CIO Leadership

Three Overlooked Practices To Successfully Lead Vendors And Manage Stakeholders

Vendor contracts often place the CIO in the squeeze between contract fulfillment and stakeholder expectations. Three carefully crafted practices will keep you in the lead and in favor.

Scott Smeester

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June 9, 2021

Photo credit:
Justin Luebke
Wanna believe what you say
But I hate you on most days
You've been testing my faith and my patience, yeah
And you know that I be headstrong
But you know that you be dead wrong
Telling me to relax when I'm reacting

(Hard Place lyrics by H.E.R.)

We have phrases for certain times in life: Damned if I do, damned if I don’t; between a rock and a hard place; caught in the middle; lesser of two evils.

It happens to us often as we navigate a contract with vendors. They are not meeting expectations. You are in the middle of working with their process versus the pressures coming from your stakeholders.

What is a CIO to do?

Three practices set up working with vendors for success. It’s a little different than what some of my peers write. I’m going to help you establish relationships, work from order, and massage expectations.

Establish The Relationship

a) Keep the leverage

I have two sons. There is a simple rule if you want to be someone I favor: love my kids, I love you. If you have children, you understand. The reverse is true: Upset my kids, and I am unhappy with you.

A friend taught me this. He had occasion to help the son of an NBA star. Next thing he knew, he was invited to sit courtside at a game. He didn’t help the son with that in mind. But a father’s heart will not be denied.

When entering any vendor contract, particularly SaaS, make sure that the contract specifies that your representative is the one you desire. Do not allow yourself to be handed off.

Once that relationship is established, discover two things: what does success for the rep look like in the eyes of their boss, and what are the primary challenges the team will face in satisfying their contract with you.

Three things come into play to keep the leverage in the relationship: coach the rep, communicate with their report, congratulate the team.

By coaching the rep, you are in a regular pattern of communication in which you make sure you clarify with them:

  • What is the current goal?
  • What is the current reality: obstacles and opportunities for completion.
  • What are the options they are looking at in order to stay on target?
  • What will they accomplish that you can follow up on in the next conversation?

By communicating occasionally with their report, you are seeking to be as positive as possible about the work of the rep. Love the kid, the father loves you.

By congratulating the team, even with small gifts of appreciation or words of affirmation, you are putting a personality to the project. Love the kids….

Is the above important?  Yes! Can it seem manipulative? Yes. Or it is just good relationship building.

b) Monitor the lower-driven person in the relationship.

In any relationship, in any area of the relationship, someone has a lower or higher drive. It’s true for you outside of work, and it is true inside of work.

It is simply a position in a relationship. In our context, it may be you as the client or it may be the vendor.

As Dr. David Schnarch points out, the lower-driven person controls the outcomes along the way. It isn’t wrong, it just is.

Here is how it works: The higher-driven person takes initiative. The lower-driven person decides what tone/communications/motivations/incentives (s)he will respond to. This determines a given outcome. As a result, the lower-driven person has de facto control whether (s)he wants it or not.

This is true for you as a CIO in your vendor relationship as well as in your stakeholder relationships. If you are the higher-driven, you are most subject to disappointment and agitation. And if you are the lower-driven, you will likely feel badgered by the higher-driven.

Why the psychology? Because the above is a relationship dynamic few are aware of and yet live with every day. If you know who is lower and higher-driven, then you can understand and respond to the tensions that come into play.

Always Operate From A Position Of Order

We talk about balance, but life is rarely balanced. Specifically, you are rarely in balance. But you can be in order regardless of what is happening around you.

In your relationships with vendors and stakeholders, the “sources” of pressure, order these and you will never feel weak, manipulated or pressured again.

  1. Stay true to who you are and what you are about. We tend to distance ourselves from people and situations that pressure us to accommodate. Never violate your personal values to adapt and conform.
  2. Self-regulate. Competing interests from vendors and stakeholders can pull you apart. When you can regulate your own emotions and anxieties, you operate and choose from a place of strength instead of shifting circumstance.
  3. Remain grounded in response. Self-regulating is how you respond to yourself; remaining grounded is how you react to others. A well-ordered mind and heart stays calm; and most people are looking for assurance, not a quick answer.
  4. Endure discomfort. We all seek pleasure and avoid pain, but we can have an amazing capacity to endure for the sake of growth.

If you review the pressure you have faced in relationships (work or not), the conflict is only as strong as the above is weak.

Massage The Expectations

Two realities to kick around: how you set expectations is critical, and how you confront unmet expectations is crucial.

  1. We are guilty. To sell, we oversell. The vendor wants to promise your minimal need, and you want to meet your stakeholder’s optimistic goals. You know what it is to put performance goals into a contract. Internally, parties need to communicate the expectations around the screens of good, better and best. Good is contractual, and for most folks, worst case. But what is an agreeable “better and best?”
  2. Still, even good expectations are being unmet. The effective CIO knows what to do and when by regarding the vendor as “good, bad or ugly.” Good means that they will respond to honest and direct communication. What you did to establish the relationship and operate out of order has laid the groundwork for this. Bad means that you have uncovered a vendor who only responds to consequences. Hopefully, your contract has such options in place. Ugly means that a vendor will only respond to an act of power or authority. That means bringing every legal and political option to bear to force a change or exit the contract.

Few are the perfect relationships between you and vendors. But with a little attention to the often overlooked details, you can lead vendors and manage stakeholders without feeling stuck between, caught or damned.

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