Author: Maya Mehta

Consulting Complexities: How Intention Gets Undermined in Change Management

Posted on by Maya Mehta

This post on the complexities in change management work is the fourth in our series that looks at what interferes with our capacity to serve, even in the face of our best intentions. It speaks to the industry as a whole, though both internal and external consultants will recognize the tensions between doing what top management asks for and providing genuine service to a client. Future posts will get into other complexities that undermine our best efforts. Winding up the series will be some thoughts on what to do.

Some time ago, when pressures for better quality and sharper customer focus added to the traditional pressures for cost reduction and accountability, organizations decided that what was needed was a change in culture. We needed workplaces in which people acted as owners, employees felt empowered and involved, change was welcomed, and patriarchal management practices were driven out.

To achieve these goals, managers brought in consultants and charged internal change agents to end command-and-control and bring in more participation. Bosses were to become coaches, employees would now be called associates. All were to work in teams, even across functions. It reached the point where employees were to evaluate their bosses, just as college students had been evaluating their teachers.

All of this was a large undertaking, which created a logical need for consultation.  The ethical question arose from the disparity between the claims and the reality. That consulting complexity still exists today.

The promise of culture change was essentially that a shift in power would take place: Teams close to the work would more control over how the work was done and how money was spent. Much of the consulting work done to this end, however, was done in a way that undermined a true resurgence of worker power and choice. Change management became and becomes a colonial venture.

To begin with, the profession approached the work from the belief that the workers were incapable of exercising more choice without intensive training. They had to be given certain tools. They had to be taught to work in teams. They had to be persuaded that they should act in ways that served the well-being of the business. And it was the consulting companies and training departments that owned these tools and methods of persuasion, which they sold through a series of training programs to the employees.

The change management tools were not limited to training products. There were major projects to define the new competencies that would be required in the new culture. There were new assessment and measurement products that would help gauge the progress of the change effort. There were major communications programs to publicize and explain this new world both to employees and to the outside world.

The consulting complexities I want to point out about these efforts are not really about their effectiveness. The issues are about the story about them. The reports are mixed on how much any given culture actually changed, depending on who you talk to. If you talk to the top management who sponsored the effort or the internal and external consultants who implemented it, you would hear that the effort was very successful and the culture had indeed shifted.

But if you talk to employees in most companies that made the investment, you generally would find that there was not much change in their daily work lives: They might work in teams, but individualism is still the dominant mode of operation; and while they may have more budget and spending authority than before, top management is still very much in control and patriarchy is alive and well.

Besides the story, what is more disturbing is the way that consultants and managers approach the task of making organizational changes. Whenever the change effort becomes a top-down, cascading program, it serves to build the business of the service provider, and  serves to simply reinforce the existing organizational culture and belief systems about control and power, then the work is open to question.

The first order of business for consultants––internal and external––entering into any change management effort is to challenge the assumptions that the top is an appropriate driver, that experts know best what is needed, and that employees lack tools and capacities.   

Consulting Complexities: How Growth Undermines Service

Posted on by Maya Mehta

This post on how growth undermines service is the third in our series that looks at what interferes with our capacity to serve, even in the face of our best intentions. It speaks to the industry as a whole, though both internal and external consultants will recognize the tensions between doing what is popular out of the words of top management and providing genuine service to a client. Future posts will get into other complexities that undermine our best efforts. Winding up the series will be some thoughts on what to do.

The growing marketplace for consulting services intensifies the complexities around the commercialization of our profession. For example, in the large accounting firms, consulting services used to be a second cousin—something done because the client demanded it or the consultants themselves got restless doing the more routine financial work they had been doing too long. The large consulting companies were primarily experts in a particular aspect of business, such as marketing, regulatory requirements, or technical innovation. Services aimed at and changing organization culture were not really on their radar screen.

Much of the growth of consulting has been riding the wave of the technology explosion combined with the trend toward downsizing. Most large organizations have found it more profitable to shrink and merge and outsource jobs. This creates the challenge of having fewer people doing more work, and the consulting industry has been the beneficiary of this movement.

The demand for consulting services has also grown because of the interest in quality improvement, better customer service, and changing cultures toward more engaged workplaces. All of these goals are worthy, but what I want to explore is how the commercialization of our services ended up subverting their intent.

Reengineering is a good example of an area of practice that had power and relevance. Its intent was inarguable but something shifted when the idea became commercialized and popular. Reengineering became the rage and consulting firms began to make promises that were unsustainable. After a good run, the work fell of its own weight.

The reengineering craze reached a point where whatever change we had in mind was called reengineering. Every department thought it was reengineering itself. The energy was more about becoming modern than becoming better. Reengineering became synonymous with restructuring and was sold by the large accounting and consulting firms with promises of a 30 to 50 percent return on the investment.

The dark side of reengineering, which threatened the whole profession, is that the promises made to sell the work either were never fulfilled or could finally be achieved only by eliminating jobs on a wide scale. The goal of restructuring the work process for the sake of the customer was more often than not unrealized. In fact, many of the users of reengineering began to reverse their efforts because they found the concept unworkable.

Reengineering,  like the more current desire to be lean and agile,  is a good example of two larger consulting complexities: how consultants take advantage of what is in vogue and how we pursue covert purposes.

When an idea is fashionable it becomes, almost by definition, a cosmetic solution. When we offer a service primarily because clients want it, we have chosen commerce over care. If we were strictly a business you might say, What’s the problem? The customer is always right. We only gave them what they asked for. Being also a service function, though, means that something more is due to the client.

When we offer a service primarily because clients want it, we have chosen commerce over care.

The other consulting complexity exemplified by reengineering is a form of double-dealing––for example when force reductions are packaged as organization improvement. Who could argue with restructuring for the sake of the customer? Organizations went through a long process of interviews, redesign teams, and extensive selling and training for the new system when the real net result of the effort was the elimination of jobs with little real change in function or culture.

Clients have a right to expect us to decide whether what the client is willing to buy will deliver what the client really needs. If the client asks for a service that will not help, or may even be harmful, then when do we say no and turn away the work? It is a tough thing to do, especially for internal consultants. Clients also have a right to expect us to speak and act authentically. If our work is packaged and sold as something it is not, we betray trust and set the client on a path to harmful results.

Consulting Complexities: The Commercialization of Service

Posted on by Maya Mehta

This post on the tension between doing our work and managing our businesses is the second in our series that looks at what interferes with our capacity to serve, even in the face of our best intentions. It speaks mostly to external consultants though internal consultants experience similar tensions between service to a client unit and the pressure to implement the wishes of top management. Future posts will get into other complexities that undermine service. Winding up the series will be some thoughts on what to do.

When we offer a service primarily because clients want it, we have chosen commerce over care.

One factor making consulting work complex is the tension between delivering service and attending to the business of the consulting unit. When consulting becomes a business first and a service second, something fundamental about the work is changed. Most of us began our consulting work because we were attracted to a set of ideas and trained in a set of skills. We also wanted to make a living. It wasn’t until we became successful that we got caught between commerce and care.

There is an inherent strain between the economic demands of a consulting practice and the care we wish to offer to the client. Care comes when we can customize our service for each client, when something new is created with each client. The consultant’s promise is most accurately fulfilled when the person selling the work is the person doing the work. This way the client knows exactly who will be doing the work after making the decision to proceed. Care is delivered when we foster the client’s capacity to design their own changes and when the client is not dependent on us. In a practice based on care, each client becomes important, and the marketing strategy is basically to do good work.

Consulting becomes commercialized when the service gets standardized and becomes a product to be marketed. The economics of a service business drive you in the direction of standardized or packaged service. Salaries are the major cost item, and one way to reduce labor costs is to make the service uniform and predictable. It takes a very experienced, and therefore high-cost, consultant or staff person to be able to create a strategy and service for each particular client. It takes a lot of experience for one person to be able to conceptualize the project, sell the project, manage the project, and do the work. One way to solve this dilemma is to, in effect, package the service so lower-cost, less experienced people can do the work and manage the project. Then you only need highly experienced people in the front end of the project, doing the selling.

Many consulting firms and internal staff groups divide themselves into those who sell the work, those who manage the work, and those who do the work. As the overhead costs of the consulting unit come under increasing pressure, the drive to build sales and make repeat sales within each client organization becomes intense. At some point, the success of the practice gets measured by standard business criteria—annual growth, margin, earnings, return on capital. At this point, commerce has become dominant over care.

The shift from care to commerce can occur in any size firm or staff unit. It often just happens, rather than being something we anticipated. It happens when what we do works, and it happens in many professions. Physicians, architects, and lawyers, for example, often find themselves driven more by the economics than the professional objectives of their practice.

The inherent pressure is to make a business out of a profession. We worry about how to create growth opportunities so we can keep good people. We believe we need a large group to offer a full range of services and to take on really big change efforts, and it takes money to support more services. Plus the culture places a high premium on economic success.

But the commercialization of our profession is more a mind-set than a requirement of growth. It is a question of purpose and focus, and that is why it becomes an ethical obligation to settle the tension between commerce and care in favor of the best interests of the client.

Consulting Complexities: Introduction

Posted on by Maya Mehta

This is the first in a series of blog posts on consulting complexities that will look at what interferes with our capacity to serve, even in the face of our best intentions. The next post will deal with the tension between doing our work and managing our businesses. Then we will get into other complexities that undermine service. Winding up the series will be some thoughts on what to do.

Contrary to popular belief, the world’s oldest profession is consulting. The first consultant was the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, who – with the encouragement of top management –– assumed an advisory role with Eve. When Eve followed his advice and picked the low-hanging fruit, the consequences were grave and long-lasting. So in addition to what some have called Original Sin, we now have the concept of Original Advice. We still feel the chill of this ancestral shadow cast over our work.

There is a vague ambiguity in calling ourselves consultants. Once, on an airplane, I answered the question of what I did by saying I was a tabletop photographer. Nice conversation stopper. When people ask you what you do for a living, and you decide to answer truthfully, as soon as you say “consultant,” it is hard to know what is coming. Whatever response I get, I usually make light of the profession, thinking that if I can tell the jokes about consultants first, I will finesse any discomfort and ward off the other’s cynical comments.

Many years ago, I began writing Flawless Consulting with my usual jokes about consulting. See above. I left the jokes in later editions because the consulting industry has experienced enormous growth in the past two decades, partly the result of jobs disappearing so rapidly. Humor is a good defense against criticism that contains some truth in it. I think the shadow of this profession is about our ethics and the complexities of the role; it is not about our competence or contribution. This shadow is about questions of who we are here to serve, and whether is our work a low-risk way to downsize some more, in the name of change management and efficiency.

Although most of the heat about the profession is about external consultants, the same conflicts exist with internal consultants and staff groups. Staff groups are under great pressure to do the bidding of top management and often find it difficult to hold to their own values and beliefs. In this way, they carry much the same burdens as external consultants. It is not accidental that internal staff groups are labeled “overhead items” or that staff groups are an early target of cost reductions and outsourcing.

Many internal staff groups also operate as virtual consulting businesses: They are self-funding, bill out their services, and experience the same tension between serving their own interests and doing what is best for their clients. And with the increasing cost pressure on most organizations, many are even free to extend their services to outside clients.

The Promise

Part of the problem is that the promise of consulting is a commitment to care and to serve. We promise to act in the interest of another, the client. When we can hold to that promise, we probably add real value and become legitimate. It is just hard to meet such a standard.

To be effective in our work we have to explore what might be deserved in the world’s skepticism about whether consulting really brings the value that it promises. When consultants deny their own questions about both the value and the legitimacy of our stances in working with clients, we are feeding the cynicism and making the next generation of work more difficult.

3 Pitfalls that Cause Projects to Fail

Posted on by Maya Mehta

Below you will find Peter Block’s answers to all of the questions he did not have time to answer during “The 3 Pitfalls that Cause Projects to Fail” webinar.

Dean: How can one isolate bad behavior on the part of a powerful individual that is creating serious resistance and impeding trust?

Peter Block: You have the question right, Dean. No use in trying to change the one committed to low trust. You cannot resist or confront the behavior. What you can do is build support among those around that person. Engage them with each other about their intentions and raise the question with them how they can support each other more in the face of the one undermining trust.

Jim: As an ABCD consultant to neighborhood CBOs and Residents …. negotiating a “contract” with residents is tricky since they, typically, are seeking to be taken care of vs. being assisted. Do you have any suggestions for negotiating with residents?

Peter Block: Jim, you see the dilemma of learning passivity or internalized dependency. Rather than the language of negotiation, which assumes they will show up as equals, you might simply keep asking them what they want in the moment. Treat them as free agents, and when they trust the environment, they might answer the question of what they want. Lecturing them about their possibility is useless.

Deb: I work as a facilitator for a Restorative City trust and facilitate restorative conferences and community decision-making. I have been working with a consensus decision-making to help people make decisions that they all engage with and follow through with. What is your approach when a decision must be made, one or two people cannot move forward with the group?

Peter Block: You are doing wonderful work, Deb. Thank you for that.
Give up the idea of literal consensus. Create space for people who refuse to say “I pass” at moments of decision. Otherwise, you will reject them or make them lie to go along. Invite them to stay connected, but not let them hold things back. Consensual decision making is to believe in the patience to hear all points of view, but not be strangled by a vote.

Rebecca: I’m looking for guidance on how to be heard and seen in my bro-dominated workspace. I participate on teams but constantly feel like that what I share is ignored and not heard. I’ve experienced directly sharing feedback and then watching how when the same concept is repeated by a male colleague the group goes along. Looking for guidance on how to show up in my own power and be seen and valued for my contributions.

Peter Block: Rebecca, you see the world as it often is. You likely showing up in your own power, and often it has no impact. There is nothing to “do” or “fix” about it in the moment. What is unbearable is the loneliness of it all. Where are your allies? How can you choose to support each other? What you can commit to is to reduce the isolation of those around you who experience the same thing.    

Caring About Place

Posted on by Maya Mehta

This post on how growth undermines service is the third in our series that looks at what interferes with our capacity to serve, even in the face of our best intentions. It speaks to the industry as a whole, though both internal and external consultants will recognize the tensions between doing what is popular out of the words of top management and providing genuine service to a client. Future posts will get into other complexities that undermine our best efforts. Winding up the series will be some thoughts on what to do.

The growing marketplace for consulting services intensifies the complexities around the commercialization of our profession. For example, in the large accounting firms, consulting services used to be a second cousin—something done because the client demanded it or the consultants themselves got restless doing the more routine financial work they had been doing too long. The large consulting companies were primarily experts in a particular aspect of business, such as marketing, regulatory requirements, or technical innovation. Services aimed at and changing organization culture were not really on their radar screen.

Much of the growth of consulting has been riding the wave of the technology explosion combined with the trend toward downsizing. Most large organizations have found it more profitable to shrink and merge and outsource jobs. This creates the challenge of having fewer people doing more work, and the consulting industry has been the beneficiary of this movement.

The demand for consulting services has also grown because of the interest in quality improvement, better customer service, and changing cultures toward more engaged workplaces. All of these goals are worthy, but what I want to explore is how the commercialization of our services ended up subverting their intent.

Reengineering is a good example of an area of practice that had power and relevance. Its intent was inarguable but something shifted when the idea became commercialized and popular. Reengineering became the rage and consulting firms began to make promises that were unsustainable. After a good run, the work fell of its own weight.

The reengineering craze reached a point where whatever change we had in mind was called reengineering. Every department thought it was reengineering itself. The energy was more about becoming modern than becoming better. Reengineering became synonymous with restructuring and was sold by the large accounting and consulting firms with promises of a 30 to 50 percent return on the investment.

The dark side of reengineering, which threatened the whole profession, is that the promises made to sell the work either were never fulfilled or could finally be achieved only by eliminating jobs on a wide scale. The goal of restructuring the work process for the sake of the customer was more often than not unrealized. In fact, many of the users of reengineering began to reverse their efforts because they found the concept unworkable.

Reengineering,  like the more current desire to be lean and agile,  is a good example of two larger consulting complexities: how consultants take advantage of what is in vogue and how we pursue covert purposes.

When an idea is fashionable it becomes, almost by definition, a cosmetic solution. When we offer a service primarily because clients want it, we have chosen commerce over care. If we were strictly a business you might say, What’s the problem? The customer is always right. We only gave them what they asked for. Being also a service function, though, means that something more is due to the client.

When we offer a service primarily because clients want it, we have chosen commerce over care.

The other consulting complexity exemplified by reengineering is a form of double-dealing––for example when force reductions are packaged as organization improvement. Who could argue with restructuring for the sake of the customer? Organizations went through a long process of interviews, redesign teams, and extensive selling and training for the new system when the real net result of the effort was the elimination of jobs with little real change in function or culture.

Clients have a right to expect us to decide whether what the client is willing to buy will deliver what the client really needs. If the client asks for a service that will not help, or may even be harmful, then when do we say no and turn away the work? It is a tough thing to do, especially for internal consultants. Clients also have a right to expect us to speak and act authentically. If our work is packaged and sold as something it is not, we betray trust and set the client on a path to harmful results.

Your Boss Is Not Your Parent

Posted on by Maya Mehta

Peter Block has never been one to avoid confrontation and denounce current business practices. In this year’s edition of the Visionary Leaders Summit, a yearly installation of interviews with the world’s top innovators, thinkers, and educators, Peter Block had the honor of joining host Nicole Farkouh for an insightful interview. Peter concisely dismantles the age-old business practice of bosses treating their employees like children. The mindset that it is the boss’s responsibility to boost morale and maintain well-being is outdated and inherently detrimental to the progression of an employee. The simple reason for this is that the parent-child relationship in business diverts responsibility from the employee when in reality, the employee should ask themselves “What are you doing to contribute to the very thing that upsets you?” To learn more about why this and other popular business practices are lacking, watch Peter’s Visionary Leaders Summit interview here:

Feedback

Posted on by Maya Mehta

Let’s be honest. We all appreciate receiving honest feedback, but we dread being the bearer of bad news. It’s easy to leave things unspoken with someone to avoid an uncomfortable situation. However, providing honest feedback earns the trust of the people around us. Consulting is a helping profession: an act of service, love and care. When we fail to be authentic when offering feedback, we fail as consultants and business partners.

Blueprints

Posted on by Maya Mehta

When an architect designs a new house, a construction team must follow an organized blueprint to make sure that the house is built to the exact specifications of the architect. While blueprints are effective when building a house, following a strict blueprint does not work when changing the culture within an organization. In this video, Peter Block argues that human beings respond better to being free with organic thinking as opposed to sequential action steps to institute a positive shift in culture. Changing the culture of an organization involves engaging with employees so that employees feel as though they are providing value to the company. Collaborating with employees, as opposed to forcing change from top management, will promote support for the new company culture.