Consultants Require a Distinct Set of Skills

Expertise, knowledge, and management experience are not enough.

Although my career in enterprise IT covered half a century, most of that time was as a consultant. In fact, my employee positions in corporate IT were only with four large companies in the first 10 years. After that, I transitioned into a consulting career.

So, many of the lessons I learned in my career were about what it takes to be a consultant.

This post covers the role of consultants, the skills they require, and why it’s not easy to make the transition from business management to consulting.

What Is a Consultant?

People commonly refer to someone who is hired on a temporary basis as a “consultant.” But “consultant” is not a synonym for “contractor.” Being a consultant is not about how you are paid; it’s about the kind of work you do. In fact, you can be a full-time employee of a company and still be a consultant for that company—in other words, an internal consultant.

For example, my business partner, Dan Husiak, learned his consulting skills first as an internal consultant at Bell Labs and then at TRW. And those skills were highly transferable to the work he did with me, first at the SI firm and then as partners at Strativa.

So, what is it that consultants do? In his classic book, Flawless Consulting, Peter Block [1] described three basic roles that consultants play in client engagements. These are not fixed roles, although a consultant may have a preferred role. They are:

• Pair of Hands: Here the client knows what to do and how to do it. But they don’t have the time. So, they hire a consultant to do it for them. For example, a company may need to develop a new system, write job descriptions, or source new suppliers. They could do any of these things themselves, but they are shorthanded. So, they hire a consultant to do it for them. To me, this is not much different from staff augmentation, and if the consultant doesn’t bring any unique experience or skills to the engagement, I might not even consider it as consulting.

• Expert: Here the client doesn’t know what to do or how to do it and needs a consultant who is an expert in the problem domain to assess the situation and recommend a proposed change. The client does not take an active role in the project except to provide information and to approve or provide feedback on the consultant’s work.

• Collaborative: Here the consultant and the client work together as a team. The consultant brings knowledge and experience from other client engagements along with methodologies, tools, and processes to analyze the problem and develop a solution. The client brings knowledge of the organization, its current situation, its culture, and “how things get done around here.” In this role, the consultant often stays engaged with the client to carry out the implementation, even if it is just in an advisory role.

As a professional, I find the collaborative role to be the most rewarding. In the expert role, the client is not highly engaged in the project, and it is easy for the client to simply not carry out the consultant’s recommendation. This is what is known in the business as “shelfware.” Or the implementation may fail, and the consultant may become an easy scapegoat. In fact, sometimes clients hire consultants for difficult decisions so that they have someone to blame if things go south.

With collaborative consulting, the client is personally invested in the proposed change because the client was a partner in its development. As noted, the consultant also stays involved in the implementation and becomes invested in its success as well. That leads better outcomes and an experience that is more rewarding for both the client and the consultant.

Consulting Skills Go Beyond Expertise

A consultant needs to be more than a smart person, more than an industry or domain expert. Yes, your experience gives you credibility in a certain industry, business function, or problem domain. But consulting skills go beyond that.

Consulting skills include several other skills that are essential. Here are just a few. For example, consultants need to be able to walk into an ambiguous situation or disorganized environment and quickly make sense out of it. They need to be skilled in gathering data, whether through interviews, surveys, or direct observation. They need to be able break down a problem into its component parts, so they can be analyzed.

They also need critical thinking skills, not taking what they hear at face value but looking for evidence that problems are real and identifying whether something is a root cause or a symptom. They need to do more than simply parrot back to the client what they heard in interviews [2].

They also need creative thinking skills, thinking “out of the box,” seeing solutions that go beyond easy answers to propose changes that will address root causes. Whenever possible, they need to find solutions that are truly a win-win, rather than compromises.

And in all this, they need to write well and speak clearly and persuasively.

More Than Management and Leadership Skills

Now, you might think that experience as a business manager—whether in operations, supply chain, finance, HR, or IT, for example—would help develop these skills. Certainly, I have known some business leaders who have done that and transitioned successfully to a consulting career. But I’ve also seen those who could not make that transition.

Why is that? It is because managing ongoing operations is not the same as consulting. By their position in the organization, business executives have authority. Consultants don’t, except for the power of their ideas. They need to be able to persuade clients to take a certain course of action. Management skills, especially project management skills, are important. But business leaders are accustomed to giving direction and expecting people to follow. Consultants can influence others, but they cannot give direction.

This is why the collaborative consulting model is powerful. The consultant brings subject-matter knowledge, experience, and an outside perspective. The client is in a position to make things happen and lead the organization to carry out the plan.

Failure of the Retread Model

Our understanding of the difference between management skills and consulting skills became clear in our early years at Strativa. In the 12 months that we spent planning for our launch, we came up with a resource strategy that Dan called “the retread model” [3].

Here’s what that meant. At that time, in the late 1990s, we were seeing businesses removing layers of middle management in order to “run lean.” This meant they had little capacity to take on new growth initiatives or digital transformation projects, which were increasing with the e-business boom. Therefore, there would be a much greater need for outside consulting resources. We saw this as a “demand opportunity” for our services.

At the same time, all these laid off or overworked and discontented middle managers would be looking for more meaningful employment and would be excellent candidates to become Strativa consultants. This would be our “supply opportunity” for new consultants…or so we thought.

Here was our concluding word about the retread model:

We believe that this model would be so attractive to a certain type of discontented but talented senior managers that we would have more good candidates than we could hire.

But things didn’t work out that way.

Although we did hire several former business managers as consultants, most of them had made the transition consulting prior to joining us. In contrast, the few who joined us straight out business management positions did not successfully make the transition [4].

The good news for those who want to break into consulting is that the skills needed can be taught. In fact, in those seven years I spent at the SI Firm, I developed a whole curriculum for consultant skills training. Even 20+ years later, I was still using and teaching those skills to younger consultants.

Nevertheless, to really develop these skills takes many years of practice with many clients. There are always new clients, with new situations and new challenges. We should never stop learning.

End Notes

[1] Dan was a big fan of Peter Block and David Maister, another great source for understanding the consulting profession. He introduced their books to me, and I highly recommend both.

[2] As the old joke goes, a consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is.

[3] Dan was great at coming up with catchy names for things. Here, he took the word “retread” from the practice of recycling old worn-out tires on vehicles by simply replacing the tread. Dan meant no disrespect, but it’s not a particularly flattering term. I think the only place we used it was in our business plan.

[4] At the risk of unfairly exaggerating, with some of them their idea of consulting is sitting across the table from the client and starting sentences with, “Well, when I was a CxO….” That does give you a certain amount of credibility. But if you don’t have the skills discussed in this post and you can’t produce something of value as a deliverable, clients are not going to want to pay for your “advice.”

Image credit: Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images

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