How to Know When to Walk
Last year an old friend and client reached out to me and asked if I’d be interested in doing some project work with him. He’d taken a new part-time role at a big organization that had a mission I could get behind. And more than anything, I just wanted to work with my friend again. He and I worked closely together for quite a while in my time at Stoked and he’s both one of my favorite people in this world and one of the best when it comes to doing innovation work inside an organization.
So I said yes, and as I started “onboarding” with this organization I began to notice a few things things that felt, well, a little off. The first thing that got my attention was that, in spite of my years of experience teaching and doing innovation in the field, they got hung up on my lack of a college degree. Granted, this is an organization that values higher education and degrees. They are an incredibly pedigreed bunch! But, they eventually saw that I had valuable experience and got over my lack of a degree. Still, it felt a little strange to me. Like I was being eyeballed at the country club for not wearing the right clothes.
We moved on and I thought everything was going OK, but then, they asked me to prove that I’d worked at Stanford for the past 15 years. They weren’t willing to take my word for it, or that of my friend who brought me in. So I made the call to the chief of staff at the d.school and had to ask for a letter. This felt super weird and uncomfortable, but again, I ignored these red flags because I wanted to work with my friend and the mission of this org was kick ass.
The next thing that felt bad that I kept ignoring as it got progressively more clear that I wasn’t going to either A) enjoy this work or B) have any kind of real impact at this company was the weekly virtual meetings we had as a team. I have never seen bureaucracy at that level before – and I’ve worked for some really large companies in the past. These meetings constantly ran over without nailing the agenda items, argumentative in the most passive and politest of ways, bloated with “expertise” while completely lacking in curiosity. It’s also anciently hierarchical – like a museum of the industrial era.
At this point, I knew I’d made a bad decision, but I felt too deeply embedded at this point to back out without making my friend look like a jerk. I had to see it through.
The final straw was the first in-person workshop we led. I’ll skip the painful details and just say it didn’t go well. There was so much in-fighting (that I was mostly unaware of) that very little got done. I spent most of the 2 days feeling like I was resented but I didn’t know why. As it turns out, I was just scapegoat. This company had more baggage than luggage carousel at peak travel season.
The final death knell came when I was asked to co-lead a follow-up workshop in Africa. I wasn’t really feeling good about the whole thing, but I was in for a penny and a pound and I was determined not to let my friend down.
So I booked my (rather expensive) flight and the following day I was told that the participants no longer wanted to work on this project using tools of innovation. They knew what they needed to do and didn’t need our help. Nevermind that they had been working on this project for 15 YEARS and hadn’t made any progress yet.
Anyway, I was stuck with the ticket and never reimbursed, (which reminds me I need to update my contracts for project work) but that’s not the point of this piece.
My point is that those of us who choose to take on projects and do freelance work often need to know when to say “no”. We need to ask the right questions to see if a potential project is a good fit for us and we also need to be able to see through our own wishful thinking….especially if we need the revenue and don’t feel like we can say no to potential work.
I hate to say it, but that company wasted their time and money engaging me. It’s not their fault or mine or my friend that brought me in. We all had some wishful thinking going on which kept us from asking the right questions of each other. My guess is that we all thought we were making the right call and we were all ignoring that little voice that said “this isn’t the right approach” or “this won’t work here”.
Next time, I’ll be much more mindful of those little warnings going off in my body. When someone doesn’t believe me about something I’ve said about myself, the right move would be to bow out of the opportunity. Will I? I sure hope so.
I’ll attend a meeting or two before I say “yes” to see how they work vs hear about how they work. If my referrals aren’t trustworthy enough for them to bank on, that’s a good sign for me to pass on the work.
Cause in the end, this was a loss for everyone. Not just me but my friend who brought me in as well as the client. Yes I wanted the revenue and I wanted to work with my friend. I liked the mission and the client’s logo would have looked great on my website, but none of those things was worth where it all ended up.
Like most of you, I want to do great work and have a reputation for doing great work, and getting stuck in situations like these isn’t what will get me there. I don’t know for sure that I could have predicted the future with incredible accuracy, but I do know that I ignored warning signals in order to get what I thought I wanted. But, hopefully this is one of those lessons learned that I won’t soon repeat again!
Question For You: How do you know when to say no? Or what’s your threshold for walking away from a clearly bad engagement?
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