Clients: A Taxonomy

Consulting is a peripatetic profession. You’re always moving about, part of one team today, and tomorrow another. It’s a cross-continental life - different companies and organisations in different countries and each with their own strategic challenges.

It's not for everyone – many colleagues have left consulting behind them in search of new directions and a more stable lifestyle – but it suits me. It may well be that I have the soul of a dilettante, but if so, I’ll just have to embrace it. I like the diversity of experience, coming up against new and interesting problems to solve. I like finding myself in airports and hotels in odd places, and I like meeting new people - the sheer human variety of the job is what gives consulting its bite, its zest and its entertainment value.

Over the years, I have learned that there are many types of client, and here I’m not talking about the client team (which is a topic for another blog), but the primary client. This is the person who holds the keys - to whom one is ultimately answerable. The primary client makes the hiring decision, writes the (these days metaphorical) cheque, and has the power to accept or reject findings, take action, or remain inert.

Many clients – most - are solid and secure, in themselves and their jobs. They’re on top of things without micro-managing. They know which fires they have to fight and which can be left to other firefighters. They’re happy to delegate and are stress scrubbers rather than stress generators. They focus on results rather than rules and process. They have the confidence and common sense to be decisive without making stupid, wasteful or absurdly whimsical decisions.

Then there are the others:

• The People Pleaser – This is the client who wants everyone to like hm, believes the organisation should be a family and hates conflict. His discourse always seems to revert to the different personalities on his team, making it difficult to separate substance from gossip. The People Pleaser comes across as friendly but his obsessive need to please can feel ingratiating or patronising, and in his anxiety to avoid disappointing anyone, he shies away from making tough decisions. ??
• The Bully – She is the opposite of the People Pleaser, trading in intimidation and the kind of old-school game playing that should have disappeared with Mad Men. Her body language is hostile, and she uses her terrain as a theatre of war, with the desk as a key frontier. She believes her time is more important than anybody else’s and she parcels it out in niggardly portions. She sees herself as a strong leader while, in fact, she is anything but.
• The Dictator – Similar in some respects to the Bully, this client does not believe in democracy in the workplace, but prefers to manage by fiat. He is willing to confer with colleagues, but strictly those who agree with him. The Dictator makes decisions, but they may well be the wrong ones. He makes enemies in the organisation, and when their discontent reaches a tipping point, chances are he’ll soon be gone.
• The New Broom – She’s just joined the organisation and is keen to make her mark. She can be a breath of fresh air, lifting the lid on stale processes and structures, but in her eagerness, she may throw out the good with the bad. She believes in rapid change and sees a more analytic approach as a drag at best or else a form of hidden resistance. She has no sense of institutional history, so is liable to repeat the mistakes of her predecessors. For old lags her radical new solutions may seem like just another cycle of same old, same old.
• The Shape Shifter – This client comes across as open, inclusive and democratic because he constantly asks for everyone’s opinion, but this is often just an excuse for deferring making a decision. Too much of this sort of behaviour, and he starts to lose goodwill as colleagues come to see him as hesitant, vacillating and indecisive. Consultants must beware, because he is easily influenced. Something agreed today may be revoked tomorrow depending on who may have spoken to him in the interim, and what they said.
• The Delusional – The Delusional client needs careful watching. Someone, somewhere, sometime, told her that she has an instinct for the business, or maybe that she’s a genius, so that’s how she wants to work. Everything needs to be bold, extraordinary, disruptive, visionary, game-changing. She believes she has feel - a sixth sense for where the market is moving. It’s worse if she got it right once upon a time – now she’s convinced she always knows better than anyone else, and she’ll hold fast to this delusion till the moment when the wheels come off spectacularly.
• The Fourth Decimal Place – This client has no room for instinct or gut feel. He wants everything analysed and then analysed again, and you can be sure he’ll find the mistake in the formula somewhere in the spreadsheet. Invariably, these are errors that make no difference to the key message and insight, but he’ll take them as evidence of lack of rigour, and want even more analysis before he’s prepared to make a decision. Analysis paralysis? Of course not! (or, at least, not without far more evidence).
• The Time Server – Always good value over a beer, this client is less helpful in the office. She’s running down the clock and she doesn’t mind who knows it. She might be off to a new job, or else retirement is waiting round the corner. Maybe she’s going sailing round the world, or if there’s nothing planned, she may ask you if you know of opportunities in your own firm, or elsewhere[1]. Her professional guard is down and she’ll tell you things about her colleagues you don’t need or want to know. She’ll tell you how hard she’s worked in the job, the huge improvements on her watch, and her bad feelings about the future, because the incoming New Broom doesn’t know which way is up. She has a lot to say, but it must all be treated with caution as the Time Server carries so much baggage it’s hard to tell what is real, and what is simply the story she tells herself. ?
• The Humble Bragger – everyone knows this client. He works harder than anyone, he’s given the organisation his all, often at great personal sacrifice, though he doesn’t talk about it, except when he’s telling you that he doesn’t talk about it. He tells you all the wonderful things people say about him, the awards he’s won – but in a way which deprecates it all. He’s noble and long-suffering, and when colleagues cluck about how tired and over-worked he is, he’ll wave it away with his thousand-mile gaze.

This is my taxonomy. It’s partly caricature – most people are more nuanced - but I have worked with all of these characters in my time, and I imagine I’m not alone. Recognising the range of behaviours and beliefs and adjusting accordingly is a necessary part of the consultant toolkit. However, it’s one thing to be adaptable, to understand the game the client wants to play, but it’s quite another to play by their rules. You can’t be one person with one client, and someone else entirely with another.

Someone who colludes with the Delusional is worse than useless – actually destructive. The same applies to consultants who conspire with the Dictator, abase themselves before the Bully, stroke the ego of the Humble Bragger, are bamboozled by the Time Server, lose sleep over the Fourth Decimal Place, gossip with the People Pleaser or suck up to the Shape Shifter.

You need to be your own authentic self, no matter who, or what, you are dealing with.

That’s how you earn the respect of the client, establish your credibility, build followership and, most importantly, look yourself in the eye. ?

[1] All clients, and I mean all of them, not just the Time Server, think they could be consultants. They all believe that, if they wanted to, they could walk in tomorrow and simply do your job.?