Professional Courtesy: The Life in Weddings Guide to Acting like a Wedding Industry Grown Up

As a planner, I get to work with amazing professionals every day.

In turn, I get to work with some real choice (expletive deleted)s. Conglomerate experience with the latter over the past several years leads me to the following post. Consider this your official sarcasm warning, because this post is plenty full of it.

I Was Not Put on Earth to Ruin Your Day (Even If You Were Put Here to Ruin Mine)

Let me clarify some things about the way a professional planner works, and about minimum expectations by clients for the way all of their vendors will act:

The Event Timeline: contrary to somewhat popular belief, I do not sit around dreaming up timelines randomly, and very rarely do I get to craft a timeline specifically to ruin a colleague’s day (only at Christmas). In contrast, I create event timelines based on (in this order):

1. The client’s expressed wishes and our in-depth discussions of the feasibility of those wishes
2. A review of vendor contracts
3. The input of participating vendors
4. My professional experience

Really, if I want to ruin your day, I’ll just come out and ruin it (and not on OUR client’s time). My timelines are professional tools, not instruments of torture.

Note: you may wonder why I keep capitalizing the word “OUR”. For those who haven’t picked up on the subtlety, it’s because they are in fact “OUR” clients; not “MY” clients and not “YOUR” clients. We share responsibility for their happiness. What we do together (or to each other) impacts their experience.

A further note, especially to my planner colleagues – that’s one reason we have to be so careful about the way we communicate. If you shoot off a hateful email to a baker, and that baker decides to say “to He** with your client’s cake”, you better be darn sure that your client wanted you to take that route. Better to act consistently in your client’s best interest, even if someone sorely deserves to be called all of the names in the book – besides, it makes wedding planners as an industry look a whole lot more professional.

The “Here’s Your Chance to Disagree” Email: That email that I send that says “if you have concerns, changes or questions about the timeline, please don’t hesitate to contact me”…I actually mean that. So, griping that something isn’t to your liking because “I” constructed it that way is really lame.

If you’re unwilling to take me up on the opportunity to have a professional conversation that could easily end in doing things a little differently (perhaps even entirely the way you envision it), than you’re complicit in your own misery when the rest of us attempt to stick to the plan.

The moral is, the plan for an event is supposed to be collaborative. If you’re too stubborn to collaborate, though, then you’re going to have to go with what the rest of us devised. End of story.

Everything You Need to Know about Being Professional You Should Have Learned in Kindergarten: You have to be 5 years old to not get the “There’s No ‘I’ in Team” concept. Your role is NOT the most important in the whole wedding, no matter how critical your functions are. I don’t care who you are: planner, caterer, guy with the camera, lady with the cake…doesn’t matter. There are 2 people who get the title “VIP”: the bride and groom. Everyone else either acts as a team, or destroys the event.

When you take a diva-like (that’s not Diva with a capital D) approach to a wedding, and make it all about your shooting schedule, or your 15 appetizers that all have to be served individually in 15 minute increments, no matter how long a cocktail hour that creates (hint: 2 hours is too long!!!), or your 7-hour long “how they met” story that no one is listening to after the first 25 minutes, you’re screwing things up for everyone else around you.

• You’re making the client uncomfortable while she waits to see her friends.
• You’re making the caterer’s food cold, mushy or late.
• You’re making the guests super grumpy leading them to snap at the bartender, who snaps at the DJ, who snaps at the video guy who decks the planner who ends up suing you for being stupid.

 The point is, you have a job to do, but not at the expense of everyone else around you. If you can’t grasp that, weddings are not for you.

And as far as “but I promised the client that I would do x, y or z and by goodness I’m going to do it” – I expect you to be professional enough to present a plan to said client that works in harmony with the 9 other folks who also promised perfection. If that plan doesn’t work in real life, I expect you to work with the team to figure out how we’re going to remedy it.

Again – can’t handle it? Then maybe there’s another line of work, like Tyranny or Dictatorship or Narcissistic Self-Worship that you might be better suited to. I’ll write you a letter of recommendation.

I Don’t Have to Like You. You Don’t Have to Like Me. We DO Have to Pretend Though.

I try so hard not to work with people I don’t like, but the reality of this big, professional, grown-up world that we operate in is that it happens. I may question the sanity of the bride who wants to hire you, and you may do the same when they hire me. If we don’t fix it before contracts are signed, though, we have to pretend to get along.

That means we have to operate with professional courtesy.  From my side, I will do everything in my power to take into consideration your requests and requirements (until you become insane and unreasonable, of course) and in return, I expect you to follow the chain of communication that OUR client indicates is her preference.

In plain speak – if she asks you to get the info from me, get the info from me. Don’t undermine the process intentionally – it’s transparent and she will understand what you’re doing. I won’t even have to point it out…because I’ll be acting with professional courtesy. She’s smart enough to know the difference.

Furthermore, we’re going to play nicely on the wedding day (note that I’m not asking). I’ll do my best to stay off of your toes and out of your turf if I can. You can do the same for me. We won’t be bad-mouthing each other to other vendors, we won’t be shooting “I hate you glares” at each other from across the room, and we won’t be making snide remarks under our breath within earshot of each other either (I may text my mother about you, and I’ll grant you the right to text yours too if that makes you feel better).

My 1^st graders know better than that, and it is our mutual responsibility to our clients to act with more maturity than 1^st graders.

Heck. I’ll probably go out of my way to be courteous and polite to you. Maybe I’m killing you with kindness, but it’s what OUR client deserves and that’s how I roll.

Is This a Rant?

Yes. It’s a rant about no one in particular caused by years of experience dealing with stuff exactly like this.

The vast majority of the time we work with grown-ups; folks with priorities who can make the best of any bad situation, and who know how to work as a team. A benefit of working in the wedding industry is that we get a fresh chance every weekend (or with every contract) to make the experience better for all involved.

Unfortunately there are always a tiny handful of children dressed up like grown-ups who ruin it for the rest of us. For those people, I urge you to read through this guide (though I suspect you won’t) to acting like big kids in a big-kid world. If you can’t do it based on maturity, do it because your client deserves it.

If you can’t do it for the client, go to work in some other industry. Please?

By Shayna Walker

Comments

[Wendy Hartigan]

Great Post! What a shame there are so many inthe industry that tell brides NOT to use us! And, worse, that they are rude and ugly on someone's wedding day. This has happened to me, and I will not work in those venues again. I make a supreme effort not to upset anyone or tell anyone how to do their job. But, I have a clear purpose and a job to do as well. Respect is something that this world lacks as a whole. I think you should broadcast this message over the weddingsphere- so that brides and vendors can all read it!! Kudos to you!!

[AlphaProsperity]

Thank you for sharing this blog posting. This topic has been a sore spot for me of late because I recently attended a wedding marketing seminar and another vendor, venue coordinator, went on a rant about how horrible it was working with a wedding "uncoordinator" (their words). I was so disappointed because I believe in professionalism and believe all vendors should work toward the satisfactions of the client. The venue coordinator may not be happy about another wedding planner being on-site but if that is what the client wants, who are they to complain or make things difficult. Again, thanks for this post and I intend to share and repost it every where I can.

[Shayna Walker]

I'm impressed that you know what's going to be on your blog in a couple of weeks, Kara! ;) I do for my clients, but I'll admit that (at least this time of year) mine's a mystery to me! LOL.

[Kara Buntin]

I couldn't agree with you more...I just wrote something along these lines that's going to be on my blog in a couple of weeks! Mine is more about the ethics of being a professional, though (if you want to call yourself that, you'd better act like it.) There seems to be a lot of very bad behavior in the wedding industry recently. I don't know why it is, but I have some theories. Grow up, people, do your job, and don't make other people's jobs harder in the process!