As a consultant, you meet all types of executives in business -- the good, the bad, and the ugly. Driven by big egos, big jobs, and big money, some C-level honchos can be tough cookies.

Even though the vast majority of them are smart, savvy, intuitive, charming, talented, persuasive, and colorful, there are a few enfants terribles who have elevated bad business practices and behavioral eccentricities to an art form. These "execs gone wild" can severely strain business relationships and make your life profoundly difficult.

Consultants are often brought on board to solve a problem in times of rapid growth and impending crisis. While their ostensible goal is to confirm the client's problem, suggest a path or a process to tackle it, and implement a solution that will produce tangible, measurable, and desired results, their real objective is to make sure their clients don't impede or undermine their efforts.

Corporate Archetypes

This paper profiles the types of clients who create irritating roadblocks, potholes, and fissures on the road to business success and reveals the behavioral patterns that characterize their "worst practices:"

• The Bureaucrat
• The Autocrat
• The Know-it-All
• The Waffler
• The Tight Lip
• The Hand Wringer
• The Absentee
• The Perfectionist
• The Exploiter
• The Emotive

These archetypes are drawn from behaviors all too common in the business world. The most difficult executives are an amalgam of these archetypes and share several commonalities: distrustful, controlling, aggressive, inflexible, paranoid, and occasionally tyrannical. It is facile to suggest that these behaviors are always intentional or driven by a sense of malice. Rather, it is fear, ignorance, insecurity, and thoughtlessness that are at the root of the most egregious worst practices.