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How to Select Correct ISO Consultation
Consulting Is More than Giving Advice

How to Select a Corrective Consultant

A Hierarchy of Purposes

Management consulting includes a broad range of activities, and the many firms and their members often define these practices quite differently. One way to categorize the activities is in terms of the professional’s area of expertise (such as competitive analysis, corporate strategy, operations management, or human resources). But in practice, as many differences exist within these categories as between them.

Another approach is to view the process as a sequence of phases

Perhaps a more useful way of analyzing the process is to consider its purposes; clarity about goals certainly influences an engagement’s success. Here are consulting’s eight fundamental objectives, arranged hierarchically (also see the Exhibit):

Exhibit A hierarchy of consulting purposes
  1. Providing information to a client.
  2. Solving a client’s problems.
  3. Making a diagnosis, which may necessitate a redefinition of the problem.
  4. 4.-Making recommendations based on the diagnosis.
  5. Assisting with the implementation of recommended solutions.
  6. Building a consensus and commitment around corrective action.
  7. Facilitating client learning—that is, teaching clients how to resolve similar problems in the future.
  8. Permanently improving organizational effectiveness.

The lower-numbered purposes are understood, practiced, and more requested by clients. Many consultants, however, aspire to a higher stage on the pyramid than most of their engagements achieve. Purposes 1 through 5 are generally considered legitimate functions, though some controversy surrounds purpose 5.

 Management consultants are less likely to address purposes 6 through 8 explicitly, and their clients are not as likely to request them. But leading firms and their clients are beginning to approach lower-numbered purposes in ways that involve the other goals as well. Goals 6 through 8 considered by-products of earlier purposes, not additional objectives that become relevant only when the other purposes have been achieved.

 They are essential to effective consulting even if not recognized as explicit goals when the engagement begins. Moving up the pyramid toward more ambitious purposes requires increasing sophistication and skill in the processes of consulting and in managing the consultant-client relationship. Sometimes a professional tries to shift the purpose of an engagement even though a shift is not called for; the firm may have lost track of the line between what is best for the client and what is best for the consultant’s business. 

Reputable consultants do not usually try to prolong engagements or enlarge their scope. Wherever on the pyramid, the relationship starts, the outsider’s first job is to address the purpose the client requests. As the need arises, both parties may agree to move to other goals.

1. Providing Information

Perhaps the most common reason for seeking assistance is to obtain information. Compiling it may involve attitude surveys, cost studies, feasibility studies, market surveys, or analyses of the competitive structure of an industry or business. The company may want a consultant’s special expertise or the more accurate, up-to-date information the firm can provide. The company may be unable to spare the time and resources to develop the data internally.

Often information is all a client wants. But the information a client needs sometimes differs from what the consultant is asked to furnish.

2. Solving Problems

Managers often give consultants difficult problems to solve. Seeking solutions to problems of this sort is certainly a legitimate function. The consultant’s first job is to explore the context of the problem. To do so, he or she might ask:

  • Which solutions have been attempted in the past, with what results?
  • What untried steps toward a solution does the client have in mind?
  • Which related aspects of the client’s business are not going well?
  • If the problem is “solved,” how will the solution apply?
  • What can be done to ensure that the solution wins wide acceptance?

The most important problem may well shift as the study proceeds. Even the most impatient client is likely to agree that neither a solution to the wrong problem nor a solution that will not be implemented is helpful.

3. Effective Diagnosis

Much of management consultants’ value lies in their expertise as diagnosticians. Nevertheless, the process by which an accurate diagnosis is formed sometimes strains the consultant-client relationship since managers are often fearful of uncovering difficult situations for which they might blame. Competent diagnosis requires more than an examination of the external environment, the technology and economics of the business, and the behavior of non-managerial members of the organization. The consultant must also ask why executives made certain choices that now appear to be mistaken or ignored certain factors that now seem important.

When clients participate in the diagnostic process, they are more likely to acknowledge their role in problems and to accept a redefinition of the consultant’s task. Top firms, therefore, establish such mechanisms as joint consultant-client task forces to work on data analysis and other parts of the diagnostic process. As the process continues, managers naturally begin to implement corrective action without having to wait for formal recommendations.

4. Recommending Actions

The engagement characteristically concludes with a written report or oral presentation that summarizes what the consultant has learned and that recommends in some detail what the client should do. Firms devote a great deal of effort to designing their reports so that the information and analysis are presented and the recommendations convincingly related to the diagnosis on which they are based. Many people would probably say that the purpose of the engagement is fulfilled when the professional presents a consistent, logical action plan of steps designed to improve the diagnosed problem. The consultant recommends, and the client decides whether and how to implement.

5. Implementing Changes

The consultant’s proper role in implementation is a matter of considerable debate in the profession. Some argue that one who helps put recommendations into effect takes on the role of manager and thus exceeds consulting its legitimate bounds. Others believe that those who regard implementation solely as the client’s responsibility lack a professional attitude since recommendations that are not implemented (or implemented badly) are a waste of money and time. As the client may participate in diagnosis without diminishing the value of the consultant’s role, so there are many ways, in which the consultant may assist in implementation without usurping the manager’s job.

6. Building Consensus & Commitment

Any engagement’s usefulness to an organization depends on the degree to which members reach accord on the nature of problems and opportunities and appropriate corrective actions. Otherwise, the diagnosis will not be accepted, recommendations will not be implemented, and valid data may be withheld. To provide sound and convincing recommendations, a consultant must be persuasive and have finely tuned analytic skills. But more important is the ability to design and conduct a process for (1) building an agreement about what steps are necessary and (2) establishing the momentum to see these steps through. An observation by one consultant summarizes this well.

Consultants can gauge and develop a client’s readiness and commitment to change by considering the following questions.
  1. What information does the client readily accept or resist?
  2. What unexpressed motives might there be for seeking our assistance?
  3. What kinds of data does this client resist supplying? Why?
  4. How willing are members of the organization, individually and together, to work with us on solving these problems and diagnosing this situation?
  5. How can we shape the process and influence the relationship to increase the client’s readiness for needed corrective action?
  6. Are these executives willing to learn new management methods and practices?
  7. Do those at higher levels listen? Will, they are influenced by the suggestions of people lower down? If the project increases upward communication, how will top levels of management respond?
  8. To what extent will this client regard a contribution to overall organizational effectiveness and adaptability as a legitimate and desirable objective?

Managers should not necessarily expect their advisers to ask these questions. They should expect that consultants would be concerned with issues of this kind during each phase of the engagement.

7. Facilitating Client Learning

Management consultants like to leave behind something of lasting value. This means not only enhancing clients’ ability to deal with immediate issues but also helping them learn methods needed to cope with future challenges. This does not imply that effective professionals work themselves out of a job. Satisfied clients will recommend them to others and will invite them back the next time there is a need.

Consultants facilitate learning by including members of the organization in the assignment’s processes. For example, demonstrating an appropriate technique or recommending a relevant book often accomplishes more than quietly performing a needed analysis. When the task requires a method outside the professional’s area of expertise, he or she may recommend other consultants or educational programs. However, some members of management may need to acquire complex skills that they can learn only through guided experience over time.

With strong client involvement in the entire process, there will be many opportunities to help members identify learning needs. Often a consultant can suggest or help design opportunities for learning about work-planning methods, task force assignments, goal-setting processes, and so on. Though the effective professional is concerned with executive learning throughout the engagement, it may be wise not to cite this as an explicit goal. Managers may not like the idea of being “taught to manage.” Too much talk about client learning comes across as presumptuous—and it is.

Learning during projects is a two-way street. In every engagement, consultants should learn how to be more effective in designing and conducting projects. Moreover, the professional’s willingness to learn can be contagious. In the best relationships, each party explores the experience with the other to learn more from it.3

8. Organizational Effectiveness

Sometimes successful implementation requires not only new management concepts and techniques but also different attitudes regarding management functions and prerogatives or even changes in how the basic purpose of the organization is defined and carried out. The term organizational effectiveness is used to imply the ability to adapt future strategy and behavior to environmental change and to optimize the contribution of the organization’s human resources.

Consultants who include this purpose in their practice contribute to top management’s most important task—maintaining the organization’s future viability in a changing world. This may seem too vast a goal for many engagements. But just as a physician who tries to improve the functioning of one organ may contribute to the health of the whole organism, the professional is concerned with the company as a whole even when the immediate assignment is limited.

Effectiveness and the consulting process should help lower whatever barriers to improvement are discovered. Good advisers are practitioners, not preachers, but their practices are consistent with their beliefs. When the consulting process stimulates experiments with more effective ways of managing, it can make its most valuable contribution to management practice.

More Emphasis on Process

Increasing consensus, commitment, learning, and future effectiveness are not proposed as substitutes for the more customary purposes of management consulting but as desirable outcomes of any effective consulting process. The extent to which they can build into methods of achieving more goals that are traditional depends on the understanding and skill with which the consulting relationship is managed. Such purposes have received more attention in organization development literature and the writings of behavioral consultants than in the field of management consulting. (For recommended reading in these fields, see the sidebar, “Selected Readings.”) Behavioral objectives can best be achieved when integrated with more approaches that are traditional. Clients have a right to expect that all management consultants, whatever their specialty, are sensitive to human relationships and processes and skilled in improving the organization’s ability to solve future as well as present problems.

Consulting Is More than Giving Advice