Principles of Talentism: Part 11 - Consultants, not Accountants

(Continuing with the long running and often tortured series about the "Principles of Talentism". Hang in there, we're almost done.)

If you are in a P&L that delivers services then you need to learn how to be a consultant. In fact, spending time as a consultant is something that everybody in corporate America should do at least once in their career.

We need to separate the practice of consulting from it’s standard implementation. Consultants usually exist inside of consultancies, and consultancies, like all other businesses, exist to make money. Since consultancies make their money by finding things that are wrong and pointing them out to a client who may be otherwise blissfully unaware of the issue, consultancies are structurally doomed to be reviled by their clients and the clients employees. The fact that many consultancies make money by finding things that are perfectly OK, or could be repaired by someone internally, and then pointing them out to the client as not only broken, but only fixable by the consultancy themselves, further tarnishes the luster of the profession.

But we are not talking about the business of consulting here. So let’s acknowledge that “consultants” get a bad name for reasons both real and imagined and talk about what being a consultant is all about.

Good consultants do three things very well: ask insightful questions to gain deeper understanding, listen for opportunity and identify the real problem. By comparison, most business people spend time primarily as accountants: count the problems and cost them.

Whenever I see a reasonably successful business person they always have the consultant qualities. Whenever I see someone that is locked in a dead-end job, watching the clock and hoping for a cold beer and TV as soon as possible, they operate by the principles of accounting. I have never seen a variation to this theme.

As a consultant, you first and foremost learn how to capitalize on business opportunities rather than complain about problems. There is a maxim amongst cynical sales people that prospects lie. And that is sometimes true. But often it’s simply that potential customers can't translate what they want or believe to be true into shared meaning (as in “We really do both understand each other”). So the customers say things that make perfect sense to them but come across as complete lunacy to anybody who isn’t living the problem day-to-day.

Asking insightful questions until you get to common understanding is perhaps the most important skill that people inside a company can have, and yet few do. Most people think of themselves as "workers" - they get instructions and they carry them out. But here's a hint: most of the instructions are wrong. It’s a set-up. Not because your boss is a bad person but because they are just as much in the dark as you are. Hope is not a Strategy is the title of a good sales book, and it should also be a phrase that everyone inside a company should learn: just hoping that someone above you in the corporate food chain not only knows what they are talking about but has the wisdom and time to translate that instruction into just the right language for you to know exactly what you are supposed to do is nothing but a "hope" strategy. It almost never happens.

Everyone in the organization has to take responsibility for asking the right questions to figure out what everyone else is talking about. This is a consulting skill.

The second part of the consultant’s skill set is “listening for opportunity.” The little accountant inside of you wants to keep score. So someone comes to you with a problem and your brain kicks in with the double-entry accounting: “Bob messed this up and it’s gonna cost him a lot to get me to dig him out from it.” Like all double-entry accounting, however, this never achieves anything except a zero-basis. Remember, accounting, whether it is classical number crunching or internal defensive mind games, is all about making the ledger balance. Creating value goes out the window.

Consulting on the other hand seeks to make critical problems into opportunities. And while some consultancy clients may end up feeling like it’s a zero sum game, the reality is that good consultants are approaching the world like good business people: optimistic and always thinking of solutions

Finally, consultants get good through practice at identifying the real problem. How many of us have been told to go do something only to find out later that all that work was for naught – you had been working hard to solve a problem that really wasn’t important? I get approached every week by people that insist they have done thorough analysis and identified the real issue at hand, and within 5 minutes of asking questions almost inevitably it becomes clear that putting time, attention and capital towards solving that particular problem in the way the person is advocating would be nothing but a waste of time, attention and capital.

How do you know “the real problem”? Start by asking the WGLL question – “What does good look like?” Get people out of their purely analytical stance and ask them to start exploring the problem from the perspective of goodness (otherwise known as “quality”). Once they have identified the ultimate goal in a way that is real and compelling, ask them to describe how solving this problem connects to the larger business goals at hand. This is critical because while there are many problems to be solved within a company, only a few problems are actually impediments to achieving the stated goals of the company. Most problems are just accounting (the personal ledger is out of balance). Once the person has described WGLL and how it solves a problem important to the company, then ask them to draw a straight line between the activity they are proposing and getting to WGLL on that problem. It usually can’t be done. This is how asking questions helps you get to the “real problem.”

HR can take the lead in transforming the corporate culture from accounting to consulting. It’s a key part of the strategy of getting the maximum leverage from your talent, and it’s a unique insight that only HR can bring to the table and foster through training, advocacy and communication.

Comments

[Wendy Morgan]

I am relieved to see that Mr. Hunter has started writing again. The world was missing his intelligent voice!