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When I ran my own consultancy, I went on holidays for a month once, leaving the company under the management of a long time employee. I came back to find an em

When I ran my own consultancy, I went on holidays for a month once, leaving the company under the management of a long time employee. I came back to find an employee of one of my customers sitting at a desk in our office. Turfed him out. Had to "fire the customer". Lost about 30,000 euros of work time and unpaid invoices. In my view joining someone's Slack Channel would be no different than that little piece of "management kidnap". Everyone in the office had completely turned their attention on that single customer's problems.

Aloha 7y ago
How does this happen exactly, and why is having one of your customers working temporarily out of your office an issue - I think I'm missing context
- jsty 7y ago
  I read it as the customer wasn't happy with something, and having learned that 'the boss' was on holiday, decided to parachute in their own management to oversee things.
  - Aloha 7y ago
    that could very well be it - but I'm not sure I'd leap there - as someone who has been embedded inside my customer sites for months at a time, its not unusual for me to get attempted micromanagement from the customer - I've learned how to push back both politely, and impolitely, as the situation calls for.
    - hinkley 7y ago
      Bidding. They learn that you will say no, every time. So they ask someone else, and someone else, until they get the answer that most resembles what they were after, then they lock into that as a commitment instead of a hypothetical conversation. As a child you figured out which parent was more likely to say yes to treats, and under what circumstances (mood, which sibling asks, how they ask). The thing is the customer gets rewarded for results, no matter how they get them. So if they stoop to juvenile tricks and get a promotion for it, they're just gonna keep doing that forever.
- merlincorey 7y ago
  I'm not the person you were replying to, but my reading of the situation is that the customer realized the boss was out of town and so they sent their own manager to ensure that their issues got priority over everyone else's.
paublyrne 7y ago
Interesting. It's not uncommon for consulting agencies to bring client employees in house for a few days, or vice versa, in order to work directly with one or two people, and this doesn't mean the whole office is focused on working for the visitor, but of course in your case it may not have worked like that. We have a couple of shared channels with companies for whom we are customers and it also does not feel like that. The other company assigns one or two resources in each case to helping some of our staff with issues when they come up, and we pay them for that support. Only a small number of our team would be a member of those channels.

Aloha 7y ago

How does this happen exactly, and why is having one of your customers working temporarily out of your office an issue - I think I'm missing context

jsty 7y ago
I read it as the customer wasn't happy with something, and having learned that 'the boss' was on holiday, decided to parachute in their own management to oversee things.
- Aloha 7y ago
  that could very well be it - but I'm not sure I'd leap there - as someone who has been embedded inside my customer sites for months at a time, its not unusual for me to get attempted micromanagement from the customer - I've learned how to push back both politely, and impolitely, as the situation calls for.
  - hinkley 7y ago
    Bidding. They learn that you will say no, every time. So they ask someone else, and someone else, until they get the answer that most resembles what they were after, then they lock into that as a commitment instead of a hypothetical conversation. As a child you figured out which parent was more likely to say yes to treats, and under what circumstances (mood, which sibling asks, how they ask). The thing is the customer gets rewarded for results, no matter how they get them. So if they stoop to juvenile tricks and get a promotion for it, they're just gonna keep doing that forever.
merlincorey 7y ago
I'm not the person you were replying to, but my reading of the situation is that the customer realized the boss was out of town and so they sent their own manager to ensure that their issues got priority over everyone else's.

paublyrne 7y ago

Interesting. It's not uncommon for consulting agencies to bring client employees in house for a few days, or vice versa, in order to work directly with one or two people, and this doesn't mean the whole office is focused on working for the visitor, but of course in your case it may not have worked like that. We have a couple of shared channels with companies for whom we are customers and it also does not feel like that. The other company assigns one or two resources in each case to helping some of our staff with issues when they come up, and we pay them for that support. Only a small number of our team would be a member of those channels.