Chapter 9

What Goes Around, Comes Around

I’m a true believer in karma. You get what you give, whether it’s bad or good.

—Sandra Bullock¹

Mission Statement

Bridges should be built, not burned!

In my business, I’ve had the good fortune to secure many long-term clients. Throughout the years, with the help of my team, organizations have grown and prospered, and the individuals we’ve coached have been promoted and often gone on to greater glory. Every now and then, however, a “tenured” client will tell us that they want to take a break, for whatever reason. Often they feel that after all this time they’ve got it covered. Frankly, our goal is for our clients to evolve their messaging, branding, presentation, and strategic communication skills to the point at which they can fly on their own; that’s what I call a success.

One of our long-term clients was using us to, among other things, message and coach presenters for their annual national sales meeting. Our original agreement called on us to work with the main tent speakers on their presentation content and flow, and rehearse them on-site at the meeting. As it often happens, our scope of work increased as the project went on; we were asked to work with the brand teams and training department as well as the main tent speakers. In addition, we were asked to conduct a separate workshop for part of the sales team. Once it was clear we were working way beyond our original agreement, I put in a request for additional fees to cover the extra work. This request was slowly moving up the approval chain as we headed toward the meeting site in Orlando.

The executive who hired us had been a client for many years and had worked at this company for most of his adult life, rising from being a sales representative to district manager, to national sales director, to vice president of sales. As others came and went in the organization, Mark (as we’ll call him) stayed and advanced his career. He always told us we made significant contributions to the company and championed our involvement in many areas.

As the big meeting approached, we had been privy to some discreet but consistently negative comments about Mark and how he was handling certain people and business activities. I found this odd, as his dealings with us had always been positive as well as productive. The complaining reached such a point that the training director told us that he could barely stand to look at Mark in recent days.

We were having our own concerns, as a signed copy of the request for additional fees had not been sent to us, even though I had been told that this would not be a problem. The day before the end of the national meeting in Orlando (when we had basically completed our work), I called the client’s home office to inquire about the fee approval. I happened to get Mark’s administrator, who told me that it had been approved, but at the last minute, Mark pulled it. She assumed that he had already spoken to us about it. I thanked her and got off the phone fuming. We had done the work, and now, after the fact, Mark was questioning our fees.

I sent him an urgent voicemail demanding to speak to him. He got back to me that he was in the middle of conducting employee evaluations. “How can you bother me with this now when I’m dealing with people’s careers and livelihood?” I responded, “Because your actions have directly affected my career and livelihood, Mark.” At any rate, we did meet a short time later, and he was as cold as ice. He felt I had no right not only to confront him on his actions, but also to confront him at his meeting, where he had so many more important things to deal with. I wouldn’t let him off the hook. I said that after all the years I had been in business, I had never been treated in this manner, especially given our track record of outstanding collaboration and work. After going back and forth, he realized he was fighting a losing battle (especially because I wasn’t supposed to find out about him pulling our agreement for payment until after I returned home from the meeting), and begrudgingly agreed to pay us the agreed-upon fee.

At the conclusion of the meeting “debrief” back at the home office, we were told that moving forward, they would handle their communication needs internally and wouldn’t require our services. As I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, this happens on occasion. But I knew that their internal capabilities were non-existent and Mark was basically firing us because I stood up to him. Well, my eyes were finally opened regarding Mark and I realized that we would, most likely, never work with that company again.

Fast-forward two years when I ran into Mark unexpectedly at an industry function. He was very cordial and said it had been too long, that their presentations at meetings were awful, that he’d like to talk to us about maybe coming back, and then he began to ask me if I knew about any opportunities outside his company. He was asking me about helping him find a new job! Not much later, I found out he had left the company and, after looking unsuccessfully for a corporate job, was starting his own consulting business that competed directly with mine. And he had the nerve to ask me for an endorsement on LinkedIn. I got a call from his former training director who asked, “Did you see Mark’s listing in LinkedIn? He actually asked me to endorse him as well. I’m not only ‘not endorsing’ him, I’m telling everyone I know to stay away from him!” Between us, we know at least half the people in the industry. Not a smart series of moves, Mark.

If my experience was an example, clearly Mark thought he was secure enough in his position that he could treat anybody as he pleased with no significant consequence. Only when he felt his job was in jeopardy did he reach out and try to make nice before he asked me to help him find a new job. But by then, the bridge had been irreparably burned. I really don’t know how well his consulting business is doing, but I do know that it could be doing a lot better with my active endorsement.

No matter how far you may have progressed in your career, it’s critical to stay on good terms with superiors, subordinates, and peers alike. You never know when you may run into them again and need to be in their good graces.

By building bridges, we basically mean building relationships. In a recent edition of Fast Company, best-selling author and business leadership guru Ken Blanchard reported that “…a major telecommunications company commissioned some research to find out which attributes best predicted long-term leadership success. Why did some leaders succeed while others never really lived up to expectations? After examining a variety of factors—including tenacity, intelligence, work ethic, ingenuity—they discovered that the ability to build and leverage a network of relationships was the best predictor of success.”² Had Mark understood the value of managing his relationships successfully, he probably wouldn’t have gotten such negative pushback when he hung out his shingle.

Mr. Blanchard went on to say that “building collaborative work relationships is a challenge for many people. Relationship building is generally not taught in schools and it’s rarely taught to those who join the managerial ranks.”³ Considering the critical nature of relationships as a driver of success, I would consider that a huge issue.

Regardless of the industry or field you are in, teamwork and commitment toward a desired outcome are essentials for success. Yes, a single individual can make a significant impact, but part of your role, as a leader, is to ensure that together, your team can take on much greater outcomes than you could as individuals.

A critical by-product of building bridges is evolving your career—transitioning from executor/contributor to manager/leader. This requires that you help others reach their goals and objectives in order for you to reach your goals as well. How is this done? Basically, you have to change your thinking from you and what you want to do, to focusing more on the team you wish to lead. What are your team members trying to accomplish? How can you facilitate their needs? Through that lens, you will be helping to ensure that your company’s objectives are being met as well as the team’s.

In Chapter 7, I discussed the hapless Stephanie who was so concerned with her own needs that she forgot she was part of a team. Even after I was brought in as a form of “intervention,” she still shot herself in the foot and burned every bridge in sight, despite her immediate boss’s desire to give her the benefit of the doubt. Her inability to appropriately manage up, down, and around amounted to career suicide (at least at that company).

As a leader, it’s important that you are able to communicate a definitive vision, how your team can help realize the vision, and how the results will benefit everyone as well as the company. Again, you want to be perceived as a unifier (as opposed to a negative force—looking to find fault) as well as a person who can drive action.

Here are some tips that can help you keep your bridges secure:

1. Build psychic equity before debt. Effective relationships with colleagues are driven by mutually beneficial exchanges. In order to make sure these exchanges happen almost automatically, it’s important to create equity in a person’s psychic account that you can draw from when things occasionally hit a rough patch (which happens all the time). Once you have built an emotional reserve, you can withdraw as needed.

2. Be egalitarian as opposed to opportunistic. We see this all the time. Some individuals only go after building relations with people they think are high on the totem pole and can benefit them while, at the same time, ignoring those who are lower on the food chain. What happens is that relations with peers and superiors are fine, but those down the line (that is, subordinates) are unhappy and generally disgruntled. As someone who is supposed to lead, you need to be effective at managing up, horizontally, and down, simultaneously.

3. Building relationships is key in any professional situation. Don’t fall into the trap of feeling that reaching out to colleagues is somehow “selling out”—that you are above that sort of thing, and that all the company needs are your skills and brain power, that somehow your “work speaks for itself” and engenders confidence and respect. This is dead wrong. Success in any endeavor is about building good and appropriate relationships—in one’s personal and professional life. No one operates well in a vacuum, and isolating yourself puts you in one.

A very successful CEO, Lenny, whom I knew earlier in his career when he was a training manager, was very strategic regarding his bridge-building. He worked for a very successful operating company of a large, multinational organization in which access to the executive team was relatively limited. He found out that the senior vice president usually began his day at the company gym, around 6 a.m. Armed with this information, Lenny made it his business to also be in the gym before sunrise in order to engage with the SVP on an informal (but very exclusive) level. As their relationship grew, so did Lenny’s career at the organization.

4. Relationships should extend cross-functionally. A common error people make is to create a circle of relationships that include only individuals who are like them or whom they perceive as peers. Successful leaders make sure they extend their circle to colleagues who are very different and possess varying skills/methodologies and work in other areas, at other levels.

A suggested way to build this circle of beneficial relationships is to map out what I call your Sphere of Influence, previously mentioned in Chapter 3. Simply take a piece of paper and, putting yourself in the center of a circle, connect to a series of spokes that are the key individuals you currently are (or should be) connecting to (superiors, peers, subordinates, internal, and external customers). Then, assess each of the relationships by determining:

What is critical to each of them.

In your function, if you are contributing to meeting their critical needs.

The status of your relationship (good, bad, neutral).

If your relationship is neutral or negative, you need to figure out what the ramifications will be if it gets worse. Could it put you in jeopardy?

Ask yourself: When is the last time I communicated with this person (directly)? Do I need to reach out more to keep the bridge “secure”?

By creating, refreshing, and acting on your Sphere of Influence, you will be in a much better position to leverage these relationships moving forward. As you make your way up the ladder in any company, it’s critical that you manage and nurture those beneficial relationships that you’ve built. We all spend a great deal of time at our jobs, and we want to work with people we respect as well as like. I have found that the individuals who are able to leverage these ongoing relationships by helping to ensure collective successes are those who are tapped for leadership positions. We discuss the all-important interview later in this book, but I will say now that the main purpose of any interview is not to discuss your skills and qualifications. They know those already and that’s what got you the interview in the first place. All they basically want to know is if they would like to spend at least eight hours a day with you, every day. The importance of liking (respecting) those with whom you work cannot be overstated.

Whatever you do, don’t minimize the importance of maintaining mutually beneficial relationships at work. You might feel that putting your head down and plowing through your work solo will avoid the traps of potentially toxic office relationships. However, this will severely curtail your potential to rise within any company and have any significant impact. In addition, being overly competitive with a “winner take all,” or “my way or the highway” (hey, it’s just business) will surely come back to haunt you.

Another individual I’ve known (and worked with) was the CEO of the company at which Mark, our bridge-burner, was employed. Louis, as we’ll call him, was as charming as he could be but, in reality, the charm was skin deep, exceeded by real cunning and a win-at-all-costs attitude. A good friend and colleague of mine, whom I’ll call Carol, went to work for Louis as president of his U.S. division. All was going smoothly until Louis asked Carol to sign off on some activities that she felt could be construed as unethical. She wouldn’t go along. Louis and the owners of the company conspired together and soon, without any warning or notice, Carol was walked out of the building. They didn’t even give her time to clean out her desk; her personal property would be sent to her. Carol was humiliated and realized how ruthless Louis had been. Eventually, the owners soured on Louis as well, and he was asked to seek new opportunities. Carol, in the meantime, was appointed as North American head of a growing healthcare company. Soon, we were reading that Louis too had landed well and had been named president and CEO of another healthcare organization. Both of these appointments were not unusual, but what happened next was. The company Louis ran negotiated an agreement with the company that employed Carol to commercialize a particular product, but not in North America (Carol’s territory). Given Carol’s company’s familiarity with the product landscape, especially in the United States, it’s interesting that Louis passed on working with the U.S. organization. I have to think that had Louis not handled Carol so badly, he could have added North America to the agreement, thus making it a much more valuable transaction. Another burned bridge getting in the way of further success.

I understand there are times when circumstances prevent a “Hallmark” experience at the office. There’s a great deal of stress, tempers flare, and the blame game ensues. That’s typical. However, the gutting of relationships is often completely avoidable, and even though you may work in a large industry, it’s a small world, and you can’t afford to turn off too many people. You never know when you’ll cross paths again.

I often work on projects that deal with multiple external vendors who supply a variety of services. Sometimes, our services overlap and there are occasional “territorial” issues. Several years ago, I was working on a large national sales meeting for a very important client. We interfaced with another external partner in a variety of areas, and sure enough we began to clash. Now, I thought I was fairly friendly with this organization, but they began to exclude me from meetings, didn’t communicate critical information, and basically attempted to marginalize my involvement. I didn’t take kindly to this, and even contemplated reporting and complaining about them to the client. That might have provided a temporary fix, but with detrimental long-term consequences. You see, in this arena, we constantly run into each other all the time, and a battle between us would come to no good down the road. So taking the bull by the horns, I invited my colleagues to lunch (on my dime) and reassured them that I had no interest in doing what they did, and assumed that they felt the same about me. Once we got the issue on the table, we were able to discuss better SOPs and how we could productively work together going forward. As a result, we now recommend each other to potential clients and have given each other substantial business.

In a recent article, Michael Hess of Moneywatch echoes my sentiments about groups with whom you should never burn your bridges: “Every good businessperson knows the importance of building quality relationships. But I’m surprised at how often people don’t give the same thought to the ‘quality’ with which those relationships end, and the possible ways in which a bad breakup can come back to haunt them.”⁴

To avoid burning bridges, think about the following groups and your relationship to each:

Colleagues (peers, subordinates, superiors). It’s a small world, as the saying goes, and if someone stays in the same line of work, chances are you will hear from them again, even after they leave your company. Maybe you’ll even be working with them again in some capacity (whether you stay in your current position or move to another company). These people may take on positions that directly affect you in a big way, and your previous relationship will go a long way to determining your ability to be successful moving forward. So, when it’s time to move on, for whatever reason, I strongly urge everyone to leave on good terms. And if you have to fire someone, make sure you do it appropriately and professionally; he or she may come back in your life as your boss later on.

Clients. The need to cultivate these relationships is clear. But you can’t please all the people all the time, and sometimes clients move on. However, in this world of immediate and pervasive communication, their potential comments about you could dramatically enhance or negatively affect your business. Make sure you continue to stoke those relationships even after the ties are severed.

Purveyors. It’s very simple: though there are multiple vendors for any single product or service, a shortage, special request, or time-sensitive situation could cause you to require a favor. You don’t want to cut off a vendor when there is any possibility, down the road, you might need them. This could significantly impact your standing in your organization (and not in a good way).

Salespeople. Most organizations that provide products and services use a sales force (sometimes referred to as account executives). And although reps may come and go, if they stay in the same industry, they probably have more contact with your customers (both potential and existing) than you do. A bad relationship with these “feet on the street” could come back to haunt you, especially if they leave your company to work for a competitor. Movement from one company to another is inevitable (and becoming more and more common these days). So you don’t want to exacerbate a situation by being negative when a sales associate departs for another organization.

Competitors. This is a subtle and nuanced series of relationships. Cordial relations with competitors are beneficial for a variety of reasons. You may serve together on trade associations or work on industry projects together. You also may hear about opportunities at other companies, which could be very beneficial to you. I am extremely competitive and certainly like to win, but having a vindictive and/or snarky attitude toward those who work for competing organizations takes you down while you’re attempting to tear them down. It makes you look small and may have big and negative outcomes in a world that is increasingly hyper connected.

As I stated earlier, business situations are not always the “Good Ship Lollipop,” and occasionally relationships end acrimoniously. However, this should be minimized. As the title of this chapter says, “What goes around, comes around,” and you never know when a bad split could come back to bite you at a bad time in a bad way. As the popular saying goes, “karma’s a bitch.”

   Test Yourself!