Working with Consultants

How well does your company really work with consultants? Identifying a number of trends and patterns within businesses led us to develop our training workshops that help companies get the best value for money out of working with consultants. Collating feedback from both client firms and those working in a consultant capacity within the sector, what we observed and from information gathered, was that many firms are not getting the best value they could out of the client-consultant arrangement.

Let’s for a moment consider a single question, one of the frequent questions consultant’s report encountering when going into a firm: “What are you actually supposed to be doing here?”

On the face of it, when asked earnestly by an employee, it may simply highlight that companies often do not effectively communicate the role and purpose of the consultant’s work to their staff. It’s reasonable to assume that a company would not allocate the same level of onboarding for a consultant as a new employee, and consultants are often only introduced to the small number of people, the key contacts for the work they’re contracted to deliver. In our experience, only rarely does the arrival and role of a consultant get covered in company-wide corporate comms, practically never in SMEs.

Yet very few, highly specific consulting roles will only need to work with two or three employees in delivering their projects, especially in larger firms. The time “saved” on not fully communicating a consultant’s role to the broader staff is subsequently “wasted” as the consultant has to explain and re-explain his or her role on an ad hoc, one-to-one basis.

Sadly, in some cases, this question is not asked earnestly but as a form of passive aggression that betrays attitudes that some employees hold towards consultants; a marking out of territory and quite literally questioning the validity of the consultant’s role. If not encouraged, then it is nonetheless extremely rare that companies undertake any training with their staff on how to work effectively with consultants, even in firms that have relied on the regular work of consultants for decades.

As any change management specialist will tell you, it’s only natural to encounter resistance to change, especially when employees feel it’s being imposed upon them. Yet, many consultants encounter a similar resistance even when their work—to supply specialist technical expertise or soft skills—does not herald any change to the overall structure and running of a company. This can have further reaching consequences than you might expect.

For example, a common feedback point from C-suite managers is that they feel that consultants are often not sharing as much specialist knowledge and expertise within the firm as they had hoped when bringing them in. Of course, consultants, just like employees, have varying levels of competence, motivation, and professional integrity.

However, consider how you might behave if going into companies and experiencing a high level of resistance. There are consultants that operate a professional strategy of not acting proactively except in cases of glaring problems with legal or other significant implications and only offer their detailed input when invited to do so. They operate in this way to signal to the most resistant employees that they are not there to take over.

C-suite leadership might feel frustrated because they expect consultants to be more proactive, but has their organisation actually nurtured a culture that viably welcomes that? After all, they equally expect consultants to not be disruptive or confrontational. Yet, consultants do not have the same rights as employees and in some firms, there remains a culture in which they are not accorded the same time or respect accorded colleagues.

With a bit of thought, planning and behavioural modelling, it is absolutely possible to embed an organisational culture that optimises the value and benefit of working with consultants. It is why we developed our training for organisations working with consultants. And, we have seen positive results following it.