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.