BY ART VAN BODEGRAVEN AND
KENNETH B. ACKERMAN
basictraining
Night of the living consultants
FIRST, OUR APOLOGIES TO GEORGE ROMERO FOR COMparing consultants to zombies. Zombies are way cooler than
consultants and are often more fun to be with. Sometimes, they
are even less predictable.
As long-time consultants ourselves, we admit we may be
overly sensitive to the specter of wave upon wave of competitors rising up from the swamps and invading our turf.
Consultants have seldom lacked for competition, but things
may be intensifying.
The past couple of years have, regrettably, thrown a lot of talented people out of work. For many, the lure of opening up
their own consulting shop has been hard to
resist. But the fact is, knowing how to perform a function, even one requiring way-above-average smarts, isn’t remotely the
same as being able to consult effectively.
Sooner or later, and generally much sooner,
reality sets in: While they may have earned a
handsome living as managers or executives,
that experience has provided precious little
insight into how to organize and price consulting projects.
It gets worse. For both us and the newly
unemployed.
When the economy heads south, the large consultancies (as
well as some of the smaller ones) tend to let people go. This has
put another army of competitors on the street. While this
bunch may get rehired when business picks up, the up-ramp
tends to be significantly slower than the down-ramp.
So, the woods are overpopulated with wanna-be solos and
mini-firms, staffed with people with minimal consulting experience and little real grasp of the economics of the business. And
more to the point, perhaps, with limited skills in the subtleties
of communication and the art of working with clients.
IT’S ALL IN THE APPROACH
That leads us to an important point. When a company starts
down the long road of choosing and using a consultant, its
immediate concerns will be experience and qualifications. Is the
candidate familiar with our type of business? What about our
industry? Does it have experience solving problems like the one
we face? Can it work with our timeline? Does
it have the required bench strength? And so on
and so forth.
With all of these critical questions on the
table, it’s easy to lose sight of secondary considerations like quality of relationships. But
this is one thing you can’t afford to ignore.
While it might seem relatively insignificant, a
consultant’s approach to working with clients
has an enormous effect on a project’s outcome. In particular, it can mean the difference
between a short-term fix
and a long-term, sustainable solution.
Generally speaking, consultants take one of three
basic approaches to client
relationships:
▪ Doing it to you, imposing processes and methodologies irrespective of their
appropriateness and what
should have been learned in
the listening process;
▪ Doing it for you, taking center stage in
front of senior management, customers, suppliers, and peers;
▪ Doing it with you, teaching, training,
coaching, motivating, developing new ways of
thinking, communicating and working
together, collaborating, sharing risks, learning
together, developing your skills and confidence, and taking off the training wheels when
you’re ready to ride on your own.
The first two styles tend to yield transient
benefits, at best, and introduce risk into both
internal and external relationships. The benefits can be real enough, but they’re subject to
deterioration over time, as well as to sub-opti-mization without the foundation work on the
people part of the success equation.
