Are you a leader wanting to improve your decision-making and project management skills? Look no further! Joining us in this episode is Air Force veteran and CEO, Kandis Porter. As the co-author of Good Decisions Equal Success, Kandis dives deep into the critical aspects of decision-making, project management, and hiring consultants. She shares valuable insights on defining roles, streamlining the decision process, and effectively navigating high-impact choices.
Plus, Kandis reveals her strategies for establishing a successful project management office with an emphasis on transparency and stakeholder communication. Don’t miss this golden opportunity to learn from a seasoned leader as she offers tips on identifying red flags in project managers and finding consultants who align with your business goals.
Kandis Porter: You’ve got to be transparent. You’ve got to show courage. As a project manager, I’ve been in a lot of situations where you have to be courageous and you have to say, hey, we went into this with this assumption. That assumption is absolutely false, and now we’re going down a road that maybe we don’t want to go down.
John Berry: Welcome to the Veteran Led podcast, where we talk with leaders who use their military experiences to develop great organizations and continue to serve their communities. Today, we’re joined by Kandis Porter, founder and CEO of Effective Flow Connections. Kandis was an Air Force officer and has a Master of Science and Project Management from George Washington University and an MBA in Human Resources and is a certified project management professional. Kandis is also the co-author of the book Good Decisions Equal Success. Welcome to the show, Kandis.
Kandis Porter: Thanks, John. It’s great to be here.
John Berry: Today, we’re going to talk about three things in which you are an expert: decision making, project management, and hiring consultants. Let’s dive in, Kandis. You wrote a book about decisions. Please tell us about it.
Kandis Porter: I absolutely love decision making. I’ve been intrigued working with clients over many years and seeing how they really work through high impact decisions. I wrote a book with a co-author named Damon Lembi, and the name of the book is Good Decisions Equal Success. We really talk about some of the areas that you can get hung up with decision making. Then we also introduce some tips for really clearly defining roles and for moving through a decision-making process for high impact decisions, specifically.
John Berry: What I love about the book is that you mentioned that, look, not all great processes will result in great decisions or great outcomes, but the bad decisions will catch up with you.
Kandis Porter: Yes, absolutely. I think we have to keep in mind that we make decisions with the best information that we have available at that time. We have to be willing to course-correct and go along with it if we’re not getting the outcomes that we expected or desired.
John Berry: How do we get to a point where we’re thinking about our thinking and really thinking through that decision-making process? Do we want to always have a framework, or sometimes we just need to go with our gut?
Kandis Porter: Absolutely. When we’re talking about decisions that aren’t necessarily high impact, what am I going to wear today? What am I going to eat? Anything along those lines, go with your gut. I think that that’s key. We don’t want to over-engineer it to where we’re not making progress, and we all have to lock ourselves in a room for weeks at a time to make a simple decision. But when we’re talking about high impact, and a lot of times people will ask, well, how do you define high impact? That’s going to vary from organization to organization, because a million-dollar organization is going to think that something’s high impact, that maybe a $500 million dollar organization does not. So, it’s really relevant to the organization itself. But we want to make sure that we’re at least thinking about how we’re moving through the decision-making process and definitely defining roles. If we don’t know who’s actually making the decision when we go into it, or if there’s confusion there, it’s probably going to get a little bit chaotic as we get closer to that big decision point.
John Berry: Yes. I found that that creates a lot of miscommunication and trouble for team members when we, as leaders, don’t define who’s making the decision and their role in decision-making process.
Kandis Porter: I was once working with a group of leaders, and we were launching a huge project, and it was going to impact roughly 300 people. That was the size of the department. We got a project team together, and the leader said, okay, you to name this project. And so, the project team, they went through this whole contest. They had people submit ideas for the name of the project, and ultimately, they selected one, and they notified the leadership team, what the name of the project was going to be, and it immediately got overturned. And they said, no, that’s not going to work. And the VP of the organization and the leader said, actually, here’s what we’d really like to name this project. And I know that there were some hurt feelings and frustration along with that. In this case, I think it would have been better to say, hey, you’re going to make a recommendation for top three names for this project, and the leadership team will ultimately make the decision. It’s those types of things where it can really disengage people if they think they’re the decision-makers versus making recommendations on the decision itself.
John Berry: How do we set expectations when we ask for feedback or input, but hold back that decision-making authority?
Kandis Porter: I like to use a model. It’s called DIDI for clearly defining those decision-making roles. With the first one, who is the decision maker? So the D piece of it. It could be a group of people as well. And so if we’re talking about a board of directors or an entire leadership team, let’s be clear on who’s making the decision and how it’s going be made, whether it’s voting, whether it’s consensus or so forth. The I is making sure that the right people are providing input. So decision maker, input. The next D is the driver of the decision. And so we may ask someone, hey, can you please go out, gather all the information, make recommendations? That person is driving the decision-making process. And then the last I is for implementation. So, a lot of high impact decisions are implemented through projects itself. And whenever we are really looking at that, we need to have someone that’s on the hook as the implementer, oftentimes known as the project manager, for making sure that that decision actually leads to the outcomes that we desired.
John Berry: Now, I am a quick start. I make decisions rapidly. But in the book, you also talk about analysis paralysis, where individuals, sometimes they get scared, they get worried, they don’t have enough information, and they just can’t make a decision. And so, when you bring groups together, for me, I generally think of it as, it is not so much what we decide, but that we decide, just to get the ball rolling. How are you able to get people like me to interact with the people who want to do the long analysis? As you know, I’m getting bored from the person I propose. Okay, come on. We already know the answer. As Colin Powell said, if you have 80% of the you have too much information. And that came from his 40-70 rule, which is if you have 40% of the information or less than 40, you do not have enough. If you have 70% of the information, you have too much, you got to get in that sweet spot. And so, for people like me, I get closer to about 40%, I’m like, okay, decision. Whereas other people are trying to push 70, 80, 90%.
John Berry: How do you bring those individuals together to make decisions as a team?
Kandis Porter: I think time boxing it is critical. And so, if we can say by this date, we are making a decision with what we know unless there is high risk or something that has surfaced that allows us to maybe ask for a little bit more time. But having a deadline that you’re working towards can really allow those people that need to analyze a bit more to know that they’re working up towards something versus walking in a room one day and thinking they have another week or two to analyze information and realizing people are trying to make a decision right then and there. If we agree on the time frame okay, by September 15th, we’re going to make a decision on this with the information that we have at hand, then that allows people to start wrapping their mind around it.
John Berry: What happens when we’re going through something similar to the military decision-making process, where we’re working through that decision making, and we think we’re there, and then we hit that, what I would call the Donald Rumsfeld problem. We’re double dangerous because we don’t know what we don’t know. Do we just restart from there and scrap it, or how do we deal with that when all of a sudden, we realize we have maybe made a faulty assumption or we’re so far off base that our whole calculation could be wrong.
Kandis Porter: The unknown unknowns, yes. I think that that does go a lot with the analysis paralysis as well. Let’s be honest, with technology and information just evolving at an incredible pace. AI, generative AI, really just front and center right now, there’s probably more information coming at us than we need sometimes. So we have to really laser focus on what it is we’re we’re looking for. But when we’re talking about the unknown unknowns, I think it’s critical, and you pointed at it. Let’s make a list of our assumptions, and then we’ve got to go back and stress test those assumptions. And if any of them prove to be faulty, we need to take a look at how that can impact our decision-making process or the decision itself. But I really think just being willing to say, let’s start moving in this direction. And if we hit a point where we’re not getting those outcomes or if we need to redirect, we can go back and take a look at previous steps of this decision-making process and gather more information in a specific area and then determine, hey, do we need to go in a different direction?
Kandis Porter: I think that it really is that flexibility of, let’s start moving in a direction that we can all get on board with, but then continuing to see, are we getting closer to those desired outcomes? And if not, do we need to do something different?
John Berry: Okay, now let’s go a different direction, and let’s talk about that gut decision. I read a wonderful book years ago called The Gift of Fear. And it was about all these people who were in perilous situations, either they were about to be murdered or kidnapped or something bad was going to happen, and they got a hunch. They either survived it or they avoided it altogether. The book talks about how our brain works, how the subconscious works, and says, look, our subconscious is working so fast that we can come to a decision and not understand all of the rationality behind it. It’s like the saber-tooth tiger’s outside the cave. We hear a growl, we run back into the cave. What they did was they did a postmortem on those decisions. Then those individuals who survived those horrific events or perilous events were able to go back through and dissect it and say, well, I just made a decision on the spot. But now when I look back, here were the 10 red flags that had me suspicious. This was clear. It was totally telegraphed. I knew it was coming. I just couldn’t articulate it at time.
John Berry: How does that work with decision making? Do we often find that we made good or bad decisions based on stuff that maybe we knew, but we weren’t able to articulate or we didn’t know we knew?
Kandis Porter: Oh, it’s so interesting. When we talk about fear first of all, I love that book, and it’s been a very long time since I’ve read it, but my mom gave it to me when I think I had left the house. She mailed me a copy. She read it and she thought, this is so important for everyone to read. But it’s a fascinating book. And I think that when we’re talking about being in physical danger, especially, we’re probably not going to take the time, nor should we, to go through this full decision-making process. But we should be aware. I think it’s that thinking about how we think, understanding how we may come to conclusions. And I think biases is key. There’s so many biases that are out there. And if we understand how our brain may work when it comes to biases, that’s an interesting part. But when we’re talking about the emotional part of our brain, the limbic system, that’s usually that gut reaction. It’s coming from that area of our brain versus our prefrontal cortex, where our executive decision making. We want to try, when we’re talking about corporate or business decisions, to be aware of emotions, but to shift up into our prefrontal cortex for the actual decision-making process.
Kandis Porter: If we’re talking about, if I could separate them out a little bit. We’re talking about being in a dangerous situation. Listen to that part of your brain that’s telling you, like, run. If we’re talking about more of business decisions, I think sitting down and saying, what is the worst case scenario here? And talking through that, I think that that can be helpful when you’re collaborating with others and working through and determining, are some of these fears realistic or are they not? And what is that worst case scenario if we go in this direction, if we go in this direction if we go in this direction.
John Berry: Well, now that I’ve set the table for this, let me bring in your experience as an Air Force officer. You were in situations where it was scary and you had to make decisions and lives would be impacted based on the decisions you made about stuff like the weather. Tell us about that where it’s high stress, high impact. There’s some fear in the room, there’s some fear in the environment, and you still have to go through that process. How do you do that in a way where you’re not defaulting to that subconscious mind that is making the decision based in fear?
Kandis Porter: Well, I joined the Air Force as a teenager. I was young, and I signed up specifically to go in enlisted as a weather forecaster. You go in through basic training. Eventually, I went down to Biloxi, Mississippi, where I went through many months of intense weather training school. And what you really lean into there is the data. So what is it that you’re looking at? And it teaches you to be a little bit like a detective. Okay, so what are the pilots actually reporting? And I always get the joke, oh, 50/50 chance of rain. Is that what you used to do? And I’m always like, no, that’s not what I used to do. We did forecast rain. But when we’re talking about Air Force weather, we’re talking about, yes, ground weather, which is that chance of rain. But then we’re also talking about ascent, flight level weather, so turbulence, icing. And then someone’s jumping out of a plane or whatnot. We need to know those winds, especially because we don’t want people to end up in trees or worse. And so, we’re really looking at the entire flight path when we’re forecasting that weather. And so, it’s not one point here in the United States where we can go outside and say, oh, it looks like it may rain or not.
Kandis Porter: You’re looking at data from regions that you may be nowhere close to. And you are gathering and really looking at what’s being reported. I think one of the sayings, if nothing changes, nothing changes. Why would you predict something that may be different than yesterday or hours before if there’s no weather events taking place? You really are. You’re gathering data all the time. There are emotions because if we’re talking about something fun on a base, for example. Let’s say you are physically located. I was at Scott Air Force Base for a long time. When we’re talking about, hey, let’s go out intramural softball, for example, and you’re forecasting lightning and canceling softball games or whatnot, people are very happy about that, right? You don’t want to be the one that’s waiting on people’s parade and forcing them to lose the fun part of it, or a pilot that really wants to take this mission, and they want that weather brief, and they want that weather brief to be clean. They don’t want to see any potential weather in there so that they could just go. There are some emotions because sometimes there’s competing priorities, but you have to make sure that you’re protecting assets and you’re really looking at the data and making the decision with the best information that you have.
John Berry: That’s such a critical skill, especially as we get into business, because things get emotional when people are involved, especially from your HR experience. When people are involved, when emotions run high, when it’s a serious decision, we get very emotional. We look at the data, and sometimes we just use the data we have that confirmation bias where we think this, and we’re going to use the data to prove it. How do you avoid that?
Kandis Porter: I think that you can recognize it if you’re walking into a conference room, let’s say, and someone is there, and they are moving down the road of confirmation bias. A lot of times you’ll hear little hints such as, I knew it, where they jump in just at certain parts of the conversation, and they’re shut down, and maybe they’re not asking questions. They’re just listening for what they want to hear. To avoid that for you as a person, be aware of what the biases are. There’s so many out there. And confirmation bias, if you are only listening for what you want to hear, you’re going to be able to find it in some way, even if it’s skewed data. And that’s not going to lead you down the road to the best possible outcomes. So, catch yourself. If you’re not asking questions, I think curiosity is key. Asking hard questions is what leaders should be doing. Asking insightful questions, being courageous to speak up if you feel like you’re in a group and maybe they’re not moving in the right direction. So, there’s a lot of aspects that go along with it. The groupthink piece of it as well.
Kandis Porter: If the most senior leader walks in and says, I think this is what we should do, what do the rest of you think? A lot of times people are going to look around and say, yes, we think that’s the best idea. Let’s move in that direction. As a leader, I think going around the room first and asking others what they think before sharing any of your insights can be a powerful approach.
John Berry: How is that different than the availability heuristic?
Kandis Porter: The availability heuristic oftentimes is where our mind first goes to the information that’s most available. We know that we’ve recently heard something or that it’s out there, we’re watching the news, for example, and all of the news is carrying same story lines. We’ve recently heard some statistics over and over and over. When our minds are put in a situation where we want to grasp onto something, oftentimes that’s the first information that will come to us. And so rather than stress testing that or broadening our approach there to look and see, is that accurate? And really looking at how that applies to our situation, then we may be moving down the wrong road.
John Berry: Outstanding. So, let’s move on now to project management, another one of your areas of expertise. I read one of your blogs, I believe it was titled, Establishing a Project Management Office. Now, for those of us with businesses, this gets tricky because I’m thinking, well, isn’t that my COO’s job to be the project manager? How do you know when you as an organization need to establish either a project management officer or just one project management billet to manage the projects in your organization?
Kandis Porter: Great question. I always tell my project management students because I teach often at the University of Nevada, their extended studies program for Project Management Institute and so forth. I always tell them, first and foremost, separate operations and projects. Because operations, when we’re talking about processes and that ongoing growing business that keeps the wheels on. We want to think of that separate as projects. So, a project has a firm start date, end date, and we’re trying to accomplish something specific. And in order for organizations to scale and get really good at, I guess, realizing that return on investment for projects. Projects are typically undertaken when there’s a problem that they’re trying to solve or there’s an opportunity to maybe enter into a new market or improve something. What we have to do is get some type of standardization within an organization so that we can get meaningful data. We’re not looking at each individual project and seeing how they’re doing. I think the goal eventually is to roll those projects up and look at them as a portfolio. How are we doing overall? In order to do that, we have to have some standardization as far as what are we measuring for these projects, how are we measuring it, how are we managing the three most important things, the scope, the timelines, and the resources associated with it, and so forth.
Kandis Porter: When we talk about a project management office, that really should be the key to making sure that projects are consistently being initiated, planned, executed, and then being closed out in a way that runs across all of the projects within the organization. When you talk about how do we really decide if we need a person or a team of people, I’ll give the project management answer: It depends, because you can have a smaller organization and one person just managing that project management office and being a resource to project managers or a project manager. Whereas a lot of organizations have multiple PMOs. They may have a department PMO or an enterprise-wide PMO that supports other smaller PMOs. There’s not an off-the-shelf structure that’s perfect for every organization. You really have to tailor it and make it fit your organization and what you need.
John Berry: As a leader, how do you ensure that all of the stakeholders have visibility of the project status so that we don’t just have to rely on the perception of one person who is theoretically in charge of the project?
Kandis Porter: I do think that it’s a cultural shift. When we’re talking about embedding project management best practices into an organization, I think that it’s key to, one, upskill your team and make sure that they understand what’s expected and that they have the appropriate skillset to deliver. And then there’s also a part of that that makes people feel safe so that as they surface some of those issues, that it doesn’t feel like there’s blame being shifted like, oh, it’s your fault. But there are so many moving pieces, again, when we talk about organization-wide projects and EOS, specifically. But I do think that, one, the people that are reporting out, if they feel like they’re going to be supported and they feel like they will be able to overcome those issues by surfacing them versus being blamed. That’s a first step. But then I think that it’s okay to ask people to collaborate and stress test other people’s projects. So you could always ask two people that are reporting out on their projects, okay, I want you two to team up and stress test each other’s projects, and you two pair up and stress test each other’s projects.
Kandis Porter: So it’s not just one person’s perception of it. Again, creating a safe environment for that can be helpful.
John Berry: Yeah, that safe environment is a tough thing, right? Because as we’re going through, we want a knife hand, okay, what’s the status, right? When we should probably, with an open palm, say, how’s it going? How can we help? But not my personality, but I definitely have seen that we’re on track. People want to say they’re on track because they don’t want to look bad in front of their peers. They also, I think, don’t want to degrade confidence in their section, right? That they’re in charge of. It’s like, okay, either you’re a bad leader or your team sucks, right? And it’s like, no, we’re just off track. But I think we’re so quick to judge that we probably stifle a lot of that where we’re not getting that quick response. Are there systems or products out there that can help provide visibility to stakeholders so that I can, instead of having to ask, waiting to the meeting and asking and then digging in with my questions, which a lot of times sound like a cross-examination because I am a lawyer and I’m going to go deep. And once I get a thread, I’m going to pull that thread until I get to the bottom of it.
John Berry: Is there a better way where perhaps there is some type of tool where we can just all look at the status and make sure that things are done? Something not as confusing as a Gantt chart or I need to get my glasses out and look and figure it out. Is there something better out there to simplify this process?
Kandis Porter: I think visual project management is a way that stakeholders could get quick glance at individual projects. Then again, when we talk about rolling them up into portfolios, you can see where your portfolio of projects are. I really love the tool Smartsheet, and that is something that oftentimes I’ll work with clients when we’re establishing a PMO. I always start at the successful end state. So, when we’re talking about what they want to improve for their projects, I always say, what metrics do you really want that you don’t have now? So, if we could start with metrics, with data, what’s an ideal dashboard look like for letting you know if you’re on track or not on track? And if we start there by understanding the and their successful outcomes, we could work backwards and set up templates and things that are easy. Again, we don’t want to overcomplicate it or people don’t use it. Setting up a project plan, I think, is absolutely critical. So, here’s the work to be done. Here’s how long it’s going to take to do it, start day, end day, and one assigned resource so that we can get that accountability. And then we need to understand predecessor, successor, so those tasks, what needs to be done first, and then what can happen, and then what can happen.
Kandis Porter: You can easily roll that up. So that’s the project plan you’re talking about where you could look at it and get chart view that a lot of times if you pull up a hundred-line or a thousand-line project plan or Gantt chart, people’s eyes get crossed. They can’t read it anyway if you’re looking at it on a big screen. But then on top of that, you could build reports. And then on top of that, you could build a dashboard where it’s visual, where you could see, oh, we’ve got some red, we’ve got some green, we’ve got this chart. What’s going on here? And one of my favorite things is a RAID Log. A raid log stands for Risk, Issues, Actions, Decisions. Didn’t do that in order. But so, yeah, that can be helpful because if you’re logging things that can potentially go wrong, so a risk always in the future may or may not happen, which when it triggers, turns into an issue. So if you can be a little bit more proactive with it and talk about that before it ever turns into an issue, it gives you the chance to mitigate that.
John Berry: So if I hire a project manager, how do I know that I have a good project manager? What are the signs?
Kandis Porter: And I think it goes back to exactly that. They should be asking good questions. When you’re interviewing people, whether it’s someone you’re hiring, whether it’s a consultant you’re looking to bring on, if they are doing more talking than you are, then that might be a little bit of a red flag. They should be asking, how does this project really fit into overall strategy and goals of the organization? They should be asking, what are success metrics? How are we going to measure if this project is successful or not, which helps you decide if you’re on track or not. They should be asking questions about the culture of the organization, because sometimes we forget that the culture of the organization and the people working on it and supporting it and the stakeholders that may not be their day to day, that really impacts whether your projects are successful or not. So, they should be asking all of these questions and truly understanding if it aligns with, one, what they can support you with, but also, can we get this across the finish line and actually meet those success metrics? Are they realistic or not.
John Berry: Okay, Kandis, now let’s go dark. Let’s talk about how we know when our project manager is failing. What are the red flags?
Kandis Porter: I think hiding information is a big one or not fully disclosing it is a big one. You’ve got to be transparent. You’ve got to show courage. And as a project manager, I’ve been in a lot of situations where you have to be courageous and you have to say, hey, we went into this with this assumption. That assumption is absolutely false. And now we’re going down a road that maybe we don’t want to go down. So being courageous and upfront I always say bad news doesn’t get better with time. You have to know when it’s time to wave your arms and ask for help. I think that’s a big one.
John Berry: Okay, I want to get to a third area of expertise for you, which is consultants. Consultants, I found, can be extremely valuable and can also be a complete waste of money and time and other resources. So, my question to you is, how do you know whether when working with a consultant, whether this consultant is a good consultant who’s going to provide value or just a bad consultant who’s just a parasite who’s going to suck your time and money away from you?
Kandis Porter: Unfortunately, I have seen both. I think it’s key to partner with a consultant for the first time with maybe a discovery area for both of you. So that protects the consultant, it protects your organization, and it makes sure that you’re a good fit for working together. Because someone can have loads and loads of expertise, and if their style clashes with your culture or if they’re rubbing people the wrong way as far as the stakeholders, it’s probably not a good fit. And it’s better to call that sooner than later. So, I often encourage people, go in with a smaller deal where you can get to know each other and still make some progress, but also you have an out. If you’re signing a $5 million deal that’s over a couple of years right up front with someone you’ve never worked with, I think that’s high risk.
John Berry: How much should you pay a consultant? I know it depends, but humor me and explain, how do we know what is the right amount we should be paying for a consultant, depending on the size of the project?
Kandis Porter: You have to do your homework. I do think that it aligns with the level of expertise. For example, if you’re bringing someone on and you’re looking at having them support some strategic planning, and it’s going to be hard because you really want to shift the entire direction of your organization. You’re probably going to pay a consultant more than if you’re bringing in a junior level, maybe project manager, to come in and support you hands-on with some of your projects and maybe help get you back on track. So I’d say you really have to look at what you’re asking the consultant to do. But the best way is to get multiple quotes. Talk to more than one person. And if there’s a huge discrepancy in the pricing or the hourly rates that you’re seeing, you might want to ask yourself why and maybe talk to someone that you trust. Have a consultant that you could run some possible rates by and say, is this crazy or not? I also think the race to the bottom, I wouldn’t necessarily go with the least expensive consultant either. If you are looking at what they’ve accomplished in the past, so asking for projects that they’ve accomplished successfully that are similar to what you’re asking them to do and asking for references, people or organizations that they’ve worked with before that can vouch for them, I think that really goes a long way.
Kandis Porter: So if, for example, you are bringing on a consultant to redesign your entire customer service line, and you ask them for some of their experience, and it’s all in website design, it doesn’t mean that they’re a bad consultant. It just means that maybe their skill set doesn’t align to what you need.
John Berry: So I like what you said about the research. And I’m going to go a little bit deeper on this, because this is where I’ve been burned. I do the research and I’ve read the books. I’m reading the books and I’m like, this all makes sense. They’ve taken companies where we want to go. They understand our problem. This organization gets it. And so then you call them or set up a Zoom meeting or whatever. And you have that meeting and it’s going really well. And this is it. This is the team that I need. And then right at the end, they say, yeah, that’s great. We would love to take you on as a client. And we’re going to set you up with Jim. And so here’s what I thought I was going to get the A team. Instead, they give me the C team, and now it’s like they’ve sold me. I know that their top consultants know what they’re doing, but they give me the bottom feeders. How do you deal with that?
Kandis Porter: Two words, key personnel. Outline it in your contract with a consultant. You can ask them to bid key personnel, and you could say, by name, we want to work with John Berry. They can bid that. If you need 100 hours of John Berry next month, they can be listed with an asterisk in the contract itself that says you’re going to get 100 hours of John Berry. So that may be a different price than if you’re working with their C team. So you need to recognize that. But I think it’s something that you should get what you want when you’re working with a consultant. Don’t be afraid to ask for it. And I’ve had a lot of clients who say, yeah, we really want to move forward. And Kandis, we need to be working with you. We need to know that if we email you or we call you, it’s you returning our call. Because we have worked with other companies, and every time we reach out someone different responds, we have to start from the beginning and tell them the whole story again. Or we have someone that we think we’re going to work with exactly like your situation, and it doesn’t end up being them.
Kandis Porter: As the client, which is you in this situation, be very specific about what you want.
John Berry: Is it like lawyers, for instance, that different consultants have different skills? So, people often want to hire me for things that I know nothing about or that I do poorly. And I’m like, well, I’m happy to be involved, but this is my top person in this section. And for me, I try to hire everybody better than me so that if you get me, you may be getting the worst player. So, I generally try to make sure if I’m going to hire a lawyer, that lawyer has to be better than me at something. And I found that sometimes people want me to do things that are way outside the scope of what I do. And I politely decline and try to point them in the right direction in our organization or refer them to somebody who can handle their problem. I’m curious, is it the same for consultants? Or do a lot of consultants just like to say, oh, well, I’m a consultant. I can solve any problem. Just bring it to me. Or is the consultancy area getting much more specialized?
Kandis Porter: If you’re encountering a consultant that claims to be a Jack of all trades, I’d be wary. If they’re saying, yes, I could do that, and yes, I can do that, and yes, I could do that, and it’s all vastly different areas, I would question. I’d go deeper than just those first round of questions. I definitely have people on my team that are much better at things than I am. And what I always like to do if I’m working with a client, they say, I really want you, Kandis. But I know that, let’s say, Amanda on my team is much, much better at that. I’ll build in hours, primarily for Amanda and some hours for me into that. And I help instill trust in Amanda because maybe they don’t know her. They’ve not worked with her before. And so I’ll still make sure that things are going smoothly and that the project is moving in the direction. And in a lot of cases, they quit calling me after a few weeks or a month or so, and they know that Amanda has got their back. So sometimes that is that warm handoff or the instilling of trust in some of your team members if it is a fit.
Kandis Porter: If it’s not a fit, as a consultant, you should just be upfront. You don’t want to be fighting an uphill battle and trying to do research about something you’re not an expert in and disappointing your client, just say no and move on.
John Berry: What’s the best way as a client to work with a consultant in a way where we’re not blocking the consultant or causing problems? In other words, I understand that sometimes the problem is the vendor or the consultant, sometimes the problem is me. If I’m going to hire a consultant, what are the things that I need to do to get maximum value from that consultant and to ensure that I’m not getting in the way?
Kandis Porter: I suggest establishing some rules of the road and communication norms upfront. If you don’t want them sending 50 emails a day to everyone in your organization, talk about maybe someone within your organization that could shepherd them and help them along. This is your main point of contact. They’re going to introduce you to other people on an as-needed basis. Anytime you have a challenge or question, go through them first. It could be escalated me on an as-needed basis and so forth. So setting up those boundaries, do this, don’t do this, and then how you want to be communicated with. I work with some very, very busy clients sometimes, and I’ve had clients ask, hey, can you just send me one email a day with everything that you need from me? I don’t want 10 different emails as I’m going through because I get hundreds of emails a day. And so establishing what that looks like. For some people, they may not want any emails. I have a lot of clients I just text with if I have a question. Just text me. I’m in meetings all day. I’ll get you a quick answer so that you can keep moving at the pace.
Kandis Porter: But I think that a lot of this comes back to that statement of work as well, to where there’s clear milestones that are going to let you know that you are on track. If the statement of work is really, really vague, you may not know until the end of it that the consultant didn’t deliver what you expected them to deliver. So set some maybe gate reviews or clear milestones in there that let you know and establish that trust with them because you know that they’re meeting those along the way.
John Berry: I read a great book that said, look, if your consultant is not getting results or you’re not getting results of their consultant, fire the consultant. And I think there’s some real wisdom in that. We so often fail to set those milestones because we just assume, I just want to write a check, and this person is going to solve my problem. I mean, that’s the goal. That’s the dream. But it doesn’t always work that way. I found there’s a lot of back and forth. There’s a lot of cooperation. At what point does the relationship end? Do you have clients that outgrow you or you say, okay, this project is done. There’s nothing more to do on it. Or do you look to say, okay, as you know, in business, you solve as soon as you solve one problem, it creates three more problems. The only reason, it never gets easier, but it gets much more rewarding. Do those relationships tend to last for years and years, or are some of the best relationships very project-specific?
Kandis Porter: My best-case scenario when working with a client is to go in, have a clear understanding of what it is we’re trying to accomplish, and to deliver on that, and to successfully transition back to their team and let them run with it. And then hopefully down the road, if another challenge pops up and it’s within my area of expertise, I go back and work with them. I think that’s a best-case scenario. I actually truly want to help people solve problems, not create work for myself. So I think that the intent of the consultant is really important as well. You don’t want someone that maybe is just going to be digging around, trying to find more work if it’s not actually there. But when we talk about ending a relationship, there have been situations where, let’s say you hire me, John, and you say, here’s my problem, and I want you to solve it, and I trust you, Kandis. And I come in and I realize, one, maybe that’s not your problem at all, or two, it is the problem, but there’s a lot of resistance in your organization from other key stakeholders, and they are just not ready to move forward right now.
Kandis Porter: Oftentimes, I’ll write my contracts with clients so that if we really look at the situation at hand and say, you know what? That really is your problem, John. Your organization is not on board. We’re going to be fighting that uphill battle. The resistance is still there. You need to do some work within your organization. You have to do that work. I can’t do that work to help get people on board and agree on how you want to move that forward. So, I’ve had some of those conversations before where they’re like, yeah, we thought that could be the case here. So, I’m going to go back to the courage piece of it. If consultants are hitting those dead ends where they just absolutely can’t break through or move forward, they need to bring it to the clients and be really honest. And I’ve had some challenging conversations because maybe they’ve had other leaders on their team that are total blockers, and it’s their subordinates, and you have to let them know about that so that they could figure out how to manage and deal with it.
John Berry: All right. Well, while we’re on the topic of courage, leading, and problem solving, let’s go to the AAR, the After Action Review. What I want to hear about is your best examples of leadership and your worst examples of leadership, either in the Air Force, in the military, or in the private sector. You don’t have to name names. What are a few great examples?
Kandis Porter: Great examples. I will share one. It was from my military experience, and it was when I was stationed in Turkey. And there was a gentleman there who showed meaningful appreciation. Every single week, he would either write people an email, a handwritten note, or go and find them, and personally thank them for something that they had done that week that helped forward the mission. So, he was absolutely fantastic. I learned so much from him. Outside of the military, after I left the Pentagon, I transitioned into a larger consulting company. I had a fantastic boss there, and she really focused on developing her team and trusting them to bring solutions to hard challenges. So, the development of your team is critical. She was an A plus in that area. And one more good example, I’m actually currently working with a leader, and he always does what is best for the organization, even when it’s hard. He’s 100% mission focused. He takes his role very seriously there and is always doing what’s right. So, the highest level of integrity I’ve seen.
John Berry: Outstanding. And now the bad.
Kandis Porter: Oh, the bad. And unfortunately, I’ve seen quite a few of these as well. I would say I’ve seen a leader who, when things were going well, took all the credit. So, didn’t extend credit to the team that helped to get them there. But when it went wrong, pointing blame. And I think that that just lights the culture of an organization on fire, the good aspects of it anyway. And so, don’t point blame and take credit. Really focus on creating a culture that’s safe for people and use learning lessons if it doesn’t go right. I guess one more on a bad example. I once worked with a leader that was constantly leading by fear. So, people weren’t sure if they were going to get fired, have a job, would sometimes belittle people in public situations and give very public criticism. And it just feels bad. It feels bad. So, I would say those are my best examples of good leaders and things I would definitely stay away from.
John Berry: How can our audience learn more about Effective Flow communications and more about you?
Kandis Porter: Fantastic. I’m on LinkedIn. You can find me, Kandis Porter. I also have a YouTube channel that focuses primarily on project management. It’s educational. If you connected with any of the project management aspects, you can find me on there by searching for my name as well.
John Berry: Thank you for joining us today on Veteran Led, where we pursue our mission of promoting Veteran leadership in business, strengthening the Veteran community, and getting Veterans all of the benefits that they earn. If you know a leader who should be on the Veteran Led podcast, report to our online community by searching at Veteran Led on your favorite social channels and posting in the comments. We want to hear how your military challenges prepared you or community, and we will let the world know. And of course, hit subscribe and join me next time on Veteran Led.
Our monthly newsletter features about important and up-to-date veterans' law news, keeping you informed about the changes that matter.
