When a Situation Tests the Whole Chain

In late 2015 or early 2016, just weeks after accepting a new role as a Safety and Human Resources manager for a mid-sized construction company, I was invited to lunch by one of the vendors who provided a specific service to that organization. He picked me and the CFO up at our office and drove us a few miles across town to the restaurant we agreed on. Before the waiter made it to our table to take our drink order, that fellow had made three statements about one of his competitors that were plainly untrue. As the waiter walked up to the table, I told the guy that I had only known him for about fifteen minutes and he had already lied to me three times. I followed that statement by asking how I was ever supposed to trust anything else he said from that point forward. Then I stopped talking. The silence that followed was uncomfortable; for him, for the CFO, and even the waiter. It was not uncomfortable for me.

Each of his comments that spurred me to challenge him were about one specific organization that I had done business with in previous roles and had been familiar with for much longer. Still, I didn’t have any strong personal relationships with anyone in that organization. The CFO did and hadn’t said a word, which is a lesson in itself. I didn’t call our vendor out on behalf of any one individual, I did it because he had served us a bull shit appetizer and I wasn’t willing to eat it. The company I was with continued doing business with this vendor the entire time I was there, and that required me to interact with him routinely. Those first fifteen minutes provided an accurate snapshot of what I would experience from him in the years that followed.

Through that same time, though, I maintained a working relationship with the organization he had spoken ill of. In fact, various folks inside that organization provided me with information I needed when I couldn’t get straight answers from the vendor being paid to provide them. As Cindy and I built our business, our interaction with that organization grew and we were very intentional about referring business to them; remember those values I just pointed to, Community and Together? We didn’t make those referrals based on something that company was doing for us, we did it because we had received solid service from them.

Like all organizations do at some point or another, that one went through several changes at executive level in a relatively short period of time. In spite of that, we continued doing business with them ourselves and referring our clients to them when we saw a win/win opportunity - for that organization and our clients. Through all that, very little was reciprocated. So be it, they had existing relationships before we started our business and all we hoped for was to be considered when they made a change. Think back to what our values said you’d never see from us: an introduction that serves us more than it serves you or us positioned as the only source of the answer. We made those referrals because we believed both parties could benefit. The law of sowing and reaping takes care of the rest.

In late 2024, Cindy and I were invited to breakfast with a key member of that organization’s executive team, someone we had interacted closely with for nearly a decade at that point, to discuss what we thought would be a strategy for building on the limited work we had done with them. He was visibly uncomfortable for much of the conversation and finally made the comments that showed us why. He explained that the organization would soon be announcing a partnership with one of their competitors based several hours away to start a division that directly competed with the services we provided and that division would be reaching out to clients we had referred to them. (We learned soon after that they already had been…) He explained that if they didn’t form that relationship with their competitor, they stood a chance of losing market share in their own lane. He closed by emphasizing that “it wasn’t a personal decision, it was just business.”

One of our Strategic Leadership Coaching clients has frequently told me that he has yet to see someone do business with the sign on the side of a building; they do business with people. Truer words have never been spoken, and that’s the whole reason I said earlier that without a relationship in place, most adversities wouldn’t even be memorable. The “it wasn’t a personal decision, it was just business” comment stung on a personal level for sure. But make no mistake, the real frustration was from standing up for the organization when others wouldn’t and actively supporting them for years without being given a consideration for what they would be allowing a firm from states away to offer to many of the same people we had connected to them to begin with. 

Sometimes it becomes painfully obvious that you’ve been sowing into rocky soil all along. All said, had something like that happened even a few years prior, it may have been devastating. I won’t pretend it didn’t piss me off; it certainly did. But it also resulted in us considering new relationships with companies in that space that we would have never considered otherwise, several of which have grown exponentially in the few short years since. 

A late adversity is useful precisely because it is not new in kind—it reveals whether the earlier seeds actually grew. This, as hard as it was to digest at the time, showed us that our earlier seeds had indeed grown, but it was still up to us to find the harvest in those seeds so we’ll pick there next. Until then, think about one recent situation that stung but would have been much harder to handle without the previous adversities you’ve learned from. What did that expose about the leadership attributes you’ve developed? And which ones still need some attention?