Composure under pressure is something which many people struggle with. This story from the road brings about with it a very similar tale.
Work has been extremely hectic over the last few weeks, and most of us are working atleast 6 days a week, and probably working more hours a week than we should be. As we approach the holiday season, fatigue and weariness kicks in, and people will perhaps demonstrate behavior which is attributed to the symptoms of tiredness.
I was in Zurich with a colleague of mine, working on a fragile client [let's call them Client A]. When we were not in Client A’s offices, we were stowed away safely in our hotel rooms – my colleague working on Client B and myself working on Client C. Client A work lasted between 9am and 7pm, and Client B and C work took place between 10pm and 1am. I think it is safe to say that we may be overworking ever so slightly!
While in Client A’s office, we were faced with a challenging proposition. The people who were supposed to attend the sessions were the CFA, his assistant, and a graduate student who was learning on the job. Over the course of the two days, the three were never in the room together; infact, the graduate spent more time with us, and with his lack of knowledge of the organisation or software, and high amount of ignorance resulted in the graduate winding up the CFA and the client claimed that the software did not do what they were sold by our sales team.
What followed can only be described as surreal.
Half way through day two, the CFA stormed into the meeting room and had a very heated exchange with my colleague. The end result was that my colleague refused to work under unacceptable pressures and conditions which the client was putting us under, and decided that we could not continue the session. Under her guidance, we packed our bags and left Client A’s office.
Emergency conversations then began between my colleague, the management of Client A and our company management. 30 minutes of talking later, we walked out of the -4C cold into the relative warmth of the meeting room. The CFA and his assistant re-appeared, and we completed the session over the remaining two hours.
I found the entire experience very very funny. The two people involved handbags at ten paces were highly experienced and senior people, but they couldn’t quite operate with any degree of composure when the going got tough. I guess I don’t quite know how it feels to have that sort of pressure applied on me directly, but perhaps it is the approach that both the CFA and my colleague should have reconsidered.
Fire cannot always be fought with fire in a professional environment, and perhaps 2 steps back is sometimes the actual way forward.
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
It is interesting how clients commit to providing the relevant personnel to assist in a project they consider to be vital for them, and then these people can not attend as promised because “they are tied up with other work”. As far as I am concerned the graduate student should not have been anywhere near your team.
Your colleague did the correct thing by walking out, there was no other way, under the circumstances. As a service provider you are at the mercy of your client when you rely on their physical presence to assist in the work, and more preparation should be made to ensure availability of personnel by scheduling people individually and separately.
As for working on Clint B and C at the same time, well it should not have happened, but we all know it does. Welcome to the world of multi tasking on multi projects