Consulting Journal: Techniques - Client dining rooms

Techniques: Client dining rooms

by David Blakey

You may be invited to the client's dining room. Here's what to do, and what to watch.

[Monday 5 May 2003]

When you are at a client's premises, you may be invited to lunch. Often, especially in cities, they will take you to lunch at a restaurant or café. In some clients, you may be invited to the client's reataurant or canteen, where you will sit at a table with the person who invited you. In both of these circumstances, you will have lunch with only the people who invited you, with no one else sitting at the table with you. Sometimes, you may be invited to the managers' or directors' dining room. This situation will different.

The main thing to remmember is that you will be talking with a number of other people. You may not have met some of them already. You should be careful of what you say, especially about your work for the client. Your current assignment may be disapproved of by some people within the client; others may actively oppose the objectives of the assignment. You should be guarded without being taciturn.

Eating in the client's dining room is an excellent way to make contact with other people in the client. It may lead to other work for you. It will be a social occasion and a business meeting and a chance for prospecting.

The opportunities outweigh the possible problems so much that you should never refuse an invitation to the dining room. And the possible problems can all be controlled if you have a plan. Here are some considerations for that plan.

Your first visit

Mood

Some dining rooms do not discuss ‘shop’. This can either be a condition of eating in the dining room, or it may be a convention established by the regular diners. Some dining rooms may discuss nothing else apart from work. Most will be somewhere in between these two extremes. In most cases, conversation will range between the two. It is important that you spend some time on your first visit observing the mood of the dining room. Before you say anything that everyone esle can hear, you should be sure that it is appropriate.

Etiquette

You should also observe the etiquette of the conversations in the dining room. Everyone will be seated at one or more large tables. You should note how conversations around your table work. For some conversations, the speaker may address only the people on either side or opposite. For other conversations, the speaker may address the entire table. How this works may be dependent upon the number of people at the table and the layout of the table. For a setting with three people on each side and one at each end, talking only to one's immediate neighbours may seem rude. For a setting with four people on each side, talking to everyone at once may be impossible. Watch how the etiquette of the table works.

Alliances

Identifying the alliances betwen the people in the dining room may take several visits. On your first visit, it is worth trying to spot who any one person turns to for a response to their opinions. The signal may be as slight as a glance or as obvious as them saying ‘What do you think, Bob?’ As a consultant, you will look for formal - or dependent - alliances throughout your working day. In the dining room, you will have an opportunity to identify some informal alliances. Many of these will be based upon whether the people like each other rather than whether they need to work together.

It is often easier for novice consultants to spot the disconnections rather than the connections: to see which people do not talk to each other rather than which people do. This is a mistake. Remember when you perform gap analysis. It is when a situation is not working well and you are seeking remedies. Do not assume that the situation in the dining room is not working well. Look for ties rather than gaps.

Summary

On your first visit, you will observe all these things. You should not spend all your time simply observing. You should join in conversations and meet people.

Subsequent visits

On your subsequent visits, you should check on your findings from previous visits. It may be that, on your first visit, no one talked about work. You might have thought that this was the general mood. On your second visit, everyone may have talked about business. The mood of the dining room may vary, day to day.

A story

Finally, let me tell you a true story about a client's dining room. The company's production manager was called Peter. One lunchtime, he told the people around him about one of the company's suppliers. This supplier always worked well for a while after winning new business, but then became slack, so that deliveries were late or short. Peter said that he wished that the supplier could be consistent and that he would have to re-consider whether they should win any future business.

A few days later, I was walking towards the dining room when I met Peter. I asked how that supplier was performing. He said that they had improved. He added that mentioning it in the dining room usually worked. I realized then how Peter was using others' relationships with the supplier to achieve his aims.

Do not underestimate the power of the dining room.

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