Good Consultant, Bad Consultant

An article inspired by Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager

I’ve done consulting for a decent portion of my career. After meeting great professionals, not-so-great professionals and making my fair share of mistakes, I wrote this piece on the style of Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager.

Bad consultant is self-serving: he does his best to be necessary in the future, making him more expensive in the long run. Good consultant does her best to be unnecessary, making her cheaper in the long run. Bad consultant is a service provider for the most part. Good consultant partners with you.

Bad consultant is zealous about his ways. Good consultant is healthily agnostic. Good consultant focuses on her value proposition and recognises the strengths of other firms. Bad consultant badmouths the competition even if he never worked with any of it. Bad consultant will find silver bullets for your problems if you push him. Good consultant will never try sell to you something you don’t need.

Bad consultant defines his own success metrics and games them. Good consultant has her success measured by independent parties. Bad consultant shows off about projects that fresh undergrads could do with a few weeks of proper training. Good consultant reflects critically upon work that is damn hard to get right.

Bad consultant speaks about transformation, digital, agile or any other buzzword from a position of moral superiority. Good consultant welcomes the new with humility and looks for overarching principles. Bad consultant paces quickly towards solutions. Good consultant enjoys the mud of the problem space.

Bad consultant overpromises, underdelivers and then fabricates ghost problems to solve. Good consultant manages expectations, overdelivers and then comes up with ways to improve her core offering.

Bad consultant has a sweet tooth for making recommendations, but is not the owner of future consequences. Good consultant captures trade offs and lets the client decide, but she takes accountability when things go wrong. Bad consultant falsely believes that the client’s ability to decide autonomously exempts him from any responsibility. Good consultant understands that with the power to shape and frame decisions comes great responsibility.

Bad consultant has survived by packing the same ideas for years and selling them under a slightly different brand. Bad consultant talks about the new but does not take the time to understand it deeply. Good consultant has survived by learning and growing. Good consultant evolves her skillset, she stays on the cutting edge of her area of expertise.

Bad consultant has a solution layer that can be laid on top of any given problem. Good consultant applies different lenses. Bad consultant is in upsell mode, he pushes product. Good consultant is in value mode, she is cracking a problem.

Bad consultant makes your brain ache when you have to open one of his emails or respond to one of his calls. Good consultant feels like part of the team, work feels lighter after talking to her. Bad consultant speaks in a different language. Good consultant gets your culture and what your business is about.

Bad consultant uses rules of thumb that he learned from books and oral traditions. Good consultant tests heuristics and does not get carried away by lazy thinking. When caught off guard, Bad consultant looks like a deer in the headlights. His only resource in that moment is defensiveness.

Bad consultant does not work on his people skills. He thinks he is outstanding because of some fortunate endowment of charisma or gravitas. Good consultant hones her people skills and her ability to facilitate groups.

Bad consultant is always in dual victim/hero role. Bad consultant thinks customers are stupid and blames them, but somehow he is always there to save the day. Bad Consultant is ego-driven. Good consultant holds dear intellectual respect for her customers, is highly self-aware and celebrates success as a joint victory. Good consultant demonstrates servant leadership.

Bad consultant and Good consultant can both be strong personalities. Bad consultant becomes a diva under pressure. Good consultant handles her own psychology extremely well.

Bad consultant and Good consultant can both be top 10% communicators. Bad consultant happens to be a master of dialectical traps, misdirection and perspective shifting. Good consultant is data-informed, gives clarity and articulates value.

Bad consultant focuses too much on the next short term deliverable and does not see the bigger picture. Good consultant is playing the long game: she knows well that she is part of a complex system.

Bad consultant loves name dropping and high-status signals. He will surely let you know about his next talk at some conference. Good consultant exudes competence with a low profile. She will surely ask you a question that you did not think about yet.

Bad consultant, on the back of the napkin, creates frameworks and models that at most describe reality. Good consultant wants to validate predictions, so she builds models with thorough research. Bad consultant is good at disguising circular reasoning as sound explanations, his opinions always have 20/20 vision. Good consultant sticks her neck out even if she gets it wrong, but she is way better at putting the real issues on the table.

Bad consultant walks ten extra miles for the CEO but only talks constraints and daily rates with frontline management. Good consultant always delivers quality. Bad consultant leaves you when your business is going down the drain. Good consultant stays by your side because she believes in her client.