In order to deliver quality results to the client, portable executives must have a very clear understanding of their core offering. There is often some basic confusion regarding selling a product versus selling a service. For example, lawyers and accountants often say they are in the service business when, in fact, they are delivering a product, such as a tax return or a will, to their clients. Conversely, Avon says that they are in the business of selling cosmetics, when actually they are selling a service called "home shopping with personal consultation" delivered through a basic product. Portable executives must determine precisely what their true core offering is and be prepared to convey that clearly to the client.
In a perfect world, there would be no impediment to delivering a quality product or service to the client every time. In the effort to be responsive to the client's needs and sensitive to time constraints, however, portable executives must be careful not to compromise the quality of the product or service they're delivering. They need to decide just how much they are willing to adjust their offering in response to a client's pressures. When faced with a time- or financial-pressure trade-off, portable executives need to step back and consider the fact that the assignment they are in the process of completing is a stepping-stone to the next assignment. With this perspective, it will be easier for the individual to determine which trade-offs might be acceptable to make, and which, because they will affect the balance of career path, are not.
Monitoring Quality
Portable executives need to develop a way of monitoring the quality of the product or service they are offering, and there is no better yardstick for monitoring quality control than a satisfied client. Part of developing sound relationships with clients are establishing an atmosphere of openness in which invites the client's critical feedback. Learning what your clients think and feel about what you are doing is a function of the peer-peer exchange, where neither party has power or authority over the other but instead the two work together for their mutual satisfaction. While some portable executives may be reticent to ask clients for feedback for fear of criticism, it's helpful to remember that most clients are usually very open and positive about responding to such requests.
Learning from Your Mistakes
Everyone makes mistakes-but what matters when a mistake has been made is not that you're at fault but that you take the time to analyze and understand what the mistakes were and why a given project didn't work out. This is sometimes difficult to get to the bottom of, since sometimes isn't asked back and there's no clear explanation for it. The obvious first step in this situation is to ask for feedback from the client, but it will also prove useful to talk to other portable executives to try to learn what you could have done differently.
One of the cardinal rules of being a portable executive is "Do not sell what you can't deliver," as this is often the reason behind a portable executive's failure. Again, it is essential that you sell yourself based on a current, honest assessment of your core skills and not what you wish they were or hope they become in the near future. While it is certainly acceptable to take an assignment where you are being challenged and may have to learn new ways of applying your existing core skills, it is not recommended that you take on a project that requires a specific core expertise that you do not possess.
Perhaps the most subtle element of quality control involves evaluating your client and determining whether he or she is someone you feel comfortable working with. It is not inappropriate to do research on a potential client, such as checking his references, before you sign on the dotted line. Plus, if the atmosphere of the client's organization is out of synch with yours, or their standards of quality are not consistent, it would be wise to reevaluate your desire for a long-term relationship with that client, just as it would be if the client makes you miserable. If your relationship with your client is basically an unhappy one, the quality of your work will be negatively affected as well.
Corporate Culture and Politics
Wherever you have two or more people, you have politics, and wherever people interact, there will be a corporate culture. On a relative scale, 's involvement with the corporate culture of a client's organization is limited to getting a good understanding of the personalities he or she is dealing with and a sense of how they will influence the assignment. This superficial brush with corporate politics is a very different view from that of the lifetime employee of an organization, where politics and culture are both major factors in whether one gets a promotion or advancement or even whether one can be effective in getting a job done. AT&T's human resources manager Daphne Gill put it this way:
When you hire consultants, it's short-term; you're paying them to get the job done ... and you want to get every-thing out of them that you can; whereas with employees, it's long-term and you have to take a more humanistic role and think, "Okay, this person has been working ten to-sixteen-hour days, and we've got to care about their physical and mental health."
While it's not always easy to fit into the culture in a client's company, portable executives should approach every assignment and every client with the attitude that they are part of the solution, not part of the problem. With this in mind, they should try to keep an open mind and be willing to experiment with new ways to achieve their goals within the various corporate cultures they encounter.
The objective viewpoint that a portable executive offers a client is generally a chief attraction as well. Consumer products executive Jack Gellman says:
After my first assignment, organizations that were attracted to my background started looking at me as someone who could make a difference. The reason they would offer me positions is because they perceived that they needed somebody who was different from their internal staff. I'm the kind of guy who comes in with a point of view, and I'm not shy about putting it on the table.
The key is to try to develop appropriately close relationships in a client's office-"appropriate" in that you should maintain a professional attitude, but you should also convey a strong sense that you are there to help make everybody's job easier.
One of the most unique attributes a portable executive brings to a client is an element of cooperation rather than competition. Since portable executives recognize the value of other people's skills, and aren't playing the political "get ahead" game, they can genuinely reach out to others in a nonthreatening way and help them see the value of working together. Enrolling the support of the client's personnel is crucial to a successful assignment.
Never forget that the client across the desk from you is a human being just like yourself. Even if he comes off as having everything under control, very often he has some problems he simply can't handle. Who understands the value of his core skills, loves to apply them to solve problems, and listens carefully to the client's concerns, is well equipped to put corporate culture issues in perspective and maintain good business relations with his clients.
