Five tips for effective consulting
Help customers succeed; listen to understand; slow down for yellow lights; elevate others; and have a bias for action
Over my career I have seen many examples of “bad consultants”, but nobody talks about what makes a good consultant. As a consultant with over five years of experience, I want to share my top five tips to help you become a more effective consultant.
1. Help customers succeed.
Focusing on your customers and helping them to be successful paves the way for your own success. In the book “Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play” by Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig introduces the dysfunctional behaviours of buyers and sellers.
Customers often don’t know what they want, and they often won’t want to tell you, they are also afraid of making mistakes. Many salespeople just want to make a quick sale and don’t focus on making sure what they are giving the what the customer needs. For both sides to be successful we need to overcome these dysfunctional relationships, we need to “Get Real”. This means having humility, demonstrating honesty, integrity and personal commitment to collaborate with our customers to deliver successful outcomes.
As a consultant you need to wear many hats, one of the hats is presales. It is your responsibility to ensure that your customers are getting what they need, using your relationships with the customer and your own sales function to focus their attention on the right problems.
When I meet a new customer, I am armed with the Opportunity Jigsaw by the sensational Brad Waldron the Author of Present Naked and presenter of “Helping our Clients Succeed”. This is an essential tool to mutually explore the customer’s problems and opportunities, enabling us to jointly quantify value and identify prioritisation. This helps me to understand what matters most to them and to have an accurate, details understanding of why.
I have met many customers who are stuck on a solution, they want something but it’s probably not what they really need. It is my responsibility to help them move off the solution, to focus on problems and ensure that we are solving the right one.
The sweet spot is when we identify problems or opportunities that the customer has; that our engineers would love to deliver; at a price the customer is able to pay for that outcome. Using this collaborative approach, we can build long-term relationships based on the measurable impact of successful outcomes.
2. Bias for action.
I have been working alongside AWS Preserve for over two years, naturally, I have become indoctrinated with AWS’s ways of working and the AWS Leadership principles. AWS believes that everyone in their organisation is a leader, the principles provide a clear signal of intent to align and focus all employees on the same traits and behaviours. Many of these principles resonate with me but I want to focus on a Bias for Action.
If you identify something that in your judgement is a great opportunity or will drive a better outcome, then it is within your gift to grab it with both hands and turn it into reality. But you also need to act with full accountability, communicating your intent effectively and sharing your reasoning. If things don’t work out it is your responsibility to reflect on the reasons why and to learn. If you just ignore it and carry on have lost an opportunity to improve.
For a Bias for Action to work the right culture is needed. In the book “Turn the Ship Around!” L. David Marquet talks about replacing orders with intent. Giving his crew control, enabling them to think and act rather than asking for permission. Moving the authority to where the information is, people can make decisions and they feel that they matter. You want to give control and create leaders; this feels wrong as we have evolved to take control and attract followers. If the right culture doesn’t exist people will just become frustrated, disenfranchised and leverage a bias for action to find another organisation with the right culture.
3. Listen to understand, and be curious.
You need to listen intently to the spectrum of customers from sponsors, and senior stakeholders to interns and apprentices. You need to understand, evaluate and comprehend exactly what the challenge/opportunity is from different perspectives. You can use thoughtful enquiry to get additional information, test assumptions and provide constructive challenges. What you hear enriches and validates your understanding and customer context, allowing you to more effectively guide the customer and maximise your opportunity for success.
Listening isn’t just for meetings; I have heard some amazing stories over lunch or after work that forced me to completely reevaluate my perceptions. Your goal here is not to be nosey but to be curious. You are listening in for unmet needs, problems, opportunities or anything that might become a blocker.
A colleague recently expressed her wish for more hands-on technical work. We both understood the limitations of our engagement, but I took it on board. A few days later in a meeting, I listened to a customer, and I heard a need for an experienced engineer to support a new team on a short-term basis. At the end of the meeting and using some bias for action, I asked the customer if I could have a quick chat. Within 15 minutes I had brought together my colleague, the customer and a few relevant stakeholders. We discussed the unmet needs of the customer and my colleague. After a few further discussions, the stars became aligned, and she is now working in the team for this customer.
This is a simple example of the power of listening, every conversation compounds your knowledge and offers opportunities to take decisive action to drive a powerful cycle of mutual benefit. My colleague is now showing her customer the art of the possible, building our reputation and helping her customer succeed. She is also listening, opening the door to more opportunities and more mutual benefits. The cycle continues!
4. Slow down for yellow lights.
If you hear something unexpected or misaligned with your understanding, you need to slow down. Take a step back, seek observable data and be prepared to bring everyone down a few rungs of the ladder of inference. If you ignore yellow lights, be prepared for them to turn red. Red lights are bad news, they can be destructive, halting projects, damaging reputations and generally making people unhappy.
I was working with a company that had appointed a third party to execute a lift-and-shift from on-premise to the cloud. They were concerned that several of their internal services would not work post-migration and wanted to understand what might break (yellow light!). A discovery was agreed to provide some answers. As the discovery progressed several servers were identified and access requests submitted, despite multiple attempts and chasing the requests were not granted (yellow light). Eventually, it transpired that access was not being granted as the servers were owned by another third-party provider (red light!). It wasn’t clear which of the third parties would be responsible for lifting and shifting these servers. Without access the discovery was incomplete, wasting time, frustrating consultants and ultimately disappointing the customer.
5. Elevate others.
As a consultant, you are there for a specific reason. You likely have key skills, experience and abilities that the customer does not have. It is therefore your responsibility to support, encourage, upskill and promote knowledge transfer and learning, thus maximising the chances of a successful outcome in the short term and helping build reputation and trust in the long term. As a consultant your role is transient, you need to fill the gap long enough to enable others around you to fill it. The long-term success of your customers is dependent on their ability to build internal skills and capability, fostering self-sufficiency and enabling the customer to continue to be successful long after you leave.
I recently had the pleasure of mentoring a customer apprentice. She was intelligent, skilled and highly capable just lacking in experience. To quote a famous leader, Andy Jassy (CEO of AWS): “There is no compression algorithm for experience”. She would often ask me for help with technical challenges, instead of giving her the answer I would give her the keyboard. I wanted her to discover the answer but with my support, to expand her knowledge and help her to develop as an engineer. I’m incredibly proud of her achievements but also humble about my small contribution to helping her on her journey to becoming an exceptional engineer.
This reminds me of an Oxfam advert from 2007: “If you give someone a fish they will feed themself for just a day if you give someone the means to fish and they can feed themself and their family for a whole lifetime.”
Or at least until the fishing rod breaks but why would we settle for this outcome? If you give someone the means to think about the problem, to develop their skills/capabilities, and encourage them to Think Big they can have the potential to feed the whole world, end poverty, deliver world peace or even solve global warming. Think Big is another AWS Leadership principle.
If you have read this far then well done and thank you.
But that was the easy part, now it’s your turn. Help me reflect by sharing your own thoughts and experiences.
If you would like me to see if I can help you succeed, please get in touch.
About the author
Richard Pearce is a Principal Consulting Engineer here at Version 1.
