Being Right Loses

Her analysis was clean. The numbers were right. The risks were real. Forty-eight hours later, the deal signed anyway. She was not wrong. She was right. And she lost.

The frameworks aren't the hard part of procurement. The certifications aren't either. The hard part is the conversation in the office, behind the closed door, with someone who has more title than you, where the right answer is unpopular and your job is to make it land anyway. 

This episode is for procurement professionals at every level: buyers, sourcing managers, contracts leads, category managers, and the CPOs coaching them. It covers the difference between process authority (the right to say no) and political authority (the ability to make your no land), two escalation stories that ended very differently, and a five-step framework for delivering a no in a way that gives leadership a yes worth saying.

Primary audience: Procurement Professionals (All Levels)

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Website: https://procurexcellence.com 

Email: robert@procurexcellence.com 

Topics covered: vendor proposals, procurement rejection, discovery process, risk management, mission-driven purchasing, stakeholder alignment, supplier relationships

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

So a few years ago, an analyst on my team came into my office holding a memo. She was only about 10 months into her first procurement role, however, she was sharp, conscientious, and did her homework. She had just spent a week analyzing a sole source request from a senior program leader who wanted to extend a contract with a supplier the leader had brought in from a previous job. For anyone outside of procurement, a sole source request is when the stakeholder asks to skip the competitive process entirely and go straight to one supplier, on the argument that no one else in the world can do this work. Sometimes that argument is true. Often, however, it's not. And either way, it's procurement's job to test it before the contract gets signed. Her analysis was clean. The supplier's pricing was about 30% above market. There were two credible alternatives that could have that were screened out before procurement was ever invited into the process. And the contract had an auto renewal we could not unwind once it triggered. And on top of that, there was an indemnification cap that didn't make sense for the dollar value of the agreement. She had it all written up. The numbers were on point, the risks were real. The recommendation was that we should run a competitive process before extending. She wanted to know if she should send the memo to the program leader and copy our CFO. I told her not yet. I told her to come back to me at the end of the day after she had thought about a different question. The question was what does she actually want to happen? And is that memo sending it the move that makes it happen? She thought about it, she did come back at the end of the day, and she had sent the memo anyway. In her words, she had the data, the data was right, and if she did not escalate, she was not doing her job. Forty eight hours later, the deal got signed in its original form. The program leader described the memo as procurement overreach. The CFO sided with the program leader because the issue had been framed as a procurement as a process complaint, not a business risk. My analyst was right on every fact in the memo, and the organization spent the next three years living inside a contract she had correctly identified as a bad deal. She was not wrong, she was right. And she lost. This is episode seven of the other side of the table. I'm Robert Brindle, and today I want to talk to procurement professionals directly, buyers, sourcing managers, contract leads, category managers, directors, and CPOs coaching them. Today's episode is for you. Because the frameworks are not the hard part. The frameworks you can learn any year. The certifications you can earn on weekends. The hard part is what happened in that office. Telling a senior leader the deal they want is not the deal the organization needs. And getting the organization to listen. That is the craft. Nobody trains you for it, and every procurement professional who eventually grows into a senior seat has to learn it the hard way at least once. Here's the cleanest way I can put it. Process authority is the right to say no. Political authority is the ability to make your no land. Those are two very different things. You can have one without the other, and most procurement professionals figure that out the first time they are correct on the merits and overruled in the same meeting. Process authority is what the org chart gives you. The procurement policy says deals above a threshold require competitive bidding. The contract policy says certain clauses cannot be waived without legal sign off. The signature matrix says who has to approve what. Every one of those is real. They matter. They keep the organization out of trouble more often than anyone outside of procurement realizes. But process authority alone is brittle. It gives you the ability to stop a deal. It does not give you the ability to shape a better one. And in any organization, the people with political authority can find ways around process authority almost any time they decide it's worth the friction. Side contracts, credit card purchases, sole source justifications written in a language of urgency, memos to the CFO about procurement overreach. Political authority is different. Political authority is the trust a senior leader has that when you tell them something is a problem, it really is a problem. It is the credibility that makes a leader pause before signing. Even when they do not have to. It is earned through every previous interaction where you were where you were calibrated, useful, and right in a way that helped them to succeed. You build political authority slowly, you spend it carefully, and the highest leverage use of it is in the conversation where you have to tell someone with more title than you that the deal they want is the deal that is going to hurt them. Most procurement professionals get this wrong in two predictable ways. The first way is to lean entirely on process authority. The policy says I have to say no, so I say no. The contract policy was violated, so I escalate. The senior matrix was bypassed, so I write the memo. All of this is technically correct. None of it will change the outcome, because process complaints are not compelling to people who have already decided. The second way is to lean entirely on the relationship. The leader is going to do what they want. I have raised my concern privately, I have done my part, the deal goes through, the procurement function eats the consequences, and three years later we are cleaning up a contract everyone forgot was a problem. Neither of those is the craft. The craft is the third thing. It is the conversation where you bring both kinds of authority to bear, and you do it in a way that gives the leaders a yes worth saying. Let me show you what that looks like. The first story is the one I just told you, the NOS, the memo, the deal that got signed anyway. I want to tell you what I think she could have done differently, because I had this conversation with her after the dust settled, and it changed how she worked. The memo was not wrong, the memo was the wrong instrument. A memo to the program leader copying the CFO frames the conflict in procurement terms and frames the program leader as the obstacle. From the leader seat, what landed in their inbox was a procurement analyst going around them to their boss. The conversation that should have happened is the one where she walked into the program leader's office, sat down and said something like I want to make sure that this deal works the way you need it to, and I see two structural problems we should solve before it signs. Here's what I would recommend. Now that conversation gives the leader a way to be right. The memo gave them a reason to be defensive. Were the two structural problems still real? Yes. Was the recommendation still that we should run a competitive process? Also yes. The content was the same, the delivery was the difference. And in escalation, delivery is most of the work. The second story is one of mine more recent, and it ended differently. A senior leader at my organization wanted to expand a contract with a supplier they had worked with for years. The supplier had earned the relationship. They were responsive, they knew our environment. The senior leader genuinely wanted to give them more business, and it was a credible argument for doing it. But the structure of the expansion they had negotiated directly with the supplier locked us in for five years. It removed our contract review rights at renewal, and it tied future pricing to a benchmark that we didn't control. None of those terms were necessary. The supplier had agreed to them because they had been offered, and the senior leader who had offered them because nobody told them what they meant. I scheduled a thirty minute one on one, not a memo, not a meeting with the CFO in the room, just the two of us. I led with what the senior leader actually wanted, the relationship with the supplier, operational continuity, the certainty of working with a partner that they trusted. I told them I agree with their goal, and I wanted to help them get there. Then I named the specific problems, not in procurement language but in their language. I said the lock in clause means in year four, if the supplier's pricing drifts above market, we do not have a tool to reset it. That's not theoretical. We have seen this happen before in this same category. The review rights that you waived are the only mechanism that protects the relationship from getting expensive in a way that ends the relationship. Then I gave them the alternative. I had already worked with the supplier's account exec to sketch different structure, same scope, same supplier, a three year term, with a one year option, market rate renewal, market rate review at renewal, and the contract review rights restored. The supplier was open to it because the alternative for them was an awkward conversation with a leader they did not want to disappoint. I walked out of that meeting in twenty five minutes. The senior leader thanked me. They told me that they did not realize those clauses were unusual. The deal closed in the new structure. The supplier got the relationship continuity that they wanted. The organization got a contract it could actually live inside. Same kind of pushback, same procurement analysis, different craft, different outcome. So that is the picture. Now let me say what it means depending on where you sit at the table. If you are early in your procurement career, the first thing I want you to internalize is that being right is necessary, but it's not sufficient. You will be right and you will lose. You will see deals you correctly flagged go through anyway. That is not a sign that the system is broken. That is a sign that you have not yet learned the political half of the craft. The technical work is the price of admission. The relationship work is the rest of the job. The second thing, save your escalations. Every time you escalate over a leader's head, you are spending a finite resource. You may need that resource for a deal that genuinely cannot be allowed to close. If you spend it on every contract that bothers you, you will not have it on the day that matters. Ask yourself before you escalate whether this is the deal worth the cost. If you are mid-career, a sourcing manager, contracts lead, category manager, the work is to start building political authority deliberately. That means knowing the senior leaders in your stakeholder organizations before you need to push back on them. It means being useful on the deals that do not have problems, so that you have credibility on the ones that do. It means being calibrated. The procurement professional who only ever raises concerns is the one whose concerns stop getting heard. The one who clears deals quickly when deals are clean and pushes hard when they are not is the one that gets believed. If you're a senior leader in procurement, a director, head of the category, vice president, CPO, the work is to coach your people through this. The analyst with the memo was not broken. She was unfinished. The job of a senior procurement leader is to be the person who tells them before they send the memo what the second move would be. Most of the political education in this profession happens in private conversations between someone who's lived through it and someone who's about to. And one more thing for the senior procurement leaders. If your team consistently escalates to you and you consistently overrule them in favor of the stakeholder, your team will stop escalating. They will absorb the bad deals quietly, and will stop hearing and you'll stop hearing about the problems until they're already cooked. Calibrate carefully. Back your team when they're right, and coach them when their delivery was wrong. But do not let the lesson land as don't bother me with this. Before I close, here's the short framework I promised. Five steps for delivering a no in a way that gives leadership a yes worth saying. One, get to the actual goal, not the deal in front of them. The thing that they are trying to accomplish. Lead the conversation by naming it accurately and confirming you understand it. If you cannot articulate their goal back to them, you're not ready to push back on their solution. two. Name the specific problem. Use a clause, a number or a date, not an adjective, not a feeling, not a procurement category like we are concerned about the structure. Be precise. Senior leaders respond to precision because they live in a world of vague concerns and they appreciate the rare colleagues who show up with a sharp one. Three. Quantify the cost of doing it anyway, in their terms, not yours. If they care about delivery timelines, quantify the schedule cost. If they care about budget, quantify the dollar cost. If they care about the supplier relationship, quantify the relationship cost. Make the consequence concrete enough that the decision in front of them feels real. And four, bring the alternative. Already developed, not abstract. The hardest version of this conversation is the one where you walk in with the problem and no path forward. The most useful version is the one where you walk in with a problem in a draft solution that protects the leader's goal and avoids the cost. And five, give them the decision. Don't take it. Your job is to make sure that the decision gets made with full information. Their job is to make it. When you frame it that way, you preserve their authority and you preserve your own credibility, and you preserve the relationship for the next time you actually need it. So here's what I want you to take away from this episode. The frameworks are easy, the certifications are easy. The hard part of procurement is the conversation in the office, behind the closed door, with someone who has more title than you, and where the right answer is unpopular, and your job is to make it land anyway. You will get this wrong, everyone does, I have. The analyst in my story, and even the most senior procurement leaders I respect have a story like the ones I've told you, where they were right and they still lost, and the loss was the lesson that made them better. The work is not to avoid the conversation, the work is to walk into it with both kinds of authority the right to say no and the relationship that lets that no land. Build the second one quietly, every day, on the deals that don't have problems, so that when you finally need it, you have it. That is episode seven of the other side of the table. I'm Robert Brindle, and next week we are going we are talking to finance and accounting partners about a sentence I have been waiting all season to say out loud. The purchase order is not the decision. By the time the PO is cut, every meaningful procurement choice has already been made. We will talk about why so much of the finance procurement relationship orbits around the wrong artifact and what to do about it. I'll see you then.