Radha Mukkai's Blog

1. Use plain english
2. Use the Client’s language (reduces cognitive load for them)
3. Respect their communication preferences
   • If they prefer formal reports, provide it. If they like informal updates, do that instead
   • Schedule meetings at times they like.
4. Understand what they value (they may not say this up-front)
5. Anticipate what they may need and provide it
6. Well dressed and groomed
7. Send emails with proper grammar and no typos
8. Never criticize, condemn, or complain in front of the Client
   • Take setbacks in stride
   • Have a positive energy about yourself
9. Value Client’s feedback and make a quick change if possible
   • There is nothing better than gaining a feedback from the Client and making behavioral or changes to your action. This tells them that we listen.
   • Ask if there is one thing you would change, what would that be?
10. Lead effective meetings
    • Be on time
    • Send out a meeting agenda
    • Send a follow-up afterwards
11. Let the Client be in control
    • Provide options and your recommendation. Let the Client make the final decision.
    • Do not present options that you are not willing to implement. Say so.
    • If there is an option that you would like the Client to pick, mention that up-front and ask for permission.
12. Use appropriate language in the Ritz-Carlton side
    • Ex: My pleasure instead of No worries
13. Send them books and articles that aligns with their interests
14. Share a laugh with them. Don’t be too serious.

Selling professional services boils down to one word: Trust (according to Seth Godin). Given my experience in IT professional services, I decided to explore what Trust truly means.

Per Stephen Covey, Trust is a combination of Character (Who are you as a person?) and Capabilities (What results you can deliver?). Trust has to be earned and is easy to lose. I cannot ask a Client to trust me (I can but it never works). I have to exhibit trustworthy behaviors over the long-term. When I dived deeper into what constitutes trustworthy behavior, I realized I was diving into the human psyche as it involved dealing with ego, fear, and insecurities.

Putting Trust in another person is an act of faith and of vulnerability. It is tough to get here. It requires patience and a focus on the long-term.

Trust to me is about saying the Truth and acting in Integrity. This means:

1. Acting in the best interests of the Clients (even when it is against your interests)
2. Courage to say no (even if you have to lose a deal), and
3. Willingness to express your values (even if it means saying something the Client may not want to hear)

The following two questions help me get to the crux of what Trust means:

1. Do you have the courage to say No to a Client project when you believe you are not the right fit?
2. How would the Client react if they were a fly in the wall and listen to your team’s conversation about a project or proposal (would they be pleasantly surprised or stunned)?

 I outlined ten ideas to build trust.

1.Act in the Client’s interest

This could be anti-evolution! 😊 We are always focused on our needs and interests. It is hard to focus on others’ interests (even true in a marriage and not just a consulting relationship).

This requires taking a step back and seeing if all our behaviors, actions, and advice are truly aligned to a Client interest. A good question to ask yourself would be – Is this the same advice I would give myself if I were in the Client’s position? What recommendation would I take if I were in the Client’s shoes?

2. Listen

Listening means both listening to what the Client is saying and reading between the lines of what they are not saying. This requires focus and patience (and slowly interrupting the mental chatter that happens in your head when the Client is talking! 😊).

3. Set the right expectations from the beginning (even if you are concerned that you could lose the deal)

Winning a deal can consume a Consultant. It is important to set right expectations from the beginning regardless of how it impacts the deal (easy to say and really tough in the moment to have the courage to speak up).

4. Do what you say. Say what you do.

Cliched advice. This approach carries a ton of power.

5. Clearly communicate risks.

It looks easy to tell the Client what they are willing to hear. It pays dividends if you can tell them the potential risks with the project you are undertaking.

6. Be up-front about your capabilities and strengths.

If you believe partnering is not the right route to take, say it.

7. Don’t be afraid to push back on the Client (especially if they want something that you are not willing to offer)

Clients tend to be skeptical about services firms and for good reason. Most Clients have some horror stories about the work with a service firm that has gone bad. Outline your approach clearly and transparently. If your Client does not like your approach, be willing to explain the rationale behind your choices. If the Client is still not satisfied, have the courage to determine if alternative paths should be explored.

8. Deliver Results

The simplest way to earn trust is to deliver results that exceed Client expectations. It doesn’t get simpler than this. Your reputation to make things happen goes a long way.

9. Don’t provide free work

Clients do not value free work. They are willing to listen when they pay for your service.

10. Smile

Hat tip to Dale Carnegie. Always smile and exhibit a positive attitude.

Do you want to have better health for the long-term? Here is a short list of things I have found that can help

1. Consistent exercise is important and crucial for your long-term health
2. Sleep is the best supplement available
3. Fasting can be good for you
4. Eliminate (or minimize) sugar
5. Avoid vegetable oils (or modern industrial seed oils). They seem to be very bad for you.
6. Minimize processed foods

Sources

I do not claim to have discovered these insights. All insights have come from the following sources.

• Dr. Rhonda Patrick – Found My Fitness – Twitter
• Jason Helmes – Anyman Fitness – Twitter
• PD Mangan – Rouge Health and Fitness – Twitter
• Dr. Peter Attia – Applied Science of Longevity – Twitter
• Tim Ferriss – Tim Ferriss’ Blog – Twitter

What makes a good consultant? I brainstormed a list of behaviors and skills from personal experience. I wanted to keep the list to seven key points. The goal was to use the constraint to sharpen my own thinking on what behaviors and skills are most important.

1. Character and Integrity
2. Expertise in a specific domain or area
3. Effectively manages attention and energy
4. Deliver results (or Make things happen)
5. Ability to influence and persuade others
6. Subordinate ego
7. Face crisis (and negative emotions) with grace and calm

Trust is the bedrock of a strong Client-Consultant relationship. A good consultant demonstrates good character and has high integrity. She or he does what they say and say what they do.

Strong knowledge or expertise with business or technology or a specific skill is a strong plus. Clients typically want specific expertise or knowledge from a Consultant.

A good consultant effectively manages her attention and energy (hat tip to Scott Adams).

The ability to deliver results and make things happen will vault you to the top. Ownership, Resourcefulness, and Adapting to change are the three mindsets I have found are essential to making things happen.

Consulting is a contact sport. You have to work closely with Clients and other stakeholders. The ability to influence and persuade others is a key part of your job. You need to do this well.

Hat tip to Jocko Willink about subordinating your ego. Managing your ego is the name of the game.

I have never seen an smooth project. Things happen, plans change, and you make mistakes (Consultants are human). The ability to handle crisis with calm and grace is a super useful skill and is especially crucial for leaders. The same can be said for handling negative emotions.

Thinking long-term coupled with daily actions can be a strategic advantage and a superpower. Jeff Bezos likes to say that the revenue and profits in this quarter was decided about five years back. In a way, he is saying that he currently works on things that will have an impact five years down the line. Long term thinking like Jeff Bezos is terribly hard because it is hard to see results immediately.

I am in the IT services industry. I do not make decisions that are four to five years ahead. I have noticed that the revenue your firm earns today depends on Client and Prospect meetings you had six to seven months back.

In my world, it is hard to close a sale immediately after the first meeting. You need to have multiple interactions with the Client to qualify and close an opportunity. This requires patience (delaying gratification) and a focus on the Client needs (cannot be selfish).

With the sales cycle being long, I have found that it is natural to lose faith in the long-term approach. To ensure this doesn’t happen, keep detailed notes on the length of time for your successful deals. These success stories help orient your mindset (and your teams mindset) to think long-term when you meet a prospect for the first time. Re-iterating the success stories to yourself and your team can help you do the right things today that will payoff down line.

It is crucial your team (especially your leadership team or the founders) have to keep meeting your Clients and Prospects regularly (even if the opportunities look dim).

To do this consistently, you have to establish a daily habit or practice. One of our leaders, Philip Miles, has a ‘One Good Thing’ philosophy. The One Good philosophy states that you need to have at least one interaction with a Client or Prospect every day (an email does not count). Like Adam Grant likes to say, the value is in the daily grind.

Here are notes from my talk at Spark Conference 2015. Enjoy!

I broke my talk down to the following four areas.

Self-Improvement

• One of the best investments we can make is to understand ourselves. Focus on figuring out your Top 3 Strengths and Top 3 Weakness. This can be a hard question to answer. Ask for feedback from peers or your significant other. Remember that we have the liberty to change our answers as we move along! Understanding oneself is a process, not an event.
• I have found Myers-Briggs personality type assessment to be very useful. I first learned about Myers-Briggs as part of the Problem Solving Leadership course led by Gerald Weinberg, Johanna Rothman, and Esther Derby.
• My favorite blogger, Penelope Trunk, talks about how self knowledge and how this is critical to getting what you want and being fulfilled.
• Take action. It is the best possible way to know yourself and specifically your interests, strengths, or motivations.
• A personal journal can be a great tool to understand yourself. Try to use a personal journal to note down every time you felt like you accomplished something (big or small). Review your accomplishments regularly to determine if you notice any patterns.
• It is tempting to think of ourselves as brilliant. Most often, we are not. It is hard to see ourselves as we truly are. Peer feedback is critical in gaining a better understanding of ourselves.
• Set high standards for yourself. As Tony Robbins says, change your “shoulds” into “musts”.

Leadership Insights

• Max DePree’ quote on leadership has resonated with me a lot – “The first job of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say Thank you”. That is probably the best job description for a project manager.
• Gerald Weinberg has a definition of leadership that I like – “Leadership is the process of creating an environment in which people become empowered”.
• Glen Alleman talks constantly about the five immutable principles of project management. Following the five principles is a no-brainer to me.
• In his book, Software Creativity, Robert Glass mentions how one psychologist analyzed political leaders and came up with a scale that ranked leaders based on their ability to deal with complexity and ambiguity. This is a critical skill-set for project managers.
• Here are some tips around how we can manage complexity
  • Breaking down a problem into smaller chunks (aka Divide and Conquer)
  • Experts can be useful as they can help orient project teams the right way and they provide the ability to look two steps ahead
  • Smaller teams are easier to manage and can be useful in delivering value faster
  • Attacking scope is a good way to restrict complexity and increase success
• Here are some tips around how we can deal with ambiguity
  • It’s hard to weigh both sides of an issue. Our minds seem to deal well with certainty and do poorly with ambiguity. It’s useful to look at an approach, technique, or tip and determine the pros and cons of using it. This can help you balance two opposing views in your mind instead of coming to conclusions.
  • Another key approach is to think in terms of probabilities. Each project tends to face a fair share of challenges and risks that make hitting a specific date difficult. Do not blindly believe dates or a project plan. Understand the assumptions behind a milestone, the risks in the project plan, and have necessary schedule buffers that gives you the flexibility to respond as circumstances change.
  • Project teams can freeze if there are significant ambiguities. Lack of clear requirements, lack of access to critical decision makers can pose significant challenges. Project Managers can make an impact by figuring out baby steps a team can take to move the project forward.
  • There is a need to embrace and tolerate ambiguity. However, there are situations where you do want to tolerate ambiguity. Two situations are around tasks and milestones. Ensure there is good understanding among critical stakeholders on what a task or milestone means. If all stakeholders do not interpret the task or milestone the same way, you will be in a world of pain! :->
• We always, always, always act in ways that are consistent with our beliefs and self-image. This is probably the most important lesson I learned from Tony Robbins and Jerry Weinberg.
• We all have unwritten rules or beliefs that drive our behavior and actions. In some cases, we are not even aware of these rules. Trying to surface these rules and re-framing them are key to success. For example, you may have a unwritten rule that says “I should be nice to everybody”. This can pose challenges when you attempt to provide feedback to a teammate.
• Byron Katie’s The Work is a solid approach that helps you re-frame your thoughts and beliefs.

Software Principles

• “All problems are people problems”. This one piece of advice from Gerald Weinberg from Secrets of Consulting will save you a lot of heart ache and money!
• Consider project pre-mortems. Talk about all the ways in which a project can fail when you initiate a project. This is the one piece of advice that Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein agree on!
• The Mountain Goat Principle
  • “Take one step at a time up the slippery mountainside, and make absolutely sure that each hoof is on solid ground before you take the next step.”
  • Simple, powerful, and effective!
  • While you are at it, buy Tom Gilb’s Principles of Software Engineering Management. It has tons of great advice like the Mountain Goat Principle.
• Conquer Accidental Complexity
  • There are two types of complexity in software, per Frederick Brooks: Essential and Accidental complexity.
  • Fight accidental complexity as much as you can. Accidental complexity, such as lack of right tools, organization can cause significant in-inefficiencies. They can also lead to decision fatigue.
  • Get personally organized first. Ensure you can easily track action items, tasks, milestones, open questions on a project.
  • Use ONE tool consistently (if you can!).
  • Never, never, never have code outside of source control.

Fear

• If you want to be remarkable, you need to step outside of your comfort zone. That is when growth can happen.
• Stepping outside your comfort zone means facing fears and our unwritten rules or beliefs.
• There can be no rational response to fear given how it works.
• Habits can beat fear.
• Read Penelope Trunk, Seth Godin, James Altucher, Scott Adams, and Ramit Sethi to see what this means.

Useful Links

• Penelope Trunk’s blog – Penelope Trunk is my favorite blogger and she has the best advice on managing your career and becoming better.
• Leap First by Seth Godin – This is a great audio from Seth Godin. Seth talks about creating work that matters and how we can work with our internal resistance and barriers that prevent us from taking the leap.
• The Behaviors that define A-Players (HBR) – Great article from Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman on what separates high performers from the rest.
• Glen Alleman blog – Solid blog on project management. This blog has been influential in how I think about projects in general.
• The Joel Test: 12 steps to a better code – This handy checklist is worth its weight in gold.

Recommended Books

• Becoming a Technical Leader by Gerald Weinberg
• Quality Software Management – Volume 1 (Systems Thinking), Volume 2 (First Order Measurement), Volume 3 (Congruent Action), and Volume 4 (Anticipating Change) by Gerald Weinberg
• Principles of Software Engineering Management by Tom Gilb
• Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert Glass
• Making Things Happen by Scott Berkun
• Good Boss, Bad Boss by Robert Sutton
• Software Creativity by Robert Glass
• Rapid Development by Steve McConnell
• Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management by Johanna Rothman
• Secrets of Consulting by Gerald Weinberg

As I wrote my last post about the psychology of decision making, I started thinking about some tips that I could share about decision making. As I formulated some of the tips, I realized that Scott Berkun’s checklist captures the essentials quite well.

It occurred to me that Penelope Trunk blog posts would be a great resource, too. Penelope has written tons of posts about making good decisions on managing your career and life.  She captures some of the tougher aspects of making choices and how we can better manage our emotions and fears as we arrive at a decision that fits us (important decisions require self-knowledge).

Here are my tips that are focused on software projects:

1. Understand the context
About 3 years ago, I was leading a software project. My Client mentioned a need to import an Excel spreadsheet into a database for a custom web application we were building. My initial reaction was to use SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and import the Excel spreadsheet. I had some experience with SSIS and this was the first solution that popped in my head. I realized that the SSIS option could take additional effort. I worked with the Client to understand the problem and clarify the context. I found that this would be a one-time import of the Excel spreadsheet. The Client did not expect to import Excel spreadsheets with similar data in the future. This led me to write a simple Excel macro to generate the necessary SQL statements and perform the import. The entire solution took about 2-3 hours to develop. I have found that taking the step back to understand the context can lead to better decisions and solutions.

2. Clarify your goals or values
It is much easier to prioritize and make decisions when you have clarity on what you want to achieve. In a data warehousing/business intelligence project I was involved in, the goal was to execute our daily loads for a particular data mart in 2 hours or less. The goal drove the design and development process from designing the individual jobs and the approaches we took to develop the staging tables and the necessary code.

An important aspect about clarifying goals is to draw out “lullaby” language as Jerry Weinberg calls it. In business intelligence projects, data quality can be a critical goal. However, data quality can mean different things to different stakeholders. It helps to clarify what stakeholders truly want and if there are opposing goals that may prevent the implementation of a successful solution.

3. Rule of 3
I learned this valuable rule after attending the Problem Solving Leadership workshop led by Jerry Weinberg, Johanna Rothman, and Esther Derby. The rule calls us to evaluate three options while making a decision. The rule helps improve the quality of decision making as it prevents us from picking the first solution that comes to mind and running with it (which can be really tempting as a software engineer!).

A recent example comes to mind. I was leading an application integration project and we had to process flat files as part of this effort. Some of the processing involved co-relating multiple flat files and applying certain business rules. I came up with two options: writing the logic entirely in C# or creating SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) packages. However, both options, didn’t seem very appealing. The C# option could have resulted in higher development effort. The SSIS option would have introduced another technology in the mix with more maintenance overhead. After talking with other experts at work, we came up with a third option – using SQL Server stored procedures. This was a much better fit for our particular scenario.

I am always amazed at the wide applicability of the Rule of 3. It’s a valuable tool .

4. Write it down
This is probably one of my favorite methods. Writing down what you want to achieve can help clarify the decision for you. If I find that I am unable to write down what needs to be done, that’s a yellow flat that I really don’t know much about the problem. Hence, a decision to choose an option will be tough. It may be better to figure out what needs to be accomplished before spending time and energy on choosing an option.

5. Decision Fatigue
I learned the concept of decision fatigue from Penelope Trunk. There is a huge cognitive load on the brain as you keep making decisions throughout the day. As we near the end of the day, the quality of our decisions suffer as a result. Hence, it is better to devise routines that keep the decision fatigue into account. Critical design meetings at the end of the day are probably a bad idea!

The New York times article has some interesting nuggets around decision fatigue:

The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain.