I'm a contractor. Yesterday, I had a conversation with K, the President of my current client, in which he told me all the things I'd been doing wrong in my interactions with his company. He did it in a way that did not make me feel defensive or criticized.

The issues he was mentioning really surprised me, though. I've been working hard to behave in a professional fashion--I refused to be pushed into giving an estimate until I knew what I could deliver, but once I gave an estimate, I have exceeded it. I have been very transparent about what issues I was running into, when I expected to have them resolved, what I was working on, etc. I have refused to officially move the due date up despite being 3 weeks ahead of schedule--I was afraid that if I did, some unexpected bug would come up and I would end up running over the moved-up date, even if I made the original date. I pointed out a couple of red flags that were making me nervous (e.g., the fact that there was no dev server; dev and testing was done on the production machine); I did my best to do this in a sensitive way so as not to come across as the new kid on the block criticizing the old hands. Essentially, I have done everything I could to underpromise and overdeliver.

K pointed out that what I considered professionalism was actually causing friction between me and the team. Some members of the team thought that I was being overly formal in refusing to move the date up...that I had some kind of ISO-9000-ish stick up my tailpipe. I don't know if anyone was concerned that I was trying to pad my time (by refusing to move the date up), but that may have been a factor. Some of them seem to have taken my process suggestions as criticisms of them personally, or threats to their job security.

This was an eye-opener for me.

I'm still trying to process this conversation and extract all the wisdom I can from it--I have a feeling there's a lot to get. Here's what I've got so far:

• As a contractor, you must be professional.
• You must be the client's idea of professional. This may or may not be the same as your own.
• No matter how bad something is, don't suggest changing it until you've worked with the company for at least a month...maybe more like two, especially if you work remotely.
• You need to make the client comfortable. That means operating at whatever level of formality they use; less than that makes you look sloppy, more than that makes you look like a stuffed shirt.
• If your people skills are so good that you can criticize someone for 40 minutes and, at the end of that time, they are chuckling ruefully and saying "thanks for telling me"...you have one necessary-but-insufficient attribute of an exceptional President/CEO.

Anyone else have thoughts to offer?

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