Who are you really doing business with?

When you walk into a business do you ever stop to think who really owns it? I ask this as I was reminded this week of a business buy-out story that came about when I was coaching a senior manager.

The senior manager had built a new factory in Wales, had solved a myriad of technical and logistical problems and was slowly knitting together her operators and charge-hands into a respectable crew. Naturally, she was very pleased at her success and consequently delighted when the owner approached her and said he was thinking of retiring and…

I’ll pause here, because whenever a client tells me one of these stories, and I’ve heard a few over the years, I inwardly shudder, because I know what’s going to happen next and it’s never what the client expects…

…and would she like to buy him out and own the business?

Wow, what an offer! The dream of many senior managers come true. The opportunity to short cut the difficult and risky business of actually building a business from scratch and just parachute in to one already steaming along. The chance to avoid doing grubby things like learning how to sell, how to network, how to manage cashflow (do you have a cashflow forecast to hand?…I bet not) …and just waltz in to the big swivel chair and upgrade your business card from manager to managing director.

You might just catch a whiff of cynicism in that last paragraph because there are few short cuts in business worth taking and this is one of them. Taking short cuts reduces learning and increases the chances of later failure.

In the example above, the senior manager had already started to invest time and money in financial advice, legal advice and business planning advice and had overlooked one crucial factor in any contracting process, for that is what this is all about, once you strip away the businessy veneer.

And that factor was that the owner was married. He owned all the shares, but Mrs Owner owned all the lifestyle options. The ritzy BMW, the cafe and fluffy-shopping weekly rota and most importantly the ‘wife of successful businessman social status’. She was in effect a sleeping shareholder, in that she slept with the owner and had a say in the decision making process.

I suggested to my client that Mrs Owner would soon calculate that the large sum of money gained from selling the business would only last for five years and then it would be gone. What would she do then? And if the owner had made the business his life, would she want him under her feet all day? I think not.

In the end, of course, you know how the story ended…the senior manager spent several thousand pounds researching a sale that was never going to happen, because the owner’s wife vetoed the idea.

When you’re contracting you need to make a map (or a family tree) of all interested parties and how they connect to each other AND you need to make sure each pair of connections has a robust and mutually agreed contract in place (see previous posts).

If the senior manager had done this, she would have immediately realised that Mrs Owner needed to be part of the discussions. A five minute telephone call would have told her all she needed to know and she could have then saved herself time and money.

So, the message for the week ahead is - be careful: businesses are run by owners and their unseen wives, partners, relatives, children and other stakeholders. When you’re contracting it pays to find out who these people are and to make sure you know if they need to be included in the contracting process. If you leave them out, you could easily be heading for the edge of a cliff….

If you want to see this in action, just think about how you organise a family get-together over Christmas time. Who do you need to call to make sure everyone knows who is stuffing the turkey, who is bringing the sherry, and who is running Aged Aunt Agatha home afterwards…???

Have fun!

Have you seen Brian yet?

Los Penguin Productions have posted the  Job Hunting Blues video on YouTube so please click through and enjoy it. It features Brian, our resident stunt man and he was great to work with, a real pro. Do you like his boots? And he was very happy to be able to read his own special, little copy of the book Job Hunting 3.0. If you know someone who is looking for work then please point them at Amazon where they can read reviews and order a copy of the big book.

Also, if you know someone who would be interested in this blog post please forward it to them, or ReTweet it, or let them know they can subscribe to regular emails via the box on the homepage. Many thanks.

Next Week

We will take a look at modern selling skills, which if you’re an owner-manager, or someone looking for a job, could give you an edge over your competition!

Tags: contracting

Make contact with your partner and you too could contract to go down the pub tonight!

A phrase which isn’t mine, but which I wish was is ‘Contact Before Contract’. My TA chum Trudi says this to remind us that we’re dealing with people and that they need to ‘enter the room’ before we hit them with the task of agreeing contractual terms. (This applies to all agreements, even if it’s just to agree what time to be back from the pub).

Now, what I mean here is that although we may be physically present, our minds may be elsewhere. We come bowling in to a meeting with our heads full of diary dates and priorities, kids’ homework requirements, a lengthy to do list and the nagging feeling that we’ve forgotten something important. Like taking the chicken out of the freezer to defrost for dinner.

Because our heads are buzzing we need to be allowed to settle into our current environment and focus on the person whom we’re meeting with. This is why it’s really important to give people contact-making time. Meetings that start NOW just jar. People can feel flustered as their mind is still processing their previous conversation and as a result they won’t be thinking clearly about the task in hand.

You only have to watch The Apprentice, on BBC1, to see this in action. Normally bright and thoughtful people get pounced on and make terrible snap decisions because they’re given no time to settle into the space and warm up their thinking.

When we make contact with people we also warm to them and that helps to build connections at a deeper layer. This is a cornerstone of trust, which has to be present for any contracting work to be successful. If we chat, we relax and we forge little bonds that mean we want to stay put and complete the discussion.

It’s like when we walk into a swimming pool. We test the water a bit with our toes whilst we are chatting to our partner. At one level we are talking, but at another we are noticing if the water is hot or cold. If it’s cold we will tend to break off the conversation and exit for a warm shower! We tend to trust our toes!!

Making contact is easy and the trick is to think of it as productive work, and not just idle chit-chat. Three ways to allow people to settle in are:

1) Find out about them. Asking questions to find out about how they are, what they’ve been up to, what they did at the weekend are all known as ‘unconditional strokes’. (See my previous strokes blog). These little units of recognition are about us and not directly about our work, so make us feel warm because the other person is interested in us.

2) Allow enough time. How much is enough? I’ve found that 5-10 mins for every hour of planned meeting works well. Machine-gun style management is pointless and might look efficient, but just gets people riled. Build in some chat time in your meetings and you will tend to get better thinking outcomes from your teams.

3) Notice commonality. When the other party says something about a subject you are interested in then comment on it and let them know you like it too. This ‘noticing’ forges little bonds between people and helps to make strangers feel more like friends.

The message for the week ahead is to allow yourself time to be interested in the other person. A few minutes of making contact at the head of a conversation can be the biggest deciding factor as to the outcome…it could decide whether you get to go down the pub, or not!

The Promo Video…have you seen Brian yet?

Los Penguin Productions have posted the  Job Hunting Blues video on YouTube so please click through and enjoy it. It features Brian, our resident stunt man and he was great to work with, a real pro. Do you like his boots? And he was very happy to be able to read his own special, little copy of the book Job Hunting 3.0. If you know someone who is looking for work then please point them at Amazon where they can read reviews and order a copy of the big book.

This week: Would you find a friend for me please?

If you know someone who would be interested in this blog post please forward it to them, or ReTweet it, or let them know they can subscribe to regular emails via the box on the homepage. Many thanks.

Next Week

Is the third part of our trilogy on Contracting. Tune in next Monday, to complete the set!

Tags: contact, contracting, The Apprentice, Transactional Analysis

Ignore what's on the sofa... It's what's down the back that really matters.

Are you looking for a job? Or working as a coach? Or about to agree with your partner what you will be doing over Christmas? (Too in-law, or not to in-law, as Hamlet famously said)…

Clear contracting can help us in all of these diverse situations and by a ‘contract’ I’m referring to a mutual agreement. Transactional Analysis, a subject close to my heart, is often described as a ‘contracted psychotherapy’ and puts clear contracting the heart of the client-consultant relationship. It has much to say on the subject and what follows is based on the work of Berne, Hay and English.

When we’re offered a job we need to agree expectations and terms, if we’re coaching someone we shouldn’t be working if there’s no contract and if we don’t sit down and talk things through with our partner then Christmas can be a disaster.

So, I have 5 Top Tips to offer this week, which we can all use to make sure we have really robust contracts with people. Here they are:

1) Name your frustrations, concerns, likes, or dislikes. Doing this gives people permission to name theirs. We all have them, so we may as well get them on the table, where we can see them, poke them and include them in our thinking. These are the ‘fish’ in the title and we will come back to them later on.

2) Think about the issue of competency. Are you competent do the work? Is the other person competent to take part? I recently had pass an opportunity on to a colleague because a client wanted me to run a workshop that I wasn’t fully competent to do. What was the point in doing 60% of a job, when my colleague could work to 100% of the client’s needs?

3) Talk about contracting. It’s a word that needs to be in our everyday language. We use the word a good deal at home; not to be smug, but because we lead busy lives and need to agree diaries, kids pick-up times, food requirements and so on. It saves a lot of heartache and grumpiness later, so why not make it part of your lexicon?

4) The success of the contract is determined at the psychological level. This is a posh way of saying that if you agree to something that you really don’t want to do then you’ll probably either not do it, or will make such a fuss that a row breaks out and the work fails. The first top tip says ‘name your frustrations’ because of this. If you talk about what’s inside you can deal with it and I’d rather have a harder talk now and a better Christmas, than the other way round…

5) Check understanding. I think a lack of clear understanding causes more rows than anything else. For example, a chum told me that last Christmas she invited her sister over for lunch, to arrive ‘around 2 o’clock’. The sister rolled up at a whisker before 3, without bothering to telephone ahead to let them know where she was. Was she late? Should she have called? Well, all roads lead back to the contract and the need to make sure people are clear. Who do you need to check things with to make sure you’re both clear for your Christmas dinner?

Lots of people think that ‘contracting’ is all about discussing and agreeing the obvious things, such as time/date/place, but the really smart people do this and go the extra distance to talk about their fears, or worries, or limitations in order to add them into the mix.

I call these things ‘stinking fish’ because they’re like having a kipper down the back of the sofa. You know it’s there. You can smell it. You might ignore it, but the smell persists…The only thing you can do is to reach for it, pull it out and deal with it.

So, what do you have to deal with this week, in order to achieve a really good contract with someone? Who do you need to sit down with to re-visit an existing agreement? What fish lurk down the back of your psychic-sofa?

We all have fish, so smile, pluck them out and talk about them. That’s the real secret of successful contracting.

Oh Yes, That Promo Video…have you seen it yet?

Los Penguin Productions have posted the  Job Hunting Blues video on YouTube so please click through and enjoy it. It features Brian, our resident stunt man and he was great to work with, a real pro. Do you like his boots? And he was very happy to be able to read his own special, little copy of the book Job Hunting 3.0. If you know someone who is looking for work then please point them at Amazon where they can read reviews and order a copy of the big book.

This week: Would you find a friend for me please?

If you know someone who would be interested in this blog post please forward it to them, or ReTweet it, or let them know they can subscribe to regular emails via the box on the homepage. Many thanks.

Next Week

…we will consider one thing that can really smooth the process of contracting. I like doing it…

Tags: Christmas, contracting, fish, Job Hunting

Paddington Station: Watch out for fairies. And bears.

I was told this story the other day by a colleague and just had to treat you to it, if only because it is true and, from my perspective as a coach who likes to build a safe environment; appalling. My colleague dubs this work ‘fairy coaching’ and I tend to agree with him, on the basis that it falls into the happy-clappy-hessian-knitted-teepee brand of coaching which can give life/business coaching a bad name. See what you think, here’s the story:

At his place of work my colleague has an MD who likes to hire the services of a particular ‘coach’ to help team development and promote harmony. The ‘coach’ likes to get people down and dirty on bean bags, which is not always the best way to make people feel comfortable (the client should choose, not the coach). Last month the team were treated to a new way to confront their fears. They all caught the train into London and when they disembarked at Paddington a soap-box was produced and one by one the team had to stand on it and shout out their fears to bemused commuters.

Yes really!

I had thought this kind of misguided exercise had been binned at the end of the 90′s, along with suspect outward-bound style management ‘bonding’ weekends, which only served to create ill-feeling amongst staff and in no way replicated the working life of the business. (I’ve been on three of these and having learned to abseil, found that this wasn’t a great deal of help when trying to plan a complex factory).

No New Learning

Having finished on the soap-box what did my colleague learn? Only to avoid the police, who asked the group to “Move along please” as a shop owner complained they were blocking her flower stall. The experience also confirmed my colleague’s suspicions about ’fairy coaching’ and as for team harmony, well you can guess the general reaction to the stunt.

Safety Counts

Coaching starts with clear contracting to build a safe environment. If there isn’t a contract then in the words of an experienced Supervisor: “You don’t do no coaching.” If only more people understood this and realised that coaching is client-centred, not ego-centred, then the world and my colleague would both be a bit happier.

Tags: coaching, contracting, How To

A 'boiler plate' contract is solid and reliable

Hooray! I’ve just signed the contract with my publisher for a new book called Job Hunting 3.0 and now all I have to do is find the time and space to write 50,000 words to be delivered on 1st Feb 2010.

Although that may sound like a tough target, the publisher originally wanted 60,000 words by 1st Jan..! Given that November is racing by I must admit that my heart skipped a beat when I thought about that particular challenge, so I decided to go into what I like to think of as ‘contracting mode’. Transactional Analysis (TA) is often described as a ‘contracted psychotherapy’ and one thing that has been politely drummed in to me over the years is that contracting is key.

Without having a clear contract you run the risk of professional (and personal) disaster so it’s important to take time to do the contracting bit well. By contracting, I mean working through the goals, the ‘hows’, the admin points, the fears and the worries that need to be shared, discussed and sorted to make for successful agreements, whether written or verbal.

Mindful of this I rang the publisher and instead of simply trying to negotiate to a middle ground I asked him what his needs were, in order to find out his thinking. He wanted a book of 192 pages to hit the shops in May, or June, next year. Realising that 60k was a notional number of words and that in reailty the number of pages was more important we talked about what was realistic for 1st Feb, which is the deadline for a June publication date, and agreed upon 50k words as being a reasonable minimum.

He sent me a copy of their standard 14 page contract, I compared it to the one I had signed for my other books and inserted all the bits missing from his ‘boiler plate’ version and then we fine tuned the revisions. It’s worth noting that previously I had taken advice from the Society of Authors, who provide an excellent and free service to people like me trying to work out the details of a book contract, that is global in scope and lasts beyond my death in timescale.

My revised contract now gives me more free author copies, the right to audit the publisher’s accounts, a better split of royalties for translation rights, the right to be consulted over future editions and it acknowledges that the book is printed and sold at the publisher’s expense and risk (not mine). Added together, all these little changes mean that we both have a fair and mutually agreed contract. I feel much better that both of us shared our concerns and worked out a solution. A solution based on facts and not just a standard ‘go for the midde ground’ option.

The publisher is happy with the outcome, as he has secured a new title for next year, and I’m happy that I can deliver the manuscript on time.

Transactional Analysis (TA) has a great deal to say about contracting, notably the 3-Level Contract and 3-Cornered Contract models and we will come back to these in the future. For now though, the key things I’ve been reminded of by this story are:

• It does pay to take time and read documents.
• If I’m worried about part of the contract the time to mention it is before signing, when the parties can do something about it.
• Being worred is Ok. Staying silent isn’t. 

How well do I contract? Most of the time; much better than I used to. This is because I have given myself permission to raise concerns, find out the facts and take the time to work through the details. This is a better way to solve contracting problems without always jumping to a default middle ground ‘compromise position’. 

That’s me and I’m curious; how well do you contract? What could you do differently?

Tags: contracting, Society of Authors, tip, Transactional Analysis