Alan Weiss
I’ve found that there are colleagues in consulting and clients who share an odd and dysfunctional trait: They are threatened by learning.
You know them. They can’t wait for you to finish a sentence before they are explaining why “it can’t be done.” They project their own weaknesses and shortcoming on to others. After all, if they can’t do it, no one should be able to. They critique books they refuse to read, ideas they refuse to heed, and people they have never met.
There are dozens of these crippled psyches roaming around Amazon.com giving one-star reviews to books that otherwise are universally five-star. They hang out after a warmly-received speech to share with others why what they just heard can’t possibly work. They refuse to attend meetings to hear a new idea because they, themselves, didn’t come up with it.
Escaping the Morass
You can’t treat prospects, clients, or colleagues who exhibit these behaviors as equals. The threat to their self-image is deep and disturbing. If you are right, and they are wrong, you’ve cast in doubt practices that they have employed for many years. You plunge them into the reality that they have not been as successful as they might have been. (My observation is that consultants who continue to insist that hourly billing is superior to value-based billing are actually in deep denial that they’ve left hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table over the course of years.)
If you allow yourself to be yanked down to their level of this discourse, you’ll immerse yourself in a world of frustration, stress, and futility. You can’t teach people who refuse to learn, the rare exception notwithstanding. So what do you do?
- With colleagues: Stop attending meetings with them, find other ways to develop professionally, subscribe to different publications. On those occasions when I find myself in an association meeting and someone begins speaking about “dividing your ideal income by the hours available to work to arrive at a fee schedule,” I head for the bar.
- With prospects: Cut your losses. I’ve sat with buyers who have told me that there will be no reinforcement on the job because people are too busy to learn once they’re outside a classroom, or that the rules don’t apply to them (one guy smoked in his office despite no-smoking rules). Rude or ignorant prospects make horrible clients. They don’t magically improve their manners or outlook once they’ve paid your bill. “You’re leaving early?” asked one buyer after informing me that he regarded “attrits” (“attrition” from layoffs) as merely business costs. “Yes,” I confirmed, “I think we’re done here and I know there’s an earlier train.”
- With clients: This is the tricky one. One preventive action is to try always to be paid in advance, so that you can fearlessly and firmly confront learning-adverse client behavior. However, if you still have mountains to climb and checks to receive, I advocate that you go for the buyer’s jugular: His or her repute and plans (and evaluation) are going downhill fast unless the buyer leads the way in championing the changes and exemplifying the new direction. Also, make certain you have “joint accountabilities” in your proposals, so the client is responsible should progress be undermined because of the buyer’s poor performance. Should you “fire” a client if the client refuses to learn? Yes, life is short, and you’re a partner, not a slave.
Teaching the Unteachable (or not)
All of which leads me to one more caution: Be careful about your sources of learning. Just because someone is loud, or insistent, or in a key position, doesn’t mean they are intelligent or even successful. There are more “coaches” for consultants than there are top-flight consultants. And, as I’m sure you have, I’ve met more than my share of executives who have stunned me by the inverse relationship between their common sense and their paycheck.
Ironically, the most impressive people I meet are those who have been wrong on several occasions, have discovered the error, corrected it, and grown as a result of it. I enjoy these people and learn a lot from them, because they’ve been unafraid of learning themselves. It’s the perpetually certain, who suffer no challenges to their thinking, from whom I flee. It’s not my job to convert them, I don’t have the energy or interest in doing it, and there are greater priorities in my life than teaching the unteachable.
You can’t teach goats to fly. And if you strap a pair of wings on a goat and throw it out of a plane, you’ll only get a very unhappy goat, or worse. Don’t try to convert the unconvertible, and don’t let your ego believe that the mere validity of your position will necessarily carry the day.
There are people who are threatened by learning, by new ideas, by someone thinking/writing/speaking/doing something they have not. Leave them in the meadow with the otherwise happy goats, placidly munching grass, never looking up.
Stay in Touch