John Ossa: Winning advice

John Ossa

I have been fortunate to work with a lot of wonderful and talented people in my career. I can honestly say I have learned something from everyone along the way. My own shortcomings have made the totality of the advice at times less than the sum of the individual contributions.

I worked for a contractor that gave me this piece of advice. The context was how to approach dealing with a customer. His advice: “Tell them what you are going to do – do it – and then tell them you are done.” I have reflected on the wisdom in this advice more than once. The advice has embedded in it the obligations of awareness, duty and responsibility.

“Tell them what you are going to do,” means clarifying expectations and outcomes. To identify clearly what product or service will be the result of your action. There is no better place to start a business relationship than this point.

“Do it!” The fundamental requirement of business – you have to do what you say you will do. If you don’t take this to heart, you will not succeed.

“Tell them you are done” is a less obvious, yet important piece of doing business. It speaks to a broader human need for closure, but in business it identifies the end of a contractual obligation. This signals the time for a range of possible next steps – not the least of which is getting paid.

Many of the learning moments that I have had came from situations that did not go well.  Once, I gave a vendor some good advice after discovering  what he felt was well-intentioned, only added to difficulties I had in completing a project. I had been promised shipment of pipe and control wire for a fast moving project. We had much of a parking lot excavated with trenches for irrigation main and control wire. The short version of the story is the vendor over-promised when he could deliver the materials to the site.

Once I had the opportunity to step back from the situation, I told him that what I really needed from him was for him to “…tell me what you CAN do, and then DO it.” I told him that I can handle bad news, but what I didn’t do well with was no news, or being told something that I “wanted to hear” instead of an unpleasant truth. Also, baked into my follow-up conversation with him was the acknowledgement that “… we both know that stuff happens,” and that it was each of our responsibility to keep the other informed of changes.

So the advice that I gave contained some of the same elements that made such an impact on me earlier in my career. Now, if I could only remember everything I have learned …

John Ossa owns Irrigation Essentials, a web-based irrigation consulting firm. See www.irrigationessentials.com; mail ossa@gie.net.