Good consultants know when it’s time to go

Another day, another Teams meeting. This one with a third-party consultant with whom a client had asked us to partner on a project. 

“This might cause you to think badly of me,” he said, staring blankly at the screen. “But I believe that there’s no way this problem gets cracked by anyone any time soon. Which I’m alright with, frankly, because it means that the client will keep on paying those bills.”

That old cliché about consultants borrowing your watch to tell you the time has its roots in reality. It’s too easy to encounter consultants who promise to solve problems, but whose actions end up involving restating the obvious, slow-walking the solution, or even perpetuating the very issues that their work purports to address. (Nassim Taleb writes eloquently about ‘hidden asymmetries’ of this sort in his book Skin in the Game.)

The interesting question is why such behaviour is sufficiently prevalent that clichés like the one above become common currency. 

As always, the answer is far from simple — and it points to a structural problem in the consultancy marketplace.

We’re on the road to nowhere

Let’s start by assuming the best. That consultant isn’t a bad actor. He’s just trying to provide for himself and his family in a world that is indifferent to his survival. It’s difficult to win a client, especially in tough economic times, and it’s tempting to do what is necessary to hang on to the ones you do have.

In simple terms, the consultant’s incentives are, in the short term at least, in opposition to the idea of achieving the quickest and most effective resolution to the problem. The type of desired resolution that created the desire for a consultant in the first place.

Now here’s the rub: clients themselves often collude with this behaviour. 

The first way this shows up goes to finance. Clients want transparency about what they’re buying to prove to themselves that they are not being ripped off. Again, we should assume the best here. People are just trying to protect themselves and their organisations in a hostile world. 

But this behaviour pushes the consultant into a buying dynamic that is time- and price-driven rather than informed by value. In the very way that the relationship is set up, the incentives start to work against the problem getting solved.

The X-Factorification of work

The situation is made more complex still by organisational psychology. One way this manifests itself is that most working people — i.e. clients — actually have two jobs: their actual job, plus the job of managing how well others perceive that they are doing their job. The innately hierarchical and competitive nature of most organisations mandates this behaviour.

This can create a dynamic where the appearance of action is often more important than action itself. (It’s akin to Sir Humphrey’s distillation of politicians’ logic in Yes, Minister. “We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.”)

It also means that all action is subject to a sort of popularity contest: achieving ‘buy-in’ can become more important than the ultimate consequences of the action, at least for a time. There’s safety in numbers, even if the numbers are nonsense and the safety is imagined.

So, the consultant bills his or her hours, and the client pays those bills, in the vague, unexamined and often self-contradictory hope that things change for the organisation while nothing changes for them (except perhaps their career prospects, for the better).

Raising the interest rate

I’m conscious that the above might sound cynical. It’s the opposite: the behaviour of every actor — client and consultant alike — makes complete sense when their short-term incentives are understood. That behaviour also deserves compassion. In a difficult world, people are doing what they deem necessary to survive.

But the unavoidable problem is that ultimately, such behaviour serves no-one’s interests. In fact it works against them in the medium to long term. 

Take our consultant from earlier, slow-walking an answer to a problem in the hope of getting to submit a few more invoices. Ultimately, he will take the fall for the lack of progress when the client is called to account for their results—as the organisational popularity contest mandates that they must. 

The consultant’s reputation suffers, and he finds it harder than before to win those all-too-rare new clients, creating yet more pressure on him to make those he does win as lucrative as possible — and the whole cycle starts from scratch once more.

As for the client, the instinct for self-preservation and appearance-above-action can work against the sometimes pressing (and always in hindsight obvious) need for real change to take root. In the best-case scenario, this squanders organisational potential. In the worst case — well, jobs, departments, even entire businesses have been lost this way.

First, do no harm

Imagine, for a moment, that clients don’t need consultants. (Not a stretch, you might think, after all this.) Imagine that what they need instead is a specialist surgical team: those who can perform the most delicate of operations with an unswerving gaze and a steady hand.

If you were a client engaging such a team, it seems reasonable to suggest that you listened to what they had to say. You would trust them when they tell you that the operation that they are going to perform will take time, and perhaps take longer to recover from than you might have expected. You would believe them when they tell you that it is going to hurt — but also that you will head into the future with your injury cured and your health restored.

And you might be inclined to tell your colleagues and peers that you are in safe hands, and to trust the team in question.

Surgery might feel like a clumsy analogy for organisational change. The latter is rarely life or death. But let’s be clear. In any situation where external consulting support is required, individual and collective prospects, wellbeing and prosperity are on the line to some extent. And these things shouldn’t be gambled away at the roulette wheel of short-term interests. 

This is why “first, do no harm” should be the maxim for all consultants — and, as this analogy suggests, not solving a problem is a form of harm.

We can do better

The question, then, is, ‘How do we create consultants who are capable of carrying themselves through the world with the clarity and confidence of a highly trained, trusted, industry-leading team of experts?’

Such consultants need advanced skills in how to work in challenging, high-pressure situations. They need gravitas: the ability to command a space. And they need a mindset that is grounded in both the value they bring and the ethos that informs their work, which itself is a function of their values.

This brings us back to the themes of my last two posts. Firstly, there is a need for much higher quality training and advice than most independent consultants are currently able to access. No-one can learn without a good school to go to, helpful mentors, and peers with whom to compare notes. 

Secondly, this support needs to enable consultants to stay long enough in their chosen field to be able to evolve the skills and experience of leading experts. Resilience matters because the one thing that you can’t teach is time — and time is what expertise requires to flourish.

The Consultancy Business exists to help independent consultants create conditions in which they can do the work that matters: supporting clients in achieving genuine, sustainable change. The kind of change on which client careers are made, and outstanding consulting reputations are built.

Do you want to be part of a community that champions doing things the right way? Check out The Consultancy Business Podcast:

What to take from this article

The best route to sustainable success is to do the right thing, not the easy thing — however much the world of work seems to encourage the opposite.

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