A number of years ago, I was fired off a consulting gig.
Anybody who is a consultant knows that this is always a possibility. Consultants are hired guns, and can be un-hired, sometimes on a whim.
I tend to think that, to use an old sports coach joke, there are two types of consultants; those who have been fired, and those who will be fired.
The manner in which I was fired from this assignment (no, I did not get fired from my employer – the client simply rejected me) was a story in itself, mainly because of the bizarre way in which it was communicated.
However, one of the reasons that was given to me was that I was “too non-committal”. Apparently this was because, when asked if my team could do something that had not been previously agreed, I would say “let me evaluate that and I will get back to you”. To me, this was commonsense. I had a full plate of transition for a Testing tower. If I had said Yes to everything, I would have been an integrity-challenged fool.
The problem was that many of the people working on this transition from in-house IT to a service provider (my employer) were from India, and their cultural instinct was to say Yes to anything they were asked to do. So, the client would go to another group, and ask “Can you do X?” and the Indian delivery teams would say “yes of course”. Then they would go away and try to work out exactly what it was they had said Yes to (I kid you not. Myself and a work colleague actually overheard them around a coffee machine trying to decide what they had just said Yes to after one meeting. Amusing and frightening at the same time).
So, according to the client, I was not helpful, because I was non-committal.
I was reminded of this when reading this essay about how doubt build trust. To me, the basic idea is somewhat obvious. Especially when you consider the historical contempt that people profess to hold for “yes men”. However, many people say Yes to loaded or leading questions when they should demur or ask for time to reflect. I routinely say “let me think about that for a moment” when asked questions. If people think that makes me slow, or dim-witted, well, I guess they can think that while I go on my merry way.