[mathattack]

A mentor explained this to me as, "If you want someone to do something, you have to let them save face. If someone screws something up and you want them to fix it, you can't humiliate them in the process."

I used to get very frustrated with shoddy work from subcontractors. I found that the more I directly documented the quality of the work, the worse they'd harden their position. I learned there are better ways to operate. (And if they still don't fix things when presented softly, it's better to fire than to try and convince someone who can't learn.)

[tocomment]

Would you mind providing some examples? I can't really picture what you're talking about?

[mathattack]

Example: I recommend a client to hire a specific 3rd party consulting firm that will work side by side with my team from the product vendor. The firm's salesman agrees to my methodology and deliverables. The project starts, and their project team starts making up their own methodology, and staffs it with underskilled resources. I raise this to the salesman, who raises it to the PM, who digs in. So I gather an email chain of all the mistakes his team has made. And their PM digs in even more. The client is getting antsy about missed deadlines all around. So I get an extremely detailed report on every failure their team has made, and send it to the PM, the salesman, the senior partner responsible for the client and senior partner responsible for the practice area. The PM has to save face, so all he can say is, "You're not there day to day to understand." The client meanwhile gets hosed.

In hindsight, once I humiliated the PM, he couldn't turn things around. I should have set it up that they were reporting to me, and pushed them with a "Here's how you can succeed in making the client love you guys" message rather than being confrontational. If they didn't react to that, I could have then replaced them.