If you’re a consultant inside an organization, you have some unique consulting challenges. One of them is navigating effective work agreements across departments and even within your own. While we want everyone to be on the same page, it’s not uncommon to see work not go as planned.

In Flawless Consulting, we understand why that happens. It’s geometry. And while you may have questioned why you needed to learn that stuff in high school, understanding a little about some basic shapes can help you navigate one of your most pressing issues.

At a minimum, there are three essential parties in any consulting engagement or contract:

• Consultant: The person offering expertise and guidance.
• Client: The individual or group seeking help.
• The Consultant’s Boss: The person directing the consultant’s activities.

“Often consultants must both serve the needs of the client and fulfill a contract with their own management to implement these priorities,” says Peter Block, author of Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used. “This forces the boss into the contracting process and means internal consultants are always in at least a triangular contract.”

Each side of the triangle represents a relationship that must be clarified and managed. Contracting is not just about the consultant and client agreeing on deliverables; it’s about ensuring all three parties understand their roles, expectations, and boundaries.

To add another layer of complexity, consider what happens when you have to navigate a rectangular contract. This contract begins first with a general understanding between the consultant’s boss and the client’s boss. This means the consultant and often their client are showing up for work in a situation in which neither of them has particularly chosen the consultation and yet they have a given commitment to begin by their respective bosses.

No matter where you find yourself, each side of the rectangle or triangle needs to be explored before the engagement can begin. Otherwise, misunderstandings and resistance can arise. You can do something about it. Here are three tips to help you manage expectations and consult more flawlessly, no matter how your engagement takes shape.

1. Clarify Roles and Expectations Early: Before starting any engagement, map out the “contracting triangle or rectangle”: consultant, client, and the consultant’s boss (client’s boss). Make sure each party understands their role, expectations, and boundaries. This prevents confusion and ensures everyone is aligned from the outset.
2. Address All Sides of the Agreement: Don’t just focus on the consultant-client relationship. Explore and clarify each side of the triangle (or rectangle, if more parties are involved). If the manager’s expectations differ from the client’s, surface these differences and resolve them before work begins. This avoids the consultant being caught in the middle.
3. Surface and Resolve Misalignments Early: Use contracting conversations to identify any unaligned expectations or resistance. If parties have not chosen the engagement or have conflicting commitments, bring these issues into the open. Addressing them early helps prevent misunderstandings and resistance later.

In the geometry of consulting, clarity is the shortest distance between confusion and collaboration. Whether your contract is a triangle or a rectangle, Flawless Consulting starts with drawing the right lines and inviting everyone inside.

By Amanda Cole

Sometimes, avoiding assumptions is best.

A swirl of leaves circles our feet as my two sons and I walk down the sidewalk near our house on a beautiful, crisp fall day. My four- and two-year-old boys’ legs have carried them an extra-long way, so I know we’re getting close to a meltdown from the youngest.

As we head back home, I notice my son’s gaze peer over to two kids in the backyard. I assume he’s going to ask to go play with them. He opens his mouth to say, “Mom, look, the kids are out…” and I immediately interject, “No, we’re not going to play today. We’ve gotta get home for Charlie’s nap.” My son responds, “I wasn’t asking that, I was just saying I saw the kids out.” “Oh, I’m sorry. Yes, I see the kids out, too.”

It dawned on me in that simple interaction how often we, as consultants, assume we know what our client is thinking before we do the important work of listening. When we don’t intentionally step outside our box and stay stuck in our assumptions, we relegate ourselves to the “expert” role. While being the expert can serve a purpose, it’s rarely the most effective way to serve our clients, especially when we want to solve the real problem and not just the symptoms of one.

Before taking Flawless Consulting, I was naïve to the difference between the presenting problem and the underlying problem. As a National Training Manager for a major healthcare organization, I remember conversations with a Sales Director who complained that Legal and Compliance were on his case about his team not completing contracts correctly in the CRM. I immediately went into problem-solving mode, reviewing training dates and building an outline.

After some additional conversations, I quickly realized the problem wasn’t training, but the operational processes within the system. It was clunky and took a lot of time to complete, with too many redundancies. At this point, training sessions were already scheduled, and planning was underway. Yet, we forged ahead and trained the team on the clunky processes, while working to update them in the background.

In retrospect, if I had completed a true discovery process with the key stakeholders BEFORE I assumed the solution, I would have saved all of us time and frustration.   

Think about your most recent conversations as a consultant. Maybe you heard your client explain their problem and jumped right to a solution for the presenting problem like I did. Perhaps you’ve heard a similar situation before and offered the solution you did in the past without really listening for the underlying problem. It feels good to be the expert; to be the one with a quick answer, the one people rely on, but being the expert comes with a cost. Too often in the expert role, we miss the chance to solve the underlying problem because we’re too focused on being the one with all the answers.

Let’s challenge ourselves as consultants to be quick to listen and slow to speak. Step out of your box of assumptions, ask the hard questions, and find the underlying problem before offering a solution.