From Consultant to Practitioner
Midwives are pretty badass
Consulting is frustrating, to put it lightly. If you’ve ever done it, even if you’ve ever counseled someone through an experience that you’ve been through before, you know what I’m talking about. The world is full of thirsty horses, but standing on the bank together, it feels like they wind up drowning themselves a whole lot more than drinking.
A lot of this just ends up happening because we’re human. We’re selfish, so we want to field opinions but maintain control. For the people offering counsel, we quickly give up because “the customer is always right” even though they aren’t…they’re just in control.
We want people to like us and compensate us for making them happy, so we compromise long-term results for short term gains. It’s natural, we all do it, but at the end of the day, “it’s their company...” Guh.
My wife and I are just about to have a baby (which is terrifying), and have been trying to figure out how we should navigate the chaos. Along the way, Brandon told me a story about how their midwife who specialized in home-births had basically a “my way or the highway” approach, a stiff upper lip that just about anyone could be envious of.
It was fairly simple… “We are working together to get both you and your baby through a risky and unpredictable process, so if you want me to be responsible for giving both of you the highest chance of the best possible outcome, you have to do exactly what I say or I can’t help you.”
This badass is a practitioner, not a consultant like most of us. She’s an expert in something extremely complicated and nuanced with an unbelievably high cost of failure. Her business is built on reputation and outcomes, not advertising and pitch decks. She also measures success the same way her clients do: at the end, when the mother and child are safe and healthy, not at the beginning, when another customer is acquired and another contract signed.
I wish I could be as awesome as her, but for now, we can at least try to borrow her bravery. So, what if we stopped being consultants, and started being practitioners…what would that look like? Well, here’s a shot at a few differences.
Expertise
- As consultants, we have relative expertise — “I know more than you about this.”
- As practitioners, we must constantly refine our definitive expertise — “I know how to do this. The end.”
Responsibility
- As consultants, we are responsible for sharing our relative expertise and delivering on commitments.
- A practitioners, we are responsible for outcomes, both good and bad, by exercising our definitive expertise to the very best of our abilities.
Control
- As consultants, we work for the customer who controls direction and scope.
- As practitioners, we work with the customer as servant leaders or we can't work at all. Without control, we can’t be responsible for outcomes.
Boundaries
- Because we aren’t in control as consultants, the customer sets boundaries around what we can and cannot influence.
- As practitioners, we set boundaries around where and when the customer can have free reign, and when they must comply for the sake of our shared desire in the same outcome.
Acquisition
- As consultants, we acquire customers by pitching our relative expertise and by social proof via the companies that we’ve worked with before.
- As practitioners, we acquire customers based solely on outcomes, both good and bad, and the trust built on the transparency we offer into both.
The key to all of this, which may sound a little crazy, is two-fold. The first is a shared understanding of the actual task at hand. If it is a risky and unpredictable process that the customer cannot do alone, they need a practitioner. If it’s not, then a consultant will do just fine.
Second, your motivations need to be aligned around a shared outcome. When we fail as consultants, we can just pitch to someone else. But as practitioners, we lose future business because of our failures. There’s no reason for someone to share something so important to them if we aren’t willing to share in the pain and loss of failure.
To make this change, and it’s a big change, the burden rests solely on us, the experts. We have to measure real outcomes, not build portfolios. We have to lead with vulnerability, acknowledging both our successes and failures. And we have to be brave enough to say “no” to customers who won’t trust us because we’ll never truly be able to help them. It’s easier said than done, but it sounds a lot more fun than consulting.
Worth a clap? We hope so, but if not let us know why below in the comments
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