Chapter 1: A consultant by any other name
Definition: A consultant is a person in a position to have some influence over an individual, a
group, or an organization but has no direct power to make changes or implement programs.
The recipients of a consultant’s advice are called clients.
Definition: A manager is someone who has direct responsibility over the action. The moment
you take direct responsibility, you are acting as a manager.
Goal in any consulting activity is some kind of change:
1. Create change in the line organization of a structural, policy, or procedural nature
for example: a new compensation package, a new reporting process, or a new safety
program.
2. The end result that one person or many people in the line organization have learned
something new.
Skills needed in consulting jobs:
Technical Skills: we need expertise about the question. It is only later, after acquiring
some technical expertise, that we start consulting. If we didn’t have some expertise,
then people wouldn’t ask for our advice.
Interpersonal Skills: some ability to put ideas into words, to listen, to give support, to
disagree reasonably, to basically maintain a relationship.
Consulting Skills: Consulting skills are grouped into four phases: contracting,
discovery, feedback, and decision. Each consulting project goes through five phases.
The steps in each phase are sequential; if you skip one or assume it has been taken
care of, you are headed for trouble. Skillful consulting is being competent in the
execution of each of these steps.
Phases of consulting:
1. Entry and Contracting: It includes setting up the first meeting as well as exploring the
problem, whether the consultant is the right person to work on this issue, what the
client’s expectations are, what the consultant’s expectations are, and how to get
started.
2. Discovery and Dialogue: Consultants need to come up with their own sense of both
the problem and the strengths the client has. Who is going to be involved in defining
the problem or situation? What methods will be used? What kind of data should be
collected? How long will it take? Should the inquiry be done by the consultant, or
should it be done by the client?
3. Analysis and the Decision to Act: This phase is really what many people call planning.
It includes setting ultimate goals for the project and selecting the best action steps or
changes.
4. Engagement and Implementation: This involves carrying out the planning of phase 3.
5. Extension, Recycle, or Termination: it’s about learning from the engagement.
Following this is the decision whether to extend the process to a larger segment of
the organization. There are many options for ending the relationship, and
termination should be considered a legitimate and important part of the
consultation.
,Chapter 2: Techniques are not enough
In acting as a consultant, you always operate at two levels:
Content—the cognitive part of a discussion between yourself and the client.
Your relationship to the client during each phase - both you and the client are
generating and sensing your feelings about each other. There are four elements to
the affective side of consultant-client inter- action that are always operating:
1. Responsibility: To have a good contract with the client, responsibility for what
is planned and takes place must be balanced, 50/50.
2. Feelings: The consultant needs to constantly keep in mind how much the
client is owning feelings versus talking as if he or she is just an observer of the
organization. The consultant also must keep in mind what his or her own
feelings are about the client.
3. Trust: It is often useful to ask clients whether they trust your confidentiality,
whether they trust you not to make them vulnerable or to take things over.
You can ask them what doubts they have working with you. In this way,
you’re working to build trust.
4. Your own needs: Consultants have a right to their own needs from the
relationship.
The Consultant’s Assumptions
Problem Solving Requires Valid Data: Valid data encompass two things:
1. objective data about ideas, events, or situations that everyone accepts as
facts.
2. personal data that concerns how individuals feel about what is happening to
them and around them.
Effective Decision Making Requires Free and Open Choice: Organizations seem to
work better when people have an opportunity to influence decisions that have a
direct impact on their work.
Effective Implementation Requires Internal Commitment: People readily commit
themselves to things they believe will further their interests. Because consultants or
support people have no direct control over implementation, they become dependent
on line managers for producing results. Therefore, the consultant needs to be
conscious of building internal commitment throughout the consulting process.
The Consultant’s Goals
1. Establish a Collaborative Relationship: a collaborative relationship promises
maximum use of people’s resources and
2. Solve Problems So They Stay Solved: Teaching managers the skills for solving a
problem themselves next time requires that they understand that disturbing
employee behavior is a symptom of more basic problems and that they should not
ask others to address problems that belong to them.
3. Ensure Attention Is Given to Both the Technical/ Business Problem and the
Relationships: Consultants can urge attention to the process issues, and line
managers will listen to them in a way in which they would not listen to each other.
,Role’s consultants can choose
Expert Role: support person becomes the ‘expert’ in the performance of a given task.
- The manager has elected to play an inactive role.
- The consultant makes decisions on how to proceed.
- Disagreement is not likely because it would be difficult for the
manager to challenge "expert" reasoning.
- Collaboration is not required.
- Two-way communication is limited.
- Problems: (1) problems that are purely technical are rare and (2) the
commitment of people to take the recommended actions
Pair-of-Hands Role: the manager sees the consultant as an extra pair of hands.
- The consultant takes a passive role.
- The manager makes the decisions on how to proceed.
- The manager selects the methods for discovery and analysis.
- Control rests with the manager.
- The manager specifies change procedures for the consultant to
implement.
- Collaboration is not necessary.
- Two-way communication is limited.
- Problem: The manager specifies change procedures for the
consultant to implement.
Collaborative Role: management issues can be dealt with effectively only by joining
his or her specialized knowledge with the manager’s knowledge of the organization.
- The consultant and the manager work to become interdependent.
- Decision making is bilateral.
- Data collection and analysis are joint efforts.
- Control issues become matters for discussion and negotiation.
- Collaboration is considered essential.
- Communication is two-way .
- The goal is to solve problems so they stay solved.
- Problems: (1) Consultants often have special skills that managers see
as a quick answer to their problems and (2) takes more time.
Staging the client’s Involvement:
1. Define the Initial Problem: Ask the client to state what the problem is. If the client is
thinking more of a new possibility than a problem, state this in your own words. Add
to this statement what you think might be some more underlying causes of the
problem or important elements of the possibility.
2. Decide Whether to Proceed with the Project: If the project is set up in a way that
you think it won’t succeed, you should negotiate the terms.
3. Select the Dimensions to Be Studied: Given your expertise in the project, you may
know best what aspect of the problem should be analyzed. The client, though, has
operating experience with the problem and the people and can be asked what to
look for.
, 4. Decide Who Will Be Involved in the Project: The client often expects the consultant
to do the whole job. Creating a consultant-client team to do the job is a good way to
build client commitment.
5. Select the Method: The client has ideas about how the data should be collected. Ask
what they are.
6. Do Discovery: Have the client do the discovery with you.
7. Funneling the Data and Making Sense of It: Urge the client to be with you at
8. certain points in this procedure. Analyzing what the data mean is fun, so involve the
client in this too.
9. Provide the Results: Have the client share in presenting the data analysis in the
feedback meeting.
10. Make Recommendations: Ask the client what he or she would do about the
situation, having now heard the results of the inquiry.
11. Decide on Actions: Once the study is done and the recommendations made, the
client may want to take over the process and dismiss the consultant from the
decision-making meeting. I always resist this.
