It was the kind of phone call that a CEO hates to get. A vendor called to alert me that a mutual client had fired us. That client was going to use a different engineering firm. The caller was at a company that were water tower specialists. I’ll call them Water Tank Contractors.

Those blue-collar guys invested a lot of time educating TEP on the best ways to engineer water towers. As the tip of the spear, they knew water towers better than anyone. I was grateful for their forbearance with us delicate cubicle dwellers. Water Tank and TEP became mutual clients and mutual vendors who focused on the needs of our mutual client which, in this case, meant installing cellular arrays on water tanks.

Typically, TEP performed the engineering—tower mapping, analyses, design and post-construction inspections. Water Tank performed the installations based on our designs.

Most of the work was for either the six major wireless carriers or the many smaller carriers. We had relationships with them all. But none stronger than this one that had been thrown in jeopardy.

It was a shock when my contact at Water Tank called to warn that our client would be using another engineering firm. Not as an ancillary to TEP, but as replacement. After years with this client, TEP was fired.

I called that cell carrier to confirm and discovered that TEP had indeed been fired. I learned that it was because we took too long to finish jobs.

I promised I would fix the problem and, cashing in on TEP’s credibility built up over many years, I secured another chance.

After hanging up (yes, phones had cords), I made a beeline for our structural division manager. Let’s call him Engineer Bob, MS, PE, SE.* Perceptive employees told me that they experienced Bob’s head expanding in proportion to his adding credentials. Credentialed arrogance is a common challenge to leadership because the credentialed know too much to listen.

I saw that Bob’s desk was littered with jobs that were “mostly finished.” His boys had been stacking them on his desk. Most had less than an hour to completion. Some required nothing more than 15 minutes of Bob the Engineer’s review and a seal.

When I queried, he gleefully replied, “Yes there are a lot of jobs here. Isn’t that great? Most only need another 15 minutes. Then they are done.”

“So, finish them,” I said.

“I will. But I need to work on this other thing first,” said Bob.

His habit was to work many projects simultaneously with all of them at some percentage of completion. A lot was done, but little was finished.

I went into persuasion mode by telling a parable. Persuasion before coercion was my preferred method of leadership.

I told him of lumberjack Mike who required eight hours to fell a tree. Mike worked four hours on the first tree, so it was half finished. Then he broke for lunch.

After lunch Mike returned to work and started on a second tree. Four hours later he had half of each of two trees completed. With that he went home for the evening. Satisfied with his hard day’s work. Most certainly he had worked.

Meanwhile his coworker, Lumberjack Jack, spent the entire eight-hour day on one tree.  That’s all he worked on all day. Just one tree that got finished and sent to the client.

Engineer Bob refused to be persuaded by my story. I replaced him. (That was the coercion part.)

With leadership focused on finishing, TEP’s structural division returned to production with urgency. Our client returned. The rest is evident by virtue of the 1,000 plus employees as of this writing.

            *Bob is a pseudonym. The story is true.