Alignment

There are four essentials that clients hope and need to get from their professionals. These are respect, fair pricing, satisfaction, and minimized risk.

There are four essentials that professionals hope and need to get from their clients. These are respect, fair compensation, satisfaction, and minimized risk.

The case for alignment could not be clearer.

The reality on the ground, however, is that perfect alignment is the exception, not the norm. All too often, the client leaves the professional engagement feeling like they were charged a lot of money for something they neither understood nor asked for. At the same time, the professional feels used and unappreciated. In the worst cases, some unforeseen result turns up at a later time and litigation or professional censure result.

What a shame this is for everyone. Professionals, who have exchanged ten percent of a lifetime and hundreds of thousands of dollars in preparation, find their chosen calling to be nothing more than a job – a grind for which they receive little gratitude and indifferent compensation. Clients, who sought out the professional because they needed a solution to a pressing problem, are left dissatisfied, wondering if they are any better off than they were before the engagement.

Aside from rampant and unbridled consumerism, we ought not to pin much of the blame for this state of affairs on the client. After all, if they knew the field of expertise, they would not be calling on us.

The reason for the chronic mismatch is that most professions are barking up the wrong trees when it comes to training and governance.

Professional training ought to be very straightforward: find those people who are both apt and passionate, and give them the knowledge, skills, and experience they need to excel. Sad to say, this is not the model for most professions.

Professional governance ought to be very straightforward: a body of persons who are both apt and passionate about their calling will self-govern from a center of professional pride. Bad apples won’t even make it into the barrel.

Sad to say, this is not the model for most professional governing bodies, for whom the prevailing motto is, “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”

How do we change this? Pretty simple, really– by changing our focus from savagely hammering the square pegs into round holes to simply choosing round pegs in the first place.

As with most things in life, the simple solution is generally the best.

(Don’t forget the blue box and red box below: they often contain the best stuff!)