Category: Articles

Consulting Complexities: Performance Management… Let Me Do It for You

Posted on by Maya Mehta

This post on how the lure to set up programs to manage performance improvement ultimately undermines consulting effectiveness continues our series that looks at what interferes with our capacity to serve, even in the face of our best intentions. It speaks to both internal and external consultants experiencing the tensions between doing what is popular and providing genuine service to a client.

In a culture in which profitability and efficiency are the priority, accountability becomes everyone’s favorite word. We think that there is a relationship between holding ourselves and others more accountable and increasing performance. If we can just tighten our accountability grip, the organization would deliver more. This illusion creates a market for methodologies and consultant services that promise better gripping power.

There are consulting firms that guarantee concrete results in return for a fee. If you don’t see the results, you don’t pay the fee. This is the ultimate in performance consulting. How could a consultant make this kind of guarantee? Simple. Take over that segment of the business that you promise to improve. The consultant becomes a surrogate manager, and the line management clears the way and effectively steps aside. The people in the unit live under the power of the consultant, and generally the consultant delivers on the “performance improvement” by instituting closer controls and having fewer people doing more jobs.

This is not really consulting. It is something we might call “in-sourcing”: bringing into the organization, on a temporary basis, surrogate managers who are willing to take a difficult stand, reduce head count, confront people in a way that the permanent, resident management is unwilling to do.

Even if the job needed to be done, the use of consultants in this way undermines the legitimacy of the consultant role. Consulting is no longer educational, advisory, or capacity building. Line managers cast the consultant in the role of the Serpent in order to protect their own good image with their own people. When we go along with this, it may be good for our business, but hard on the service dimension of the profession.

There are milder forms of performance consulting, the main problems of which have more to do with taking measurements than with taking charge. There is a widespread belief that anything you cannot measure does not exist. And internal staff groups are under more and more pressure to be more business oriented and return-on-investment–minded than in the past. Hard to argue with in theory.

The risk is that staff groups will no longer be in the business of cultural change or confronting the culture with its own blindness. Performance consulting will drive staff groups to be more like the culture that surrounds them. This will reinforce services that treat only symptoms and seek acceptance at the cost of some greater impact than the consultant or staff group has the potential to make.

There is great pressure for this, especially in the human resource area. The HR function comes under siege because much of its value is hard to quantify. In periods when people concerns are in remission, the push to “rationalize” HR almost leads to its elimination. There has to be a way for qualitative services to demonstrate their value without sacrificing the power of their unique perspective.

Flawlessly Feeding Your Soul

Posted on by Maya Mehta

As a millennial in the midst of her career, I find myself exposed to a range of diverse colleagues and clients with regard to age, gender, skill set, title, role, background and overall life experience. Some are leading in their industry or just getting started with their working professional career, groomed with the latest best practices. Others have spent decades in different corporate roles, taking on new projects and challenges, rising up the ranks. Regardless of their generation and different experiences, they all face one thing in common, human dynamics.

It is the intangible skill set of connecting, relating, understanding, influencing, and aligning that seems to affect everyone in their organizational system, from individual contributor to senior leader. Technical acumen is needed to thrive in today’s technologically advancing society, but your business cannot thrive on technical acumen alone. Ignoring the more difficult aspects of human dynamics in the workplace can drag down the culture due to a reluctance to address the “here and now.” This is emotionally draining and contributes to workplace stress. Heeding behavior allows you to not only deliver a great end product, but work with others on the team Flawlessly. This is the main focus of Peter Block’s workshop’s and book, Flawless Consulting.

What does it mean to act Flawlessly? Does it mean to complete the work on time and on budget? Perhaps those things may be important and critical to the project’s success, but what about behavior?

Pure awareness, intentional reflection, grounded integrity, and operating with conscious choice is Flawless.

I invite my diverse colleagues, who may be experiencing challenges, to explore further with me. I ask you to dive deeper into the presenting problem to understand the influencing factors   I ask you to deepen your own awareness into your own contribution to the problem. I invite you to that space in-between both subjective realities where insight is flickering in the dark. Confronting discomfort, letting go, and listening for the new path forward. This is where the magic happens and a newfound opportunity to mitigate resistance and co-create a healthy and effective solution.

When I see friends and colleagues struggling with interpersonal or group dynamics, I remember how universal this challenge is. It transcends industries, levels of hierarchy, and global culture. This work is ongoing and is the work for us all in the midst of our dynamic and diverse lives. To evolve and sharpen technologically is an imperative for change, so is the need to cultivate conscious awareness in service of your personal and organizational mission. It’s emotional, it’s uncomfortable, and it feeds your soul.

FAQ’s from Flawless Consulting Workshops

Posted on by Maya Mehta

Over the years I have trained thousands of people in Flawless Consulting Workshops. Most of them did not see themselves as consultants yet had questions about how to relate to the people they served inside the organization.

Now, if you’re not sure you are an internal consultant? Follow this link to a previous article.

Here are the seven most frequently asked questions that I am asked in Flawless Consulting Workshops about becoming an internal consultant with impact and influence.

1. How do I move from a transactional (doing everything) role and into a partnership (strategic) role?

2. What are the right questions to ask clients to get results?

3. How do I get clients to be clear about their expectations?

4. How do I deal with difficult clients, handle push-back and resistance?

5. How do I get my recommendations accepted and used by my clients?

6. How do I show my value, credibility, expertise to my client?

7. How do I get my clients to take accountability?

After you think about these questions, I have two questions for you…

1. What is your top question about being an internal consultant?

2. What are you doing to build your internal consulting skills?

I’d love to hear your questions. Drop me a note. Let me know how it’s going. Looking forward to hearing from you. Over the next few blogs, I’ll work to answer some of these or other questions I get from you.

The No-Judgment Zone

Posted on by Maya Mehta

Jiddu Krishnamurti, an Indian philosopher, speaker, and writer said, “The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.” It’s an ability we talk about often in Flawless Consulting when learning how to deal with resistance in our client relationships.

Observation is the action or process of observing something or someone carefully in order to gain information. It is a statement based on something one has seen, heard, or noticed. Evaluation is altogether different. It is the making of a judgment about the amount, number, or value of something—an assessment. The time between observation and evaluation is seconds but the impact can be monumental.

At any point in our consulting process with a client, resistance is likely to happen. Dealing with such resistance may not be easy, but we’ve learned it can be simple. The key is leveraging the difference between observation and evaluation.

First, let’s talk about what resistance may look like in a client.

Some examples may include silence, interrupting, changing the topic, asking excessive questions, checking the time, stone-walling, arriving late, leaving early or even proclaiming, “We’ve always done it this way.” When hit with these various forms of resistance, it can be very easy to jump immediately into our own evaluation of what we believe their resistance must really mean. Flawless Consultants learn to come to a full-stop of our innate jump to judgment.

We do this by understanding what is behind the resistance and seek to get to the heart of what’s really going on.

Resistance in clients is often a sneak peek into their own harsh realities of the challenge they are trying to overcome.

There may be a real fear of being vulnerable to the consulting process, making a commitment, or even the fear of losing control. Resistance then is an open door to discovering critical aspects of what could be an underlying problem that should be addressed sooner rather than later. There may be a real fear of being vulnerable to the consulting process, making a commitment, or even the fear of losing control. Resistance then is an open door to discovering critical aspects of what could be an underlying problem that should be addressed sooner rather than later.

We use five skills to help navigate these murky waters.

1. Give two good-faith responses. In other words, give a “resisting” behavior a pass for the first two times. If you see your client take a quick look at their watch, don’t automatically read too much into it. If the behavior doesn’t continue, it wasn’t signaling resistance.

2. If the behavior does continue after at least two good-faith responses, name the behavior simply and directly. Here is where the difference between observation and evaluation becomes critical. Simply state the observed behavior and come to a full stop before moving to evaluation.

For instance, a client continues to look at their watch. A Flawless Consultant would say, “You keep looking at the clock.” If you say, “You look distracted,” you’ve moved pass observation, into evaluation and well into judgment which can quickly derail a conversation and make navigating the resistance even more difficult.

3. Once you’ve named the behavior, be quiet. Let the tension rise and allow the client to explain what the behavior means.

4. Give support to the underlying concerns by listening curiously, asking questions and seeking to understand.

5. Return to the business of the meeting or something new, depending on the underlying concerns. Let it go and move on.

Ultimately, resistance gets in the way of dealing with issues that affect the work. If we, as consultants, don’t manage the resistance, we may never really get to the deeper issues. We can help clients be more direct by showing them what they are doing by being clear and direct about our observations. It’s with this “look in the mirror” that we hope clients will say “why” they are doing it. No evaluation. No judgment. After all, it’s their “why” to tell.

Beverly Crowell is an experienced facilitator, speaker, thought leader, and author specializing in the areas of business operations, organization, employee and human resources development.

“What do you mean by Flawless?”

Posted on by Maya Mehta

It’s a question I hear early in my Flawless Consulting Skills workshops. Flawless can sound arrogant and impossible. But let me offer a short explanation of Flawless. There are four basic principles to being Flawless that are simple and practical…

  • Being authentic with others
  • Acting with compassion
  • Completing the business of each phase
  • Modeling it—living it out

Flawless does not mean that you’ll always get your way or never have a difficult client. Flawless builds trusting relationships, working together as partners for the organization.

Flawless is not a destination; it’s a journey of learning.

Having used these principles and skills for over 30 years, I am still learning what it means to be Flawless.

Here is a simple description I use when asked, “How do you explain to your client what you do?”

I start by discussing how we each Feel about working together. Then, I Listen to understand what the client is up against or trying to do. I Acknowledge what I’ve heard and ask questions for clarity and understanding. We agree on what we Want from each other to make our work successful. Next, I ask others for their views of the situation and Listen to discover the underlying issues. After that, I organize my thoughts and Explain to the client, without judgment, what I see happening and its impact, allowing us to make progress towards a decision. Throughout the process, I raise tough issues and Support the client’s doubts and concerns while telling them personally about the Strengths and contributions they have made in our work together.

I keep the words simple and descriptive, No jargon. This simplicity is how I emulate authenticity with my clients.

In Flawless Consulting workshops, you’ll learn the skills to begin your own personal journey toward being Flawless. I wish you fair winds and following seas. Please feel free to contact me at cfields@designedlearning.com with questions or comments.

CONSULTING COMPLEXITIES: Our Love of Leadership

Posted on by Maya Mehta

This post on how our love for leadership ultimately undermines consulting effectiveness continues our series looking 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 and providing genuine service to a client.

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We have been in search of leaders since the late seventies. Before that, we were in search of managers. We now have a leadership development industry fueled more by training and presentation than by consulting. The industry is led by authors and ex-chief executive officers who, in many cases, have found more meaning teaching leadership than providing it. The headliners come not only from private industry, but also from politics, sports, and the government.

The high end of the leadership industry is really a seminar and workshop business. At the top, the pay is good, the hours are reasonable, and the expectations are pretty low. No one asks about the financial return to the organization as the result of a celebrity presentation. They just wish the celebrity could have stayed around longer.

The number of leadership sessions offered within companies and as public conferences keeps growing. I have even been the beneficiary of this trend.

One large company required a week of training for the top two thousand executives. Forty sessions ran for fifty executives at a time. Monday was globalization, Tuesday was finance, Thursday was product innovation, and Friday was a talk with the top. Wednesday was a day on empowerment, and I had written a book on the subject. So I showed up as the centerfold of the week and talked about creating an empowered workforce, a subject of greatest interest only to myself and those sitting in the back of the room who sponsored the program. The empowerment interest has now been converted to agility, innovation, and thinness.

Though some of the participants seemed somewhat engaged in what they were learning, most were going through the motions—there only to get their ticket punched. When I finally withdrew from the program, I received from the support staff a special goodbye present: a t-shirt with a slightly cynical message on it about the true impact of the effort.

The consulting complexities built into working with clients on leadership development is that the effort holds on to the belief that organizations are the creation of those who run them. Training the organization’s leaders becomes the centerpiece strategy for improving it. In fact, there is little evidence that training leaders has any impact on organizational change, and there is little accountability for the investment made in leader training.

This is in sharp contrast to the way training at lower levels is scrutinized. Train supervisors for two hours a week for six weeks and we are asked to defend the investment. Send the top management team to a university for four weeks, and the question of value received is limited to asking the participating managers whether they liked the program. Four weeks in Cambridge, Charlottesville, Evanston, Palo Alto—what’s not to like?

The ethical challenge for internal and external consultants alike is how best to serve the client without colluding in what is essentially a form of elitism, perpetuating the notion that organizations will forever live in the shadow of its leaders.

Why We Say Yes When We May Want to Say No

Posted on by Maya Mehta

The phone rings on a Friday afternoon. It’s a key internal client and he’s got a problem. The urgency in his voice rings as someone who wants help, wants it now and wants it from you as a trusted and respected consultant in the organization. Recognizing the need to move fast, you set up a meeting for first-thing Monday morning.

You arrive at the meeting ready to explore how your client sees the problem and understand more about his expectations of you. What you learn is concerning. The client is ready to jump to a solution and wants to jump fast. Why? He’s already figured out how to fix the problem and wants you to do it for him …now.

At Designed Learning, we know this story is the real deal and a real issue.  It’s especially true for internal consultants who feel challenged with telling a client “no” when you know they want to hear “yes.” In working with our consultants around the globe, we’ve asked them, “Why do you say ‘yes’ to your client, when maybe you should say ‘no?’”

Here’s what we’ve heard:

  • I need the project in order to survive or get ahead, I have quota to fill.

  • My boss has high expectations of me.

  • I feel an obligation to my internal clients to help and do what they want.

  • It’s a great opportunity to get my foot in the door and establish my reputation.

  • It’s the way consulting has always been done.

  • It’s my job.

Saying “yes” when we should say “no” creates the opportunity for hurried contracting and a shotgun diagnosis of your client’s problem at hand.

Should you make it to the implementation of your solution, it’s the breeding ground for even more problems and less than desirable results. While saying “no” is never easy, it may be the only way to solve the client’s problem so that it stays solved and enables them to solve similar problems in the future.

So, how do you say “no” when you know your client wants you to say “yes?”

At the heart of Flawless Consulting is the mindset of authenticity and compassion. When we are authentic as consultants, we are direct and put into words what we are experiencing, and we do so compassionately by considering the client’s point of view. We strive to be a model for the way we want the organization to be and, as such, we commit to not rushing to get it done. Instead, we challenge ourselves and our clients to complete the various phases of consulting and deal with resistance as it comes along.

At the foundation of Flawless Consulting is the preliminary phase of Entry and Contracting. It is here where the consulting relationship is established and consultants have the best leverage for establishing a collaborative partnership with the client so that a “no” does not have to become a “yes” if it’s not in the best interest of the client, the consultant, or the organization. As part of their initial contracting meeting with clients, Flawless Consultants explore how their clients see the problem, whether they are the right person to work on the issues, how the client’s expectations are aligned with their own, and discuss how best to get started.

If expectations are not aligned, we may experience the harsh reality of a client fearing the loss of control, making a commitment, or being vulnerable to something new that does not represent their initial ideas. Instead of taking it personally or caving in with a “yes,” Flawless Consultants want resistance disclosed, exposed, understood and supported. If our clients are direct about their concerns and take responsibility for the difficulties they are having, our belief is that we, the consultants, can more easily support them in their struggle and help them find ways to improve their situation.

Unfortunately, even the best efforts can and will be derailed from time to time. For internal consultants, the boss may have expectations of you that you cannot fill. You may feel like you never can say no or that it’s your job to convert very difficult clients. If this is you, try having a contracting meeting with your boss. Consider what you think your boss wants from you and detail what you want from your boss. Then, schedule some time to discuss your stated or unstated wants, assumptions and expectations. The clarity of understanding and agreement with your boss will directly affect your ability to be flawless with your clients.

“Working in organizations means we are constantly bombarded by pressure to be clever and indirect and to ignore what we are feeling in the moment,” explains Peter Block, author of Flawless Consulting. “Flawless consulting offers the possibility of letting our behavior be consistent with our beliefs and feelings and also to be successful in working with our clients.”

Signs That You May Be an Internal Consultant

Posted on by Maya Mehta

You’re a what? A consultant! The word conjures many thoughts – most of them negative. I’ve heard the jokes, seen the cartoons, and watched the movies.

I never thought of myself as a consultant. I was a director of training for engineering, not a consultant. The people who worked for me were technicians and engineers not consultants. The people I worked with were engineering managers, not clients.

Over the years, as I trained people in Flawless Consulting skills, I heard that comment over and over, “I never thought of myself as a consultant.”

To help people discover their role, I offer the following nine signs that you may be in an internal consulting role. (When you read “others,” I am referring to people outside your area.)

1. You have a professional area of expertise.

2. You work in an area that provides support to other departments or divisions, i.e. Administrative services, business process improvement, communications, engineering, finance, human resources, it, law, learning and development, OD, project management, purchasing, recruiting, or training.

3. You have words like advisor, analyst, business partner, HR, improvement, IT, performance, process, productivity, relationship, research, safety, specialist, strategist, or training in your job title.

4. You refer to the others you serve as business partners, line managers, customers, and clients.

5. You work to help others solve their problems with sustainable solutions.

6. You find that others often come to you for assistance “at the last moment.”

7. You find that others’ expectations are often not clear and hard to understand.

8. You feel that others sometimes don’t see your value or credibility.

9. You find it hard to “sell” your recommendations to others.

Now if you answered “Yes” to at least four of these questions, you are probably an internal consultant.

Don’t fret, consulting can be a great life if you change your thinking. That’s what happened to me when I attended a Flawless Consulting skills workshop years ago. During that first workshop, my thinking began to change. I realized that much of what I did was internal consulting and that I needed to develop some new skills to be successful.

For example, I started listening more than I talked, I asked questions instead of making statements, and I slowed down to understand my client’s emotional reactions instead of getting frustrated or angry. In a short time, I built trust and credibility in my relationships that I had not had before.

After a few months of practicing Flawless Consulting skills, relationships at work changed for the better. I became a partner to my clients, not just someone to arrange training events. After a year, Engineering became more open, more cooperative, more productive. Within two years I enjoyed working with all departments of the company and several of their external customers. I developed an internal consulting practice and became a trusted advisor to a few key leaders. I thrived not just survived.

– This article was written by Charles L. Fields, a proponent and practitioner of Designed Learning, for many years.  He was a gifted facilitator, mentor, and coach to participants and fellow affiliate consultants of Designed Learning.  We lost Charlie several years ago to cancer, but his spirit and inspiration live on in our lives and in his writing.

Getting Beyond the Smoke and Mirrors

Posted on by Maya Mehta

In Flawless Consulting, author Peter Block writes, “Most consulting projects get started because managers feel pain. When the organization feels the pain, managers start to describe for themselves why the pain exists.” It should be no surprise then that projects defined from an initial place of pain may be a lot of “smoke and mirrors” designed to unintentionally draw attention away from what is really happening inside an organization.

In magical illusions, smoke and mirrors are a classic technique designed to obscure or embellish the truth of a situation. And while managers may not intentionally be obscuring or embellishing the truth of a situation, those experienced in the Flawless Consulting model know what is stated initially is rarely what is at the heart of a problem.

To get at the heart of the problem, you need to first discover the underlying dimensions of the situation by analyzing what you’ve heard initially against what still is to be learned. To do so, look first at the top layer which is usually described as the presenting problem – what the manager or client believes is at core of the issue. It may or may not be all smoke and mirrors at this point, but flawless consultants dig deeper by looking at the middle and core layers of the problem to understand how others in the organization are contributing to the problem and how the client may be contributing as well. The process of doing so is called Discovery.

In the Flawless Consulting process, gaining a clear picture of the problem begins only after the initial meeting with the client and contracting around how to best move forward. Once an agreement is reached, the consultant works to discover the underlying dimensions of the situation. They do so by asking the client and others in the organization to restate the problem as they see it and then go further by being direct and asking:

  • How are others’ in the organization contributing to the problem?

  • How are you contributing to the problem?

  • What’s the future you want to see?

The objective of Discovery is to understand the dimensions of the problem and describe it in a way that is enlightening and actionable – something someone can do something about.

This initial inquiry will help direct where you look next to discover how the problem is being managed … or not.

In medicine, it’s easy to understand the difference between treating the symptoms or curing a condition. A broken leg hurts and pain killers may temporarily ease the pain, but you need a completely different treatment plan to heal the leg. In organizations, it’s easy to want to treat the symptoms of a problem for even a momentary respite from the technical or interpersonal issues causing the pain. Experience tells us however; the pain will return.

Flawless consulting provides a roadmap to get a picture of what is really happening inside an organization and then make recommendations on how to address it. By shedding light on all the layers underneath, the mystery is revealed and a clear picture emerges on how to solve the problem so it stays solved.

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.