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How to work with a consultant
1. Don't forget
A consultant’s ‘7 Deadly Sins’:
- Applying tired formulas and book solutions instead of studying the problem with an open mind: adapting the client’s problem to fit their expertise instead of adapting their expertise to fit the client’s problem.
- Using a high-powered front man to sell the service and then handing the job over to inexperienced people, inadequately supervised.
- Using the client’s name without permission.
- Overcommitting themselves, through an emotional inability to turn down offers of work even if accepting means that they will be dangerously overstretched.
- Privately criticising and disparaging the client’s staff when talking to top executives, and criticising top executives to the staff.
- Doing work on fees for the client that could be done just as well, and less expensively, by the client’s own staff.
- Concealing the fact that another company whose products or services they are recommending is giving them a commission or paying them a retainer.
2. Don't forget
Your ‘7 Deadly Sins’ as a client
- Failure to define your requirements clearly to yourself and effectively asking the consultant to find the problem as well as the solution.
- Changing your mind and altering your decisions on the basis of casual and ill-informed criticism from colleagues or friends.
- Reacting to criticism from superiors by putting all the blame on the consultant, even though you have approved what the consultant is doing.
- Not bringing worries and criticisms out into the open and confronting the consultant with them: terminating the consultant’s services without warning, or not having the courage to terminate when you should.
- Interfering and second-guessing on matters that lie within the consultant’s expertise and are outside your own.
- Blurring responsibility for the consultant’s work, so that all those involved try to arrange it so that they take the credit if it succeeds and avoid the blame if it fails.
- Freeloading, that is, employing a consultant on a small, well-defined project and then trying to milk him/her ‘informally’ for free advice over a wide range of other, unrelated problems.
3. Too late for damage control
Consultants are not miracle workers. Consultants summoned to fix emergencies are at a disadvantage. Pro-active clients call consultants when opportunities for improvement exist - not when the patient is dying. Consultants' fees are better spent on preventative measures rather than damage control. …
