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March 2, 2011

The Lost Art of Consulting

The truth is that I'm a better consultant today than I ever was before in my life and the only reason is experience. The problem that i used to suffer from was the lack of my ability to sway decisions. I'd stake out a position on every issue and attempt to sway the client over to my way of thinking and my true belief now is that, as soon as you've decided on the best approach, you've already outlived your usefulness to the project.

As soon as you take a position in any discussion, you've already lost, IMHO. The key is not to take a position. If you don't take a position, then you have nothing to lose. There's no possible way to lose the argument if you refuse to takes sides. This is the true value of a consultant. They come in as an external, independent, objective person that you can consult.

What I've learned to do now is keep my mouth shut. Just because the other people in the room are all talking about a topic does not mean you need to open your mouth. When everyone gets quite and looks at me, I don't say a word unless there's a specific question to be answered.

Attempting to martial the thoughts of the huddled masses into some sort of cohesive thought process is, as Obama would say, "above my pay grade."

When everyone makes a statement or three and then gets quiet and looks at me I just say "I'm sorry...was there a question in there somewhere that I missed?" Because, if you didn't ask a question, I'm not talking. There's no reason to, and there's many reasons not to.

Only in this light can the role of the consultant be truly appreciated. So today, this girl comes to me and asks a question, and I answer it, giving her all the details one might need to come to a conclusion, but delicately avoiding offering anything that might be misconstrued as advice. Only information. This is all that I can provide. It's how I'm most useful, I think.

And in this role, I do fairly well. So, every conversation starts out with, "Now...understand I don't have a dog in this fight...y'all have to make a decision on which way to go here. If you go with option A, then here are the implications. If you choose option B, then here are the implications.

And, of course, the clients love this, as a general rule. Because it allows them the power of controlling something, no matter how insignificant. It give them the "Feeling of Power", as Carol likes to point out.

So, of course, now they all want to talk to the consultant, like people visiting the Oracle at Delphi. They come by and ask me questions and say things like "how do you prefer I contact you?" and I say "I prefer that you stay out of my presence whenever possible. I'd prefer that you send your questions via carrier pigeon."

But really, of course, I love that they come and ask me questions because, it's about the best feeling in the world and I can promise you this, no one ever asked for my input on anything when I was a salaried employee. It was all sort of "top down shove it down your throat" and "stop your whining", as my brother likes to say. He's the old-school type of boss that believes that nothing the people underneath him have to say could possibly be of value so, if you have any input, "shut up and stop your whining" is the general rule of thumb he likes to live by.

And that's why I'm a consultant as opposed to an employee, I think.

Posted by Rob Kiser on March 2, 2011 at 1:38 PM

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