Five Ways to Leave Clients Dancing in the Streets

All of us serve clients. They may be an external business group or a consulting client that our firm depends upon to keep the lights on. Either way, satisfying clients is a major part of our job.

 Research by a leading training organization showed that clients would not necessarily give their repeat business to firms they are satisfied with. They will only automatically contract with organizations that leave them “dancing in the streets.”

Let that phrase sink in. If you expect to be able to show your face in your clients’ offices again, that is how you have to leave them feeling.

1. Never Forget that you are Working With People.
You may think you are working with the FCA Company, but not really. You are working with Tina, Jim, and Joan. People who have hopes, wishes, and dreams. People who have families, and good days and bad days. Sure, they expect to get what they contracted for out of this project, but they also expect to get something else. Maybe it is a promotion, recognition, or a new set of skills.

No matter who you are working with on a project—it may even be the janitor—there is one thing you need to remember: They are employees of your client’s organization and you are not. You can never afford to forget that. I don’t care how important you think you are. I don’t care if you have a doctorate, 20 years of experience, and can weave a magic carpet with your toes. Clients are much closer to their own staff than they are to you. It is also far easier to eliminate you than to fire them. Unless you never intend to work in this town again, you need to treat every client employee like gold. And of course, no griping, complaining, gossiping, or speaking ill of people you are working with. It is unprofessional and will always come back to bite you.

2. Set Reasonable Expectations.

Peter Block in his book FlawlessConsulting,(1981), talks about the importance of being up front with your clients about what they can expect of you and what you can expect from them. He also discusses a consultant’s natural inclination to avoid talking about his or her expectations and needs for fear that it may blow the project.

Yes, there are clients who would like consultants to be able to complete projects without any involvement on their part. There may be some clients who expect consultants to know nothing, and rely on them to direct even the smallest of activities. However, the truth lies in the middle. Completing a successful project typically involves a collaborative effort. Good clients already know this. It is no secret. Getting this out up front is a good way of planning for success instead of avoiding failure.

3. Be Flexible. 

Stuff happens! Stuff that you and the client could not have foreseen. The consultants of those clients who are “dancing in the streets” know that a good relationship requires flexibility. 

4. Give Just a Little Bit More. 

Getting the job done is no longer enough. For clients to be “dancing in the streets delighted,” you have to give them a little bit more—and I cannot tell you what that is. It could be being flexible about their need to slip the schedule for a couple of weeks or it could be revising that module after it was set in concrete. Folks these days expect a little bit more, and they will get it from you or someone else.

5. Do a Darn Good Job. 

I don’t care how smooth you are. I don’t care if butter melts when you walk in the room. To retain clients and be invited to do other projects with them, you have to do a good job. Whenever you can, quantify the success of your project by its return on investment. The bottom line is that cream rises, garbage does not.

Block, Peter. Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used. San Diego; Pfeiffer & Company, 1981.


This is an except from “Consulting Basics”, published by ASTD Press, and available from ASTD, Amazon.com, and other fine booksellers.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Guest Editorial

Published October 2008

Chief Learning Officer

[Go to page 18 to read this article]

Reprinted here with permission from the publisher.

by Joel Gendelman

Let’s say you’ve finally arrived in the C-suite as a chief learning officer or vice president. Now you are sitting at the big table, and your fellow organizational leaders will take you seriously. You are officially a part of the heart and soul of your corporation.

Not so fast. To be viewed as an effective business partner, here are a few things that you may wish to avoid:

1. Relying on the fear factor: “If you think training is expensive, try not training.”
2. Justifying projects with possibly irrelevant data: “Our competition provides 40 hours of training for all new hires.”
3. Counting on management’s benevolence: “Employees rate professional development as a key indicator of job satisfaction.”
4. Employing tired phrases to provide you with the allure of being a critical business function: These include “stakeholders,” “organizational alignment,” “process development” and “dialoguing.” You also should limit use of HR terms such as “human capital” and “talent management” unless you plan to explain them thoroughly.
5. Taking the technical route and reciting the specifics of LMS data-warehousing capabilities, learning portals, knowledge-sharing systems, podcasts, wikis, blended learning and Web 2. 0.
6. Peppering your conversation with overly “impactful” terms, such as “in a big way,” “skyrocket” and “amazing.”

You did not spend all this time climbing the ladder of success just to stand naked in the town square. Now that you have arrived, you should start asking hard questions about the learning function and the business it resides in. Here are a few:

1. What does the corporation value? How is that measured?
2. How will you know that you have been successful? What yardstick will executives employ to measure your success?
3. What are your corporate goals and the roadblocks to achieving those goals?
4. What strategies will the corporation use to cope in difficult economic times? Do they expect to get along with less, or are they looking to do something different (e.g., expand higher-margin products and services)?
5. In 30 words or less, what is the corporate strategy or “big idea?” What can learning do specifically to move it forward?
6. Where does the company’s leadership expect learning to be in six months, one year and three years? What will you need to get there?

Also, to win friends and influence people, you’ll need to develop and refine a new set of skills. Below is a partial list:

• Don’t oversell or overpromote yourself or the learning function: People in the C-suite know the difference between sizzle and steak, and they have little time to waste listening to you blow your own horn.
• Continually practice and refine clear communication: Speak their language — that is, the language of business and finance. Senior executives typically are not interested in the technologies you use to do what you do. They simply want to make sure it gets done.
• Know their world: Learning is what you do best, so immerse yourself in your fellow executives’ thoughts, ideas, values and approaches. Morph yourself into one of them.

To operate as an effective CLO, you’ll also need to shift your attitude in several areas, including the following:

• Adjust your focus: Now that you are in the C-suite, your focus should be squarely on the business, not learning.
• Know your boss better than your resources: Since you have risen to the rank of CLO, you must have done a great job being intimately aware of the courses your department offers, as well as the tasks, resources and tools necessary to create and deliver those courses. Now is the time to leave that to someone else and spend more time and energy understanding and interacting with the other members of the C-suite than with your own people.
• Never confuse selling with installing: This is a tough one. It means you need to pledge to do what needs to be done without knowing the details of how you are going to do it. You will need to commit in order to maintain your seat at the big table. It is a leap of faith you simply must take. Don’t worry, they invited you to the table because they knew you could do the job — and you can. One way or another.

Aligning Business Needs and Instructional Assets (Recycling Instructional Assets)

Performance Improvement, vol. 48, no. 1, pages 25-36, January 2009

©2009 International Society for Performance Improvement

by Joel Gendelman

High-performing organizations and performance improvement professionals frequently speak about the alignment of their instructional curricula with the needs of the business. However, they often lack a systematic methodology for performing that alignment. This article presents such a method. The process provides the ability to better support current business initiatives, increase organizational responsiveness, and reduce curriculum acquisition and development costs.

Click here to download full article PDF.