Tag Archives: consulting

The Art of Consulting – Impartial, Honest and Independent

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In my last post on the Art of Consulting I compared a consultant to a waiter. My aim was to consider the balance of customer service (attempted compliance with the customer’s perceived agenda, at least) and honest advice.

  • The first waiter is willing to provide whatever the customer wants.
  • The second offers a menu but with no recommendations.
  • The third recommends certain items from the menu.
  • The fourth advises the customer to go elsewhere.
  • The fifth tells the customer he doesn’t look well enough to eat.

Which of these behaves most like a good consultant?

The Art of Consulting

The Art of Consulting – What’s the Role of the Consultant?

My own view is that a consultant must always be:

  • Demonstrably expert
  • Demonstrably experienced
  • Unequivocally honest
  • Of good repute
  • Impartial and independent (or declare his interests)

The first waiter sounds like he’s intent on the best possible customer service, though in reality I find it hard to believe that ‘anything is possible’ at short notice. (There’s a myth that Harrods in London will sell you anything you want as long as you can pay for it, but I find that hard t believe too!) But a consultant doesn’t just do anything the customer asks him to do. Rather, he advises.

The second waiter, who offers a choice from a menu, but without offering advice, sounds like a consultant I once employed in my company. He was one of the cleverest we ever had and could absorb the capabilities of a business software system simply by reading a manual from cover to cover (and even seemed to enjoy that experience). He was also eager to please. At the time I compared him favourably with another more plodding consultant whom I’d employed for far longer.

So I was somewhat surprised when a client begged me to send them the plodder rather than the clever one. ‘We can see that XXXXXX is clever, and that he knows his stuff,’ they told me, ‘and we do like him, but he won’t tell us what to do. He gives us at least four options to choose from, and, frankly, we don’t know which of the four options is the best one. YYYYYY on the other hand just offers us one option and we get on with it, and as far as we can tell, the options he recommended have all worked.’

Intellectual uncertainty, and rational self-doubt, however justified, are not what customers are looking for.

True, the third waiter also offers a choice, but the he also lays out the premise for each one – ‘If you like fish…’, or ‘If you like meat….’. This sounds more like a consultant to me.

But what about the fourth? The fourth is alarmingly honest, and the fifth is almost offensively honest.

Both act against their immediate interests – revenue (and tips). At least they appear to. And this lends credence to their advice. But what if the fourth waiter has a stake in the restaurant to which he sends the customer? This raises a point about independence and impartiality. Independence and impartiality must be both real and apparent. A consultant must always declare his interests, whether financial or merely psychological (such as friendship with a potential supplier).

Some consultants (for example, in the world of business software) are more closely allied with a particular product than with others, and have more experience of it. The customer must be made aware of this. It is not always possible to rid oneself of all influences.

In my early days in the business, working for Coopers & Lybrand in 1991 in Budapest, I had a small stake in a local company that was reselling the British financial system, SunSystems, which was already a popular choice for multinationals investing in former Communist Eastern Europe. I was asked by Coopers & Lybrand to advise Shell on systems. This clearly created a conflict of interests, but once I had declared my interest, and given that Shell were likely to choose SunSystems anyway, it was seen as an advantage by Shell that I knew the system and could help them with it.

In fact, I like both of the last two waiters. Honesty must sometimes trump business advantage. If, as consultants, we really don’t think that we can help a client (either because we don’t know enough or even because we’re not going to be available) then we should turn the business down. In the virtuous world we live in, this often redounds to our advantage at some later time.

The last level of honesty is difficult, and it’s only possible if the relationship is already strong. Remember, messengers sometimes get shot. So perhaps I would recommend the waiter who comes somewhere between number four and number five and is very sensitive to the situation.

Dont-shoot-the-messenger

The Art of Consulting – What’s the Role of the Consultant?

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From time to time, I run training courses on Non Technical Skills for Consultants and one of the first questions I ask participants concerns the relationship between consultant and client.

After years in the field we consultants take this relationship for granted, but it’s actually a slightly tricky one. We’re engaged to provide independent and impartial advice to our clients, but we’re also paid for it. On the one hand we must do what we’re told, and on the other hand we tell our clients what to do.

Conflicts of interest in consulting have an infamous history. Remember the ENRON scandal and its aftermath. When the big audit firms provided consulting services to their clients they had an interest in being a little more ‘understanding’ of accounting lapses than they ought to have been. Being nice to their audit clients won them millions in consulting fees. The link was never explicit, and perhaps in some cases it wasn’t even conscious, but even so, the consequence of the scandal were that the big audit firms were forced to shed their consulting practices and firms were required to change their auditors more frequently.

So, where do we consultants stand? Are we told what to do, or do we tell?

Those of us who have been in the business too long might, at this point, and with a wry smile, plead the ‘psychoanalyst’ position, and claim that all we’re ever expected to do, as consultants, is to listen sympathetically to what the client says, ask a few very open questions, and then agree with whatever position the client takes. You certainly don’t get fired that way. But it’s not my way.

In my training course I draw a parallel with the way a waiter might present his restaurant’s offering to a guest, and I ask participants to tell me which waiter is most like a consultant.

waiter

The Compliant Waiter 

The compliant waiter is eager to provide his guest with whatever he may ask for:

Good evening, Sir. No, Sir, we don’t have a menu. This is perhaps an unusual restaurant. We take pride in offering you the best possible service. We give you exactly what you want. Our chef can cook absolutely anything. Just tell me what you’d like.

The Conventional Waiter

The conventional waiter offers a menu of options.

Good evening, Sir. Here’s our menu. You’ll see that we have a wide variety of dishes, all of them good. Just tell me what you’d like.

The Advising Waiter

The advising waiter offers his own recommendations from the menu.

Good evening, Sir. Here’s our menu. You’ll see that we have a wide variety of dishes, all of them good. But we’re especially famous for our fish, and the lemon sole is particularly excellent today. But if you prefer meat, then the sirloin steak is the best we’ve got. Just tell me what you’d like.

The Honest Waiter

The honest waiter puts the interests of his guest first, and seems abandon commercially sensible behaviour, sending his guest to another restaurant (perhaps in the hope that he will return on a better day?).

Good evening, Sir. Here’s our menu. You’ll see we have a wide variety of dishes, all of them usually good. But just between you and me, the chef had a tiny bit too much to drink last night. If you really want to eat well, then come back another time. You’ll do better today at that restaurant across the road. I ate there myself last week and it’s really pretty good.

The Extremely Honest Waiter

The extremely honest waiter is intrusive!

Good evening, Sir. It’s nice to see you again. I have to say, though, that you don’t look your best this evening. In your present condition I’d say you’d be much better off not eating anything at all.

Which of these is most like a consultant?

Let me know your thoughts.

This is the second post in a series on the Art of Consulting.

The Art of Consulting

The Art of Consulting

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To my mind there is no better job in the world than that of the consultant.

My own field of consulting is business IT, but whether you’re an architect designing a building, an engineer designing a car, a doctor diagnosing an illness, a systems analyst creating a system, a detective investigating a crime, or a lawyer constructing a case, the excitement is the same.

What does a consultant do?

A consultant uses his knowledge, experience, intelligence and imagination to investigate, understand, and advise on the resolution of problems brought to him by a client. He may also manage the task of resolving the problem.

consultant 1

The process is similar, whatever the profession. There’s an investigative phase, which involves researching, listening, questioning, and confirming. There’s an advisory phase, where a solution or a number of solutions must be put forward to a client. And finally, though not in all cases, there’s an execution phase, when a solution is implemented.  The last requires the additional skills  of pragmatism and persuasion beyond those involved in diagnosis.

I wouldn’t do any other job. Even though I manage a number of companies, I’m still involved in sales and consulting. And I’m still excited by the first days of the sales process, when I must, as rapidly as possible, understand what an organisation might need a system to do, whether the organisation is making chocolate, selling insurance, monitoring expenses, scheduling services, or extracting sugar from sugar beet.

As an IT consultant I’m interested in understanding what an organisation needs to know in order to run a business well, and what it is practical for me to suggest. And when a ‘system design workshop’ begins if  our software or ideas have been chosen, there’s nothing to beat the concentrated effort involved in gathering opinions, reviewing a business from top to toe and then inventing a solution.

Every client, every business, every culture in which you work, is different. You learn about so much from so many different people. If you’re good, you’ll end up not as a Jack of All Trades but a Master of None, but as a Master of Many Trades. When I think of how I might have spent my professional life, quietly, perhaps equally prosperously, unambitiously doing nearly the same tasks every day, I rejoice in my good fortune. Never mind the stress of failing to sell more often than not, of long hours, of distant travel, of uncomfortable hotels, of demanding clients, the sheer intellectual challenge justifies it all.

I’ve spent 30 years in consulting, and now run a business software consultancy and reseller. I’ve seen a lot, but there’s always something new for me to think about each day. But one of the things I’ve learned over the years is that some of the essential skills of consulting are not particular to a profession. They’re needed by the lawyer, the engineer, the PR consultant, the architect, by anyone who must research, listen, question, imagine, devise, design, explain, describe, sell, persuade and implement.

So, in a series of posts I’m going to write about some of these skills and how a consultant must bring them to bear on what he does. And, as the title suggests, I firmly believe it’s an art, not just a skill. Imagination plays a hugely important role in the process. Consulting is creative.