Anatomy of a Consultant

You’re a consultant? What do you actually do? Aren’t you too young to tell people how to run their business?

Every time family gathers around the holidays, I dread the inevitable questions about what I do for a living. While these questions are ubiquitous to any consultant, it is a constant challenge to explain exactly what it is we do. My colleagues who are front end developers build fantastic web and mobile experiences for our clients and their customers. My colleagues in data science develop algorithms that truly transform the way our clients run their businesses. But it never seems to be as straightforward for consultants.

I recently went to dinner with a friend who is a designer, and was asked to explain to her mother what she does for a living. Although she liked my answer of, “she makes things easier for people to use”, it got me thinking about why I find it so difficult to explain my own role. After much reflection, I’ve found that what it really boils down to is adding value for my clients. Here is my best attempt at explaining what it really means to be a consultant, or at the very least, what it looks like to add value for a client on a consulting project.

I am a translator: Anyone who has been part of a software implementation can attest that the business speaks in one language and IT speaks in another. I push our clients in the business to define and document exactly what they want their technology to do. Then, I translate those decisions into something that can be designed and built by the technical teams. However, if the technical teams have concerns, it is also my role to listen and constructively communicate back to the business the flaws in what they’ve asked for. This role was especially important on a customer experience transformation at a media and entertainment company. After our business stakeholders defined the future guest account experience for their customers, the technical teams identified problems with the approach that would inhibit their ability to utilize customer data over time. After several unproductive meetings with stakeholders talking past one another, I made it my job to sit down with the technical teams and truly understand their concerns. I then “translated” those concerns into language that I knew would resonate with the business, and we were able to define a better solution together for the long term.

I am a detective: “We can’t do that” and “it’s out of my control” are commonly heard on any project, yet the surface diagnosis of a problem is rarely the true root cause on a multi-disciplinary, cross-functional team. I am responsible for hunting for clues across every team, then linking them together into a deeper hypothesis on what’s causing the project’s issues. In my experience, this detective work has uncovered contract holes, client ulterior motives, skills misalignment, and accountability failures with other third party vendors. Before these deeper problems were identified, the symptoms were simply treated with band aids such as more frequent meetings, staffing ramp ups, and swapping out vendors. Only after the underlying issues were identified could they truly be resolved.

I am a diplomat: Consulting projects often require tough client conversations. From communicating risk, to pushing back on added scope, to simply delivering bad news, the art of gracefully navigating difficult conversations is a major part of consulting. The ability to successfully negotiate when the relationship is at stake, but priorities are in conflict, is a critical skill. I learned this lesson on a strategy project where we knew our client sponsor would not approve of a key recommendation, despite it being best for the organization. Instead of shying away from confrontation, we strategically engaged other critical stakeholders to communicate our point of view and to get their buy in. This approach enabled us to realize the best possible outcome for the client.

I am a curator: Every client has slightly different needs and interests. Often, my job requires seeking out the right pieces of “artwork” to bring in to the “gallery”. Is the project team the right match for the client’s tastes? Is the proposed approach a good fit with their typical behavior? Are they interested in being pushed out of their comfort zone with a new framework? Answering these questions, then curating the right project team, approach, and delivery framework to delight the client is required of a consultant. This skill served me well in leading 16 IBM Design Thinking workshops on an analytics strategy project at a large Southern Utility. I facilitated the involvement of various subject matter experts depending on the workshop topic, and adapted the approaches and tools I brought into each workshop according to the feedback we received.

I am an orchestra conductor: It is a given that consulting leaders must coordinate the many moving pieces of a project, and ensure that the full group is playing together in perfect harmony. However, the delivery of consulting projects also often requires knowing which section of the team should receive the most focus and attention at a specific point in time, while the others continue making music together in the background. As a program manager overseeing two simultaneous projects at a non-profit client, I struggled at first with allocating my time appropriately. Eventually, however, I learned how to keep the overall music playing with regular cadence meetings and status reports, while simultaneously paying special attention to a “section” of the orchestra that required my direction in getting back on tempo or in delivering an outstanding presentation.

I am a bus driver: Consulting projects have dozens of moving parts, and it’s easy to make a wrong turn and end up driving for miles in the wrong direction. Someone needs to keep their eyes fixed on the road to ensure that regardless of the people getting on and off the bus, the potholes, and any adverse weather, the bus continues driving forward down the right path. Recently at a utility client, I was brought in to support a phase of the project where the scope was unclear. I dedicated unwavering focus to the outcome I was brought in to achieve — collecting business requirements for a web portal that enables customers to view their personal energy usage data. I ensured that every action I took supported the ultimate goal of gathering web portal requirements, despite the many competing priorities, and was able to achieve the goal after one month on the project.

These are just a few examples that hopefully start to answer the question of, “what does a consultant really do? At the end of the day, we wear many different hats and are expected to jump in to do whatever is needed to ensure our clients’ success. That flexibility and commitment to solving any problem is really what it’s all about.