During a recent chat with a respected friend and former colleague, I heard him say ‘… and that’s why we hate consultants’.
It got me thinking. And I asked a few more friends who have hired consultants why they hate consultants and this is basically what I got:
- They regurgitate what our employees already know.
- They give us THEIR answer, without considering what we know.
- They have no real operational experience and think too theoretically.
- They don’t give us real actionable plans.
This all got me thinking about how I can best serve my clients and avoid falling into the traps that these other consultants apparently have. I began to break down the different types of errors.
Some of these errors are the flipside of each other, with the midpoint being the best (too much listening, not enough listening), there were also a few common threads: misalignment of expectations, lack of understanding as to what would be useful.
Were these just failures of communication? Why wouldn’t these consultants ask their clients whether they were on the right track? Why wouldn’t they see if the client was unhappy during the project? Or did they see it and just not care?
I empathize with the consultant who is trying to take the client through about 6 of the 8 steps in the Kotter Change model at once. Taking someone through meaningful change while keeping them happy all the time is pretty much impossible. That old exercise adage of ‘no pain, no gain’ really is apt here. Change, by definition is a difficult, murky, complicated process, and you need someone strong, experienced and impartial to get you through it.
To further complicate things, if you’re going to do good work for the client, they are going to hate you a little bit! Ideally, though, even while they are feeling the pain of the change, they see overall progress and be bought into the overall direction. That’s my job as a consultant to keep them fixed on that bigger picture.
In my experience by the end they are thrilled with the progress they have achieved, and they have gotten exactly what they expected. Now they are either building a plan to keep it going once I’m done or signing me on for another engagement – to help them with the next steps. Both sides can speak freely about what they liked or didn’t like, and would do differently next time to make even better.
My happy clients are my bread and butter, and it is worth it to bust my butt to keep them that way! Ask and they will tell you, you work together to make a plan, then you do it! But perhaps, rookie consultant that I am, I thought, I am oversimplifying.
Then I found this very elegant article by Harvard Business Review columnist Nilofer Merchant reinforcing many of the same ideas around hating consultants. She says it’s perfectly normal! But avoidable, if both sides are authentic, and willing to face the very human side that underpins all of business, no matter how technical the project or complicated the industry.
So in the end it seems like both sides have a part to play in the problem: Consultants cling to their methods, and undercommunicate to protect themselves and project prestige. Then they end up over their heads delivering something that the client finds useless. Clients don’t ask for what they really need – because they don’t know, assume they won’t get it, or aren’t willing to see a good idea that feels too different.
Well, we all have built-in biases toward what has made us successful in the past, and we can get attached to things that make no sense. We can all shy away from looking back our mistakes or having the tough conversations to avoid leaving our comfort zones.
But committing to keep “going there” – to talk about that embarrassing elephant in the room, and convert embarrassment into understanding – is worth it. With a little extra attention and courage, the energy of hating consultant gets converted into accomplishing amazing things in one’s business.