just for roadblocks in your way like crazy. In other cases, I've had users and users who I'm building software for nervous that I'm going, I'm interviewing them like, oh, how do you do your job? What do you do? I'm going to make your interface better or whatever. I'm going to automate these processes. They get scared that they're going to lose their job. So they don't want to actually tell me what they do. Another thing could be that you've got someone who's not actually doing that much of their job. And with me coming in, building software and interviewing them about, okay, how do you spend your day? I want to make it easier for you to do this. And they have to show me everything they do. And if they're sort of like hiding at the job and not really doing that much, they can be really intimidated by that. So there are all sorts of reasons why someone might be threatened by someone coming in from the outside in a consulting role to want to throw you under the bus, make sure the project's a failure, not give you the information that you need to do a good job. And like I said at the beginning, the way around this is communication. But it helps. I mean, it's critical for many reasons. It helps to have a goal for the project. So you can say upfront with the powers that be, the owner, the president, executive leadership, whoever brought you in, the highest, maybe even people above them to make it really clear at the beginning what the objective of the project is, the strategy you're going to use to get to that objective. And then you'll have a bunch of tactics that will kind of come out of the strategy that you can attempt, change, you do all the things and perhaps change tactics along the way, but you stick with the strategy and you're always going to the same objective. So if someone is causing a problem and you become aware of it, you can say to the, you can say first, I mean, this is just my personality. First, I would say to the person, we all know that we're going to try and get, this is where we're going, right? Like we understand that we're trying to get to this objective. This is the strategy we're going to use. And then perhaps depending on the reason why they might be causing a problem or making things harder, you could kind of try and allay their fears. So you could kind of talk to them and say, it seems like, it seems like specific example of thing they did and say like, here's how I interpreted that. It felt like you could have given me those passwords a lot earlier. Is there some reason why you couldn't have get, why did this delay take place? And kind of not make an ego thing between you and them, but just like for the overall project objective that make it clear that what they're doing is causing a problem there. It's slowing things down and not be like in a contest of egos between you and this person. I mean, I don't think that ever gets anywhere. So you could, I would say if it's appropriate, it's probably appropriate to talk to the person directly. I would start there. If that doesn't work, then I would escalate and that's a drag, but sometimes people are not a good fit for the role that they're in. If this person is a chronic problem, they might not just be a chronic problem in the context of a specific project. So I would kind of escalate it. Maybe I would talk about it in a team meeting, regular team meeting. Say like, okay, it's really taking a long time for me to get assets for the website. What can we do about that? Because that's gonna jeopardize the objective of the project and get a group discussion going where the person would actually have to explain why, you know what I mean? So it's sort of bringing it up in the group communication context, sort of in the context of whatever timelines you're working on. And then farther up, you get more direct and sort of talk to...

...farther up the food chain, maybe their boss, maybe the boss's boss, say, look, I'm getting a lot of foot... It seems like I'm getting a lot of foot dragging from a member of the team or some members of the team. Could you kind of, you know, just behind the scenes, could you just sort of like try and assist with that and make sure I'm getting things in a timely fashion? And I think a lot of times that piece, historically for me, I think that piece is the part that sort of solves the problem, where it's not any kind of direct confrontation, because the people farther up the food chain are really interested in the bigger picture metrics of achieving the objective. And so they want to kind of grease the wheels and make sure all the obstacles are out of the way of me or you, in this case, coming in from the outside. Maybe it's an expensive engagement. Maybe the project is really important. It probably is. So they're going to be interested in rocking the boat probably as little as possible, but just making sure that, you know, sort of behind the scenes say, you know, like, Jeff, do you think you could like get those photos or assets to Jonathan to get on the website? We really need to get this done and it's holding things up. So, you know, I wouldn't say I'm an expert at any of this, but I've been doing consulting for like 20 years. So those are some things that have happened to me and ways that I would think about approaching it. Now, if I was going to summarize all that, I'd say it's about communication. I prefer to go direct to the person and see if I can just resolve it. And in my opinion, the best way to do that, at least for me, is to make it not about the egos involved. It's about the project and the success of the project. So hopefully that helps. Anyway, I'm Jonathan Stark. If you have any questions for me, you can hashtag AskJonathan on YouTube, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and we'll add it to the queue and I'll answer it as soon as I can. See ya. Would you like to learn how to get paid what you're worth? How about selling your expertise and not your labor? We work through all of this together in the Pricing Seminar. Pre-registration starts soon, and you can sign up to be the first to know when early bird pricing is announced at thepricingseminar.com. That URL again is thepricingseminar.com. Hope to see you there. Hey, Jonathan again. Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time, or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space, or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal. Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to jonathanstark.com slash call, C-A-L-L. That URL again is jonathanstark.com slash call. Hope to see you there.