What has worked for me in the past is to take the time to fully understand his requests – listen, write them down, run them by him to make sure that you correctly understood what he is requesting. Once you are sure that you know what he wants, then sit down with him again and explain that he can get what he wants, but that is is new work. If you have a price ready for each of his requests, you can put him in the driver’s seat and ask him which tasks he is willing to pay for. By making him the decision maker, you remove yourself from the loop if he can’t get what he wants – he’ll only have his budget to blame! Good luck.

I’m the owner of an IT firm, and my top and trusted technical resource and partner has recently been in competition with the IT manager of an organization and customer of mine. I admit that I do not know where the competition began, or for how long. In fact, I knew there were issues, and have been continuously coaching my resource to resolve issues… I didn’t realize it was a competition until reading your posting.

Nevertheless, although I’ve always been involved I have recently increased my involvement, continuing to focus on improving the relationship between our organizations. More and more I’m putting myself in the forefront and diverted the tough questions and responses from my lead resource to myself. Simultaneously I’ve added the role of Customer (focused) Representative to my resource’s set of many hats. This has helped him gain a new perspective, that causes him to proactively seek the customers best interest (more so than in the past) while focusing on the correct technical solutions, processes, best practices and overseeing and managing my team.

However, the IT manager has not changed his offensive frontal. In fact, he is requesting services (pressing his demands) that are out side the scope of our contract. While he has never seen the contract, he is in the position to suggest changes, and is eager to flex and wield his POWER.

In preparation and anticipation of conflict, I’ve been increasing communications with the director of the organization, keeping everything out in the open; sharing my challenges and my desires to see our organizations continue to grow in our relationships and partnering to solve the technology challenges that we have.

My point is this… I’m the owner of a small IT firm, therefore I’m a manager, customer service representative, and a whole lot more. My challenge is that one of the parties in competition is not my resource, but is in the position to ‘suggest’ how the future of my firm and his organization may look like.

I have lots of other ideas and thoughts on my mind, but this brings me to date to the recent activities and the current state of relationships in my business world.

Generally speaking, business is good, and relationships are still strong… but there is no doubt, managing people, a.k.a. relationships, takes lots of continuous work… (like taking care of a well manicured lawn, it takes hard work, persistence and commitment).