In the last chapter we looked at the activities involved in running a live consulting engagement. Those delivery activities are the bread and butter work of the consultant, but every individual consulting engagement is of limited duration. All engagements end. How this ending is handled is important both to the client and the consultant. The client wants a smooth and seamless transition when the consultant exits the client organisation. A consultant is judged as much on closing an engagement and bringing it to a satisfactory conclusion, as on the delivery of the engagement. A good ending is a planned and deliberately managed event. It should never just be the uncontrolled and inexorable reaching of a certain time or date.
One feature of consulting engagements, which may surprise novice consultants, is that the activities in delivery tend to be the domain of the junior and middle-ranking consultants. The more senior consultants, directors and partners tend to spend more of their time involved in the activities at either end of the delivery stage – that is, in the propose and close stages of the engagement process. In some ways this reflects the difficulty, the opportunity, and – especially – the potential risks of those stages of an engagement.
Ending an engagement well is a science and an art. The science comes in the standard repeatable items to check off when an engagement closes. Some of these activities are for the client’s benefit, but many are for the ongoing advantage of the consultancy (e.g. updating the consultant’s CVs following an engagement). The art of closing an engagement derives from the less definite and less precise aspects of finishing a piece of work. For example, if you have done a really good job then clients are often disappointed when you leave. This feeling of disappointment can turn a great result into an unhappy client if it is not handled with sensitivity. Therefore much of the close stage is concerned with doing whatever is required to leave the client with a good feeling about you. The section in this chapter on closing engagements looks at both this science and art.
Even though the engagement ends, the consultant should not think purely of reaching that point and ignore anything that may happen to the client afterwards. The consultant not only can try, but must, peer into the future after the end of the engagement. The obvious considerations are that there may be sell-on, and there will be a client relationship to be managed in the longer run. More importantly, the real value from a consulting engagement is received by a client after the consultant has gone. It is how the consultant influences and improves the operations or direction of a business in the long run that is the true measure of excellent consulting. Providing advice and assistance that is forgotten as soon as the consultant exits the client’s organisation is of limited or even zero value. Of course, consultants cannot control what happens after they have left, but they can influence it. Hence as well as describing how to end an engagement, this chapter also explains how the consultant can increase the likelihood of long-term success by ensuring the consulting results are sustained.
There are two criticisms repeatedly made of consultants. The first is the lack of added value by telling the client what they already know. This is the ‘borrow your watch to tell you the time’ account of consulting. The other criticism is that consultants run away just when the going gets tough. Consultants write reports, give presentations and make recommendations, but leave it up to the client to do the hard bit – implementing the change. This is the ‘consultants don’t implement’ version of consulting. Both these criticisms tend to arise at the end of engagements and have an element of truth and a degree of unfair stereotyping. Both criticisms are sometimes right because it was precisely what the client asked for. Clients may use consultants to survey the thinking of the organisation, to make recommendations, and may not want any ongoing involvement from the consultant. However, in many situations, the criticisms point to poor consulting. The former criticism is the one that is heard more often, but it is the ‘consultants don’t implement’ comment that is more problematical both for consultants and clients. If we take a client-centric view of consulting, then consultants who do not care about how the client handles any recommendations are shirking their responsibility to their client.
Even if a consultant has no implementation skills and is never involved in implementation they must consider what the client does with their recommendations. Hence this chapter is relevant to all consultants of whatever specialisation. The precise responsibilities you have in an engagement depend on the type of engagement and your client needs. But it is wrong to conclude that change is the exclusive preserve of consultants involved in implementation engagements. For instance, even the purest of strategy consultants or specialist advisors must consider what the client does with the advice given, once a report is handed over. If not, there is a risk that the client ignores or cannot implement the advice. Unimplementable or ignored advice is as worthless as no advice at all, but considerably more expensive.
In many ways the role of the consultant is less than that of a manager. A consultant analyses, identifies and advises, but the decision to implement and to live with the consequences of the changes is a manager’s. This should not be seen as a weakness: it is inherent in the definition of consultant as opposed to manager. The role of the advisor, even the most brilliant and gifted advisor, is always subordinate to that of the person being advised. Consultants must never forget this. But there is one important respect in which the role of the consultant is more difficult than that of the manager. The manager is responsible whilst they are in post. The challenge for consultants is to influence an organisation to be different and remain different when the consultant is gone. This is the primary, exciting and most valuable aim of consulting, which is explained at the end of this chapter.
The flow of this chapter is shown in Figure 8.1.
Figure 8.1 The close stage and afterwards
When an engagement finishes should be a time for reflection on what you have achieved and what you have learnt for future engagements. In the stress of a busy consultancy there is often pressure to get on to the next engagement and to forget important activities that seem like niceties, such as engagement reviews. This is a mistake. Like all businesses, the consultancies that are most successful are the ones that learn from their mistakes and build on their successes.
The true judge of the success of an engagement must be the client, and each client’s views and considerations are unique. If you want to learn and improve, it is always worth seeking feedback from the client on what they liked and disliked about the engagement. Typical client considerations will include:
Many of the factors that clients consider will be less precise:
In the longer run, value to a client is not about what happens whilst the engagement is running, or even on the day it finishes, but is accrued over time. You should ask yourself:
The precise questions will depend on the nature of the consulting engagement, but it should be possible to pose questions of this form about the outcome of the engagement. Some of outcomes can be measured, some not. Where they can, it should be possible to link back to the original value proposition in your proposal and see if the measurements testify to the right outcome.
A consultancy does not exist just for the clients but is a business in its own right, and therefore you have your own commercial factors that can judge the success of the engagement. Most obviously: was it profitable and did you sell any additional work? From a longer-term perspective, the success of an engagement comes down to factors like whether you improved relationships and extended your network, and whether you learnt anything on the engagement that can be used in future engagements.
However, before you can make such a review of the success of an engagement, the first question is the rather obvious, but often difficult one to answer: when is the engagement over? The initial consideration is whether you have done what you agreed to do in the proposal, and created the deliverables or the outcome that were contracted. These may be reports, findings, analysis, benchmarks, presentations, processes, tools, training courses, skills transfers, etc. There is also a more subtle measure by which a client may measure you. Any deliverables are based on findings, assumptions and hypotheses you made. Does the client accept these, and the process by which they were discovered or developed? Many clients will not be interested in the consulting process as long as they are happy with the outcome, but some clients will want proof of thoroughness and intellectual rigour within the work you performed in the commence, collect, consider and create steps. It is worth thinking about how you will convince clients that your consulting approach is sound and comprehensive.
There are several reasons why it can be difficult to be precise about when an engagement is complete. Engagement deliverables can always be improved a little more – both in terms of content and presentational format. You can probably go on forever making minor enhancements. Deliverables are usually not unambiguously defined in the original proposal, and only when they are presented may you find that the client has different expectations. Even minor differences in expectations can lead to rework and extending an engagement. There may be little peripheral promises made to client staff throughout the engagement. Such promises can be as simple as printing off an article you think might be relevant to them, or offering to introduce them to someone in your network. These all need to be fulfilled. The engagement ends when there are no such loose ends left.
Whilst there may be some clear-cut criteria, usually determining that a consulting engagement is finished is a judgement. It is a judgement made by both the client and the consultant, and ideally one which you have consensus on. A successful end is one in which both the client and the consultant are happy and agree that the engagement is complete. Even a pre-agreed date can only be accepted as the real end of an engagement if you have produced what is required, and the client has not asked for any changes to scope or deliverables. It is easy to irritate and disappoint a client by ending prematurely from their perspective. Conversely, it is easy to convert a profitable engagement into a loss-making one by constantly tweaking and improving deliverables to a client’s requests. Both of these risks can be avoided by a well-managed close stage.
The basis for a good engagement close is defined in the original proposal. The clearer the scope, deliverables and outcome from an engagement, the easier it is to be precise about when the engagement is finished. In reality, for many engagements the precise shape and scope of deliverables can only be defined as the engagement progresses and may be evolving until the last day. In such a situation, it is essential to have ongoing dialogue with the client about what the final outcome will be, and to modify the client’s expectations every time the final outcome changes. If you are unclear, or think the client is unclear, pursue a dialogue until clarification and consensus is achieved.
Flexibility in consulting engagements is usually good. Clients do not want to work with consultants who constantly turn around and say: ‘I am not doing X, because in our original proposal you agreed to pay for Y.’ But flexibility needs to be managed and aligned to the fees you are charging and the time the engagement takes. Do not ask for more money every time the client asks for something that will take you an extra 30 minutes to do. However, in general terms, if the client wants more than was originally specified, then that is additional chargeable work. Similarly, if a client decides part way through development of a deliverable that they do not want it anymore, the work to date needs to be paid for. The final invoice should reflect such factors, but should also be what the client expects.
The next factor in a good engagement close is that you are prepared for closedown. You should never reach the end of an engagement by surprise, as from day one you knew you would get there. Yet it is common for consultants to end engagements in a state of barely controlled chaos, as all sorts of activities need to be finalised. In most cases, these activities were predictable. What needs to be done at the end of the engagement should be part of the engagement plan. Activities such as reviews of deliverables by senior consultants in your firm, or client review workshops, should be set up in advance. You know they will always be required, so running out of time to do them is a sign of poor planning and sloppy engagement management.
Identify what will be handed over to whom from your engagement, and make sure they are prepared for this. You may hand everything to a single client, but it is not unusual to be producing several deliverables; for example, a report to a real client, a training pack to HR and some revised job descriptions to a line manager. Consulting deliverables are rarely just handed over, they usually need to be explained and may require a degree of client education. This all takes time. Try to predict potential blockages to accepting your findings, and resolve them whilst you still have time and resources to do so. The blockages can be simple logistical issues, for example you cannot hand over to a client who is away on two weeks holiday. Therefore, check in advance that the staff you will be handing over to are available on the dates required.
If it is a large engagement with several consultants, as you hand over aspects of the engagement you can decrease the size of the consulting team. Not all the consultants need to be with the client until the very last day. Unless there is a specific advantage to doing so, let individual consultants leave the engagement team once their part of the work is complete and handed over to the client.
Before you end a consulting engagement you should make sure the client knows what happens next. Partially this is good business sense, as it is a point of opportunity for on-sell. But even if there is no possible on-sell, and all the next steps are to be performed by the client with no consultant input, you never want to leave with the client thinking, ‘What do I do now?’ An assertive client will not let you finish, and probably will not pay your invoice if they do not know what to do next. A less assertive client may let you get away with leaving them in the dark, but it is hardly good consulting. Some form of next-steps plan should be included in every set of engagement deliverables.
There is a balance to be found, as a complete detailed client action plan may be a major piece of work that deserves to be charged for as for any other part of your work to a client. Such a plan may not be what the client has asked for, or is willing to pay for. However, the next-steps plan does not need to be detailed. Often it will be a short list of actions. It is always possible to provide a simple and concise indication of the direction the client should go in, even if one of the next steps is ‘develop a detailed plan’. The test of your next-steps plan should be that it is enough for the client to read it in conjunction with your recommendations and does not think ‘so what?’ nor ‘what do I do now?’.
Similarly, you should make sure your consulting managers and consulting partners know what happens next. Should you, or anyone else in the consultancy, be doing any specific action with the client? Are there any unfulfilled commitments or any opportunities for further work that must be seized? Be clear as possible about who needs to do what, whether it is simply a follow-up phone call or if it is a specific client meeting that needs to be planned and arranged. Plan the next steps in your relationship with the client with care.
There is always a set of activities required for the good management of the consulting business at the end of an engagement. Timesheets and expenses for the engagement need to be finalised, so you know precisely what should be billed. Final billing and invoicing should be done. Try to ensure the final bill really is the final bill. Consultants have a habit of finding old expenses receipts weeks after an engagement is complete and the last invoice was raised – or identifying a few days of another consultant’s time that should have been billed to the engagement. Clients hate it when you raise a ‘final’ bill and then several weeks later send them another one saying you missed out some time or expenses. Think from the client’s perspective – an extra bill makes their own budget management difficult. This is especially problematic if you raise an additional bill in another financial year – they may have no budget for your bill.
A well-organised consultant or consultancy business will automatically complete housekeeping tasks like updating CVs, and client case studies when an engagement is complete. Copies of client deliverables should be filed for easy future reference. All other papers and files should be archived or, if appropriate, destroyed. Staff performance reviews should be carried out and client feedback sought. You may have picked up some client assets whilst on the engagement, for example building passes and laptops. These should be returned. Records should be updated, especially information that is critical for the efficient future operations of the consulting business, such as contacts logs or relationship records.
Every engagement provides an opportunity to learn. Learning will happen informally for all members of an engagement team. Every consultant’s experience grows on each engagement. But at the end of an engagement consultants should consider the formal capture and logging of good ideas, improved processes and tools, or anything else that will make future engagements better, or which can be used with future clients. However, there is a big difference between individual consultants learning on engagements, and the formal documentation of knowledge for reuse on future engagements. Well run consultancies willingly invest time in the latter. (There is an ethical issue in selling something to one client that another client has paid for – see Chapter 10. However, as long as it is done sensitively, does not breach any client confidentiality or contractual terms; consultants thrive on building specialist understanding by performing similar work in multiple clients.)
Ending a consulting engagement is a great skill and needs preparation. A poor ending will leave a client with a bad taste in their mouth and will limit the chance of further sales. A well-managed ending is good for your business and your clients. Ensure you are ready to finish, and the client is ready for your departure. An engagement close checklist is shown in Table 8.1 below.
If an engagement is ended well, the client may be as enthusiastic and excited about the next steps as they were at the beginning of your involvement. If not, the next steps may never happen or at least be slow in starting. Ending well is important in giving the client an ongoing impetus, but it is not enough. From a consultant’s perspective an engagement will often end with recommendations, but someone has to implement them. A document listing good ideas is not enough, as it is only through the resulting change that a client achieves lasting value. If you are not involved in implementation, you may conclude this is not your problem. You have handed over your recommendations and been paid, it’s now up to the client. This is a bad conclusion to reach, as it is by client’s achieving lasting value that your reputation and business as a consultant will grow.
The next steps for a client after an engagement ends depend on the type of engagement and what the client has asked. For example:
As described in Chapter 4, there is the possibility of continuous sell-on as the consultant helps with the logical follow-on to every engagement. However, this is not the point of this chapter. You may continue to be involved with a client, but that does not remove the need to prepare the client for change. There are two key reasons for this.
Firstly, at some point your role will end. It is perfectly valid for a client to decide at any stage that they can continue by themselves, and irrespective of when your role ends, you should consider the client’s subsequent change. Secondly, consultants must understand their limitations – you cannot make client change happen. This is not simply an issue of power; it is because you are not changing, but the client and the client organisation are. Only the client can be responsible for making change happen in a client organisation. If you do sell on and remain helping the client, then that is good for your business, and hopefully the client, but even so you can only go so far. You will not be spending your future working life dealing with the change, only the client will. The consultant is there to help understand why to change, to show what to change, to facilitate the how to change – but not to change.
In reality, the degree of change required will vary enormously, from the alteration in thinking in an individual client when providing one-to-one advice to a single manager, through to the major restructuring and alteration in a business that can result from a novel and radical strategy. The rest of this chapter is written as if the change is significant, but the underlying principles are applicable even if the change is relatively minor.
Great consulting requires a strong sense of partnership between a consultant and a client. Yet, however strong the partnership between consultant and client, the fundamental truth is that the consultant and client are taking different journeys. For the life of an engagement their journeys run alongside each other. Afterwards, when they are driving in different directions, the most a consultant can do is to try to have a lasting influence on how the client steers. There is only so much the consultant can do to help a client. But a consultant should never finish an engagement with an attitude of ‘oh well, it’s all the client’s problem now’. The role of the consultant is to build, with the client, the environment such that any recommendations made by, or change implemented with, the consultant will be sustained.
One implication of the limits to a consultant’s powers is that whilst consultants may be able to guarantee making valuable recommendations and providing great advice, consultants cannot guarantee benefits because consultants cannot guarantee change. If there is no change, there can be no benefits. Achieving change is up to the client. When a consultancy does confirm benefits, it is only ever based on a long list of conditions that the client must fulfil, which effectively means ceding some management control to the consultant. Without this, the most a consultant can do is to describe how in a certain situation, when specific conditions are met, the client will get one positive outcome or another.
Yet although the consultant cannot guarantee successful change, change is the test for all consultancy advice. If an engagement does not lead to change then it has not added value. It is in considering the sustainability of consulting results where the partnership between client and consultant must be at its strongest. If, as a consultant, you do not influence the client to make sustained change, you either have defined the wrong solution to the client’s problems, or you have not convinced the client to accept your ideas.
The ability to implement a change in any situation depends on a number of factors including: capacity for change, capability to change, openness to change, urgency for change (real and perceived), and the level of power and support for the change. Many of these factors are outside a consultant’s ability to influence. However, there are critical factors for change that consultants can and should help with. The most important factors are:
I am not saying do any of this as a matter of kind-heartedness, but of professional comprehensiveness. These critical parts of your work should be accounted for in your fees. With the exception of the first bullet point, they are each potentially individually chargeable engagements. How you fulfil them depends on the situation, and in the end depends on what the client wants and is willing to pay for. If a client decides to limit or exclude any of these items then of course they can, but you need to ensure they understand the implications.
Let’s look at each one of these in turn briefly.
For a client to adopt recommendations made by a consultant, the client must have confidence in them. Confidence has to be at its highest when it comes to making change, as this is the point at which the client is risking most. Until that point the only thing that could go wrong was wasting the investment in a consultant’s fees. It is one thing for a client to risk some budget on a consultant that they do not have 100 per cent confidence in, it is quite another to adopt the recommendations of that consultant, especially if the recommendations will result either in highly visible or fundamental changes.
How does a consultant provide confidence to the client? This is the domain of human psychology and each client will have a unique set of criteria which will determine if and how much a client trusts a consultant and has confidence in their recommendations. Factors to consider include:
In addition to these factors, how the engagement progressed and the nature and style of interaction between the consultant or consulting team and the client or client staff will have a significant impact on the confidence in the consultant’s findings. For example, a consultant who is perceived as arrogant and who does not listen is less likely to deliver accepted recommendations than one who works well with the client staff and listens attentively.
A final factor will also be how radical the consultant’s findings are. Radical findings may be of more value to the client, but clients will naturally find it more difficult to accept recommendations which challenge well-established ways of working and basic business principles and assumptions. If your recommendations will be radical, it is worth starting to set the client’s expectations early in the engagement. Surprising a client with radical recommendations at the end of an engagement rarely leads to a happy outcome, even if the findings are completely valid.
The aim of consultancy is not to give ‘take it or leave it’ advice but to convince a client to accept findings and using them to make change. This is not achieved just at the point of handover, but comes about by building commitment to the change throughout the life of the engagement. Clients will not accept findings only on their intellectual integrity or intuitive appeal alone, there needs to be a case for change. The client needs to be able to answer the question: ‘If I accept these findings and make the subsequent change, what will be the benefit to the organisation?’
A critical role for any consultant is to sell the recommendations to the client. The way selling is done will depend on the client. Some clients will respond to logical argument, some to an emotional appeal, others to a documented business case with scaled metrics. In selling the story, the consultant not only has to convince the client, but has to help to educate them. Once recommendations are adopted by the client, they may need to build a further case to convince other people in the organisation to accept the recommendations.
One informal test of whether a client has accepted the consultant’s recommendations is to listen to what the client is talking about. If the client’s business conversations modify and start to incorporate the language and ideas of the consultant then the client has probably adopted the consultant’s recommendations and their thinking is becoming aligned with the consultant’s. A further test is how the client prioritises their time – if the client will not allocate any time to a consultant it means that the engagement is not sufficiently important to the client. If the client starts to allocate more and more time to the consultant, then you have caught their attention and are influencing their priorities.
On ending an engagement it is important for the client, and any critical stakeholders who are party to accepting consulting deliverables, to understand the case for change. This is something you should try and persuade a client to be personally involved in. Ideally, the client will not delegate responsibility for understanding the case for change to a more junior manager. If it is delegated, it will be the junior manager who has to sell your recommendations to the real client. This is not an insurmountable problem, but, depending on the skills of the junior manager, it may increase the risk that your recommendations are not accepted.
For a client to embark on change, they require all the prerequisites needed to successfully implement the change, or at least a plan to develop them. By prerequisites for change, I mean all the materials, ideas, plans, power, skills and resources required for change. There may be a significant range of prerequisites.
Consultants often forget many of the softer requirements for change. Change prerequisites usually consists of a combination of tangible physical deliverables (recommendations, process designs, plans, business cases, etc.), and supporting intangible deliverables (knowledge, culture, enthusiasm, drive, etc.). Consultants tend to focus on the tangible, but usually the intangible are more important to the long-term sustainability of the change. A good consultant will at least advise the client manager on the intangible deliverables they need to think about. Few consulting problems are purely technical; most have a human dimension. Implementing change always has a human dimension, and it is the intangible deliverables that most strongly influence this human dimension.
One of the crucial intangible factors in change is the style of management adopted by the client. This may need to be adapted according to the context and nature of the change. For example, there is a significant difference between managing a change based on the implementation of a new IT system or a process change, and managing a change trying to alter the culture of an organisation.
The client must have the capability to perform the change. There is little point producing recommendations a client does not or cannot understand, or does not accept. The deliverables produced for a client must be appropriate and usable by the client. Engagement deliverables need to be matched to the level of skills and maturity of the client, or the client’s skills must be improved as part of the engagement. If you are training or transferring skills as part of the engagement, you can’t just transfer the ability to do, you must also transfer the skills for ongoing management, measurement and development of these skills.
The ability for the consultant to produce a complete set of prerequisites starts with the proposal and the engagement plan. Critically, the engagement needs to be scoped broadly enough. To produce a complete set of deliverables as inputs to a change the consultant needs to consider root causes of problems, not just symptoms. The consultant also needs to have considered systems issues – that is, how one part of a client’s business system affects another. Ideally, the engagement is scoped broadly enough with sufficient time and resource to do all this. One way to do this is to scope an engagement around an outcome, and not simply the production of one or two documents. If the consultant is focused on an outcome, and if a client is willing to pay to achieve this outcome, then the engagement has to contain all the prerequisites for change.
Finally, the change needs to work when the consultant has gone, so sustaining it must not be dependent on the consultant, unless the client specifically chooses to involve you on a longer-term basis.
There is one effective and often valid way a consultant can sidestep the production of all the prerequisites to implement a set of recommendations, and that is in the production of a next-steps plan. The consultant must fulfil the conditions of any proposal, contract or other agreement with the client, but rarely does this entail producing every single pre-requisite to implement change. Where the consultant is not responsible for producing the prerequisites, they can be listed in a next-steps plan.
There are many advantages to developing a next-steps plan for both the client and the consultant. Having some form of plan means the client knows what to do next, and is not left at the end of the engagement with a sense of ‘what do I do now?’ A next-steps plan is useful for the consultant as it can help with selling on, but it can also help to close an engagement neatly. Earlier in this chapter I talked about the consultant needing to tie up all the loose ends, but avoiding constantly refining deliverables and making an engagement unprofitable. One tool in achieving this is the next-steps plan, as it is often possible to tidy up some loose ends simply by listing them as actions to complete in a next-steps plan. Of course, a client will only let a consultant go so far in doing this.
There is a balance to be found in terms of the detail in the next-steps plan. At its simplest, the most all-encompassing next-steps plan can be written simply as one action for any set of recommendations. That one action is ‘develop a plan for implementing the recommendations’. At the other extreme, a fully detailed plan for a significant change could be months of work for several consultants. Usually, unless the next-steps plan is an explicit deliverable agreed with the client which the client is paying for, it is best to veer towards a simple list of the most important following actions. This avoids the consultant engaging in excessive work, but also ensures the client is not left without an understanding of what to do next.
There is an art to producing a good next-steps plan. The consultant must avoid unethical urges to simply list actions that ensure the client has to buy more consulting services, but it is often reasonable to include some actions that may result in reusing the consultant. The plan has to be comprehensive and understandable, but unless the client has engaged you explicitly to produce it, it cannot be lengthy or overly detailed. In practice this is usually achievable, and it is possible to produce a next-steps plan that is not overly onerous for the consultant, but which adds significant value to the client on any engagement. If done well, the client and the consultant’s commercial interests can be aligned.
Any recommendations which provide a challenge to a client, because they come up with novel ideas or concepts, question current strategy or ways or operating, or query basic business principles or assumptions, are almost always going to face some resistance. Resistance comes in many forms. At one level it is a positive sign. Great consulting is challenging, and if there is no resistance then there is probably not enough challenge. But resistance must be managed because it will get in the way of accepting findings and implementing advice. It also must be listened to as sometimes it derives from sensible roots.
To help clients optimally, consultants must think in terms of two types of resistance. There will be resistance at the point at which consultants give their findings, but also there may be resistance later on when the client comes to implementing those same findings with or without the consultant. Even if consultants are not involved in the implementation, they can advise the client about possible resistance. A consultant should try to help the client understand why resistance is important, identify what resistance exists, learn from the resistance (as some may be well founded), and finally help the client to deal with it.
If a consultant’s recommendations are to result in real change there will be resistance. Change cannot be undertaken without some shift in the power balance in an organisation. This may be a significant loss of power for some individuals, or may be modest and sometimes only perceived by some people (e.g. if job titles are realigned there may be no power shift, but people can perceive it negatively). The client must accept this and be willing to deal with the resistance or else the change will not occur. A client who wants to upset no one in an organisation when implementing change will never do anything significant.
Change is not done to people, it is participated in and either accepted or rejected. Rarely does it fail because the wrong order was given, but because people have chosen to ignore the orders. Staff will accept change if they are engaged and want to or need to accept it. To make this choice, people have to feel comfortable making the change work, and that includes everyone, not just the senior managers. So, one of the building blocks of avoiding resistance is spending time explaining what a change is to people, why it is being pursued and how it will work. Contrary to popular wisdom, people are usually willing to change. People change all the time, sometimes in imperceptible ways, but over time it adds up. What people mostly resist is being forced to change.
Change means doing something differently. Change is not hard because designing a new way is hard, but because it entails unlearning and giving up existing ways. It is often easy to design a better process, organisation structure, IT system, strategy, or operational metrics. What is far harder is to make them work. Giving up a habit is far harder than making a new one. This is especially true when the change may be perceived to be associated with a loss of face. Implicit in adopting any new ways of work is a criticism that the old ways must have been wrong if they are being replaced. This feeling of criticism can generate a powerful emotional resistance to change. If consultants are involved in change they must manage this process. Partially this must be by creating an incentive for the client staff to change and creating discomfort with the existing status quo. The more urgent and powerful the feeling of discomfort is, the easier it will be to overcome the status quo.
Resistance does not only occur because of actual or perceived power shifts. Acceptance or rejection of a consultant or a consultant’s findings is also related to perceived competence, and trust and relationship. This is one of the reasons for stressing the need for a client to have confidence in a consultant’s recommendations. The more a consultant is trusted, the easier it is for a client to accept even the most difficult of recommendations. The less a consultant is trusted, the more likely even the best of recommendations will be ignored.
If there is resistance to your work, try to find the underlying reason. Resistance is better dealt with by removing the underlying cause than by treating the symptoms. If you just fight it or ignore it, resistance can get worse. Always try to determine what is causing it, and, based on this, determine what you will do about it. Identify it, listen to it, be willing to change your views if you find the resistance is based on sensible thinking, and then deal with what resistance remains.
It is important to identify what resistance really is, as opposed to what just feels like resistance. Do not confuse resistance with a lack of understanding and vice versa. Either may show as the other. Similarly, do not confuse rejecting your work because it is flawed with real resistance, or vice versa. If you mistake resistance for flaws, you will rework and expend effort unnecessarily because you will not do anything about the resistance. If you mistake flaws for resistance, you will do a poor quality job.
Try to acknowledge alternative views, and give the important stakeholders a forum to discuss their view with you. For the people who resist you, spend time bringing them on board, go round them and let them adopt change at their own pace, reduce their ability to affect the change, or remove them (a valid choice – but not the consultant’s). The options depend on the pace of change required and their individual criticality to the organisation. It also depends on the amount of consultant time a client wants to pay for. Dealing properly with resistance can conflict with consulting timelines as it is resource-intensive and can be prolonged. However, if a client really wants to make substantial change, the resistance must be handled.
Try to help with emotional responses, listen and explore logical responses, but don’t get lost in them. If your recommendations affect many people, you cannot talk to each and every individual, and sometimes resistance must be conquered with robust and directive client management. Such directive management makes people choose to change simply because the penalties of not changing are too great. However, it does not always work.
One critical place to identify and resolve any resistance is with your real client. It can be surprising, but one of the hardest sources of resistance may be the person who engages you and is paying your consulting fees. The first question to analyse is: ‘Does the client really have the desire for this change to be sustained and accept the associated level of pain?’ Often clients say they want, for example, better customer service, whereas what they really want is an irritating problem to disappear painlessly. The client may not be able to improve customer service without some pain, and if they will not accept the pain then the change will never happen. Also you must consider your client’s own personality and management style. The underlying issues that caused a client to require your help in the first place may get in the way of accepting or implementing your advice. For example, an indecisive client will respond indecisively and a disorganised client will be disorganised in implementing. Although it requires great sensitivity, helping a client to understand their own weaknesses or styles, and how they affect their ability to progress with a change, is huge added value.
If you have read the book in chapter order you have now completed the second section of the book made up of Chapters 5 to 8. In these chapters I have explained the steps in the consulting engagement process. Consultants’ work revolves around the steps of winning, delivering and closing engagements. An ability to perform the tasks in Chapters 5 to 8 is essential to working as a consultant. Perform them well and you are likely to be a successful consultant. However, there is more to consulting than the engagement process, and the remaining chapters in this book describe some of the more advance concepts in consulting.
The main points from this chapter are summarised in Figure 8.2.
Figure 8.2 Closing engagements and sustaining results
