Mining the Drama of an "Ideal Client":

Learning Nuggets to Take to the Next Project

In this January '09 issue of Playing in the Gap!, you've read that we ended the 2008 year with a disappointing client relationship.  We needed to understand more about what had happened with a seemingly "ideal" relationship and "dream" project.  We mined the Drama of what happened and found a startlingly discovery - the client really was an ideal client and primarily because of the growth opportunities that resulted from the experience.

And know we know that there are some things we’ll do different with our next clients:

  • We’ll focus more on ensuring throughout the project that our client understands, agrees with, and is aligned with our strategy.
  • We’ll clarify expectations to make sure our client is expecting more than a product that will simply make people happy.
  • We’ll create a collaboration agreement including the IAM Touchstones that establishes 100% mutual responsibility for the success of the project.
  • We’ll insist on meetings with business stakeholders up front, to ensure the business impetus for IAM learning is motivation enough to stay the course through natural resistance to new ways of learning and working.
  • We’ll insist on being more involved in internal communications to make sure our suggestions for participant criteria are successfully conveyed and expectations for the program are reasonably established.
  • We’ll insist on coaching being an integral part of the process – coaching of the internal leaders of the program and coaching of people we train in coaching skills.
  • We’ll convey to clients that honing and customizing our product is expected as we cannot know their organization as well as they do.
  • When clients bring up issues and we offer to make changes, we will continually reiterate our willingness to make changes so the client gets what they want.
  • We’ll work with clients to assess their organizational readiness for change.

We thought the client relationship would evolve into more work for us and a great product for them. What actually happened was that we got paid for developing a product we will enhance and market, our relationship with each other flourished (Karen & Diane), and now we’re clearer than ever in describing and attracting our ideal client. Perfect!