Mandatory Skills

There are skills, of course, that are critically needed by anyone calling herself a consultant, but some of those skills my surprise you. There are surprisingly few that I’d cite as mandatory, and they’re not about running focus groups or rearranging the room so that people feel empowered.

 

Framing Skills. The single most important skill I’ve utilized is that of “framing.” Framing means helping the client (and yourself) see the picture by throwing cogent and logical boundaries around it. I can frame a client’s issue in the first two minutes of any substantive discussion. Some consultants launch projects without ever having done so. 

Clients (especially internally, where they expect you to understand the culture, lingo, and history immediately—I’m under no such pressure, since I’m an uneducated outsider, a huge advantage) will “core dump” everything they know about their problem, issue, or opportunity. After a few minutes of listening (most of which isn’t to hear more but just to be polite by not cutting in too soon), outstanding consultants say, “In other words, your new sales levels are being undercut by unprecedented customer desertion.” Or: “If I’ve heard you correctly, time-to-market is being delayed because there is no incentive tied to the commercialization of R&D work.”

You must be able to quickly paraphrase and succinctly create the real challenge. That ability will instantly prompt the client to believe you have great insight and analytic ability, and will dramatically elevate your credibility. You know a client is impressed when he or she says any of the following:

“You’ve expressed it better than I could.”

“You’ve grasped the issue more quickly than most people.”

“That’s brilliant—I’ve never looked at it that way before.”

Diagnostic Participative Skills. There is nothing as powerful as co-opting the buyer to join you in the diagnosis so that you are jointly party to the buying decision. This creates instant peer relationships. The good news is that this is a learnable skill. The bad news is that most people have never mastered the tools.

The essential element here is to provide a basis within which you and the buyer can quickly—and the operative word is “quickly”—assess the current situation.

 

Conflict Resolution. There is inevitable conflict during consulting projects—conflict among stakeholders, among sponsors and the buyer, and between you and the buyer. Not everyone’s interest is the same or even compatible. 

Conflict is unavoidable, so you might as well become adept at resolving it, which is why this is the final component in our unlikely skills pantheon.

The key here is counterintuitive: Few true conflicts are about personality. Poor chemistry and battling egos do play a small role, but the preponderance of conflict occurs over two issues:

1. Disagreement about objectives.

2. Disagreement about alternatives.

If you can sort out the source of the conflict quickly (see the framing skills mentioned previously), you can resolve it rapidly, because each type of conflict has its own unique starting point.

 

Conflict about Objectives. This occurs when two or more parties disagree about the end goals and is by far the more serious conflict of the two. The buyer might seek to expand the number of customers in the Northeast while one or more subordinates believe that the goal should be fewer sales at higher prices. These are profoundly differing destinations, requiring radically different approaches in pricing, training, marketing, and so on. 

To resolve this type of conflict, you must establish who the owner of the process is (it may, in fact, not be the buyer if the vice president for Northeast operations is the sole executive affected). That owner should have the final say about the desired end results, unless the project is to correct some egregious problem the owner has already caused.

Unresolved conflict about objectives will kill any project, because key players will refuse to cooperate on what they see as quite reasonable and ethical grounds: The ends don’t justify the means. Your job here is to deliver a consensus around the legitimate ends.

 

Conflict about Alternatives. In this case, the ends are agreed upon but the route to achieve them is disputed. The goal of expanding the customer base in the Northeast may be met by bringing on noncustomers, stealing market share from competitors, or creating entirely new products to appeal to new demographics altogether.

Here the goal is to find the alternative(s) that best meet the objectives within acceptable risk limits. (Every alternative has residual risk since nothing is a sure thing or there’d be no need to plan at all.) To resolve this type of conflict, ask the interested parties to engage in a risk/reward analysis, which you facilitate. Evaluate each option’s merits versus its threat, and arrive at a prudent decision.

Unresolved conflict about alternatives will generate halfhearted responses and even competing entries in the race. Your job here is to prove that a given alternative is superior to others in meeting the agreed-upon objectives.

You’re successful in resolving conflict when participants say:

“I’m comfortable that we’ve examined all options and suggestions objectively.”

“We’re all on the same page now, agree on goals.”

“I can support this and explain it to my people logically.”

Framing skills, diagnostic participation skills, and conflict resolution— perhaps not the set of skills you had anticipated at this point. But that’s why internal consulting is so often unsuccessful. People are developing arcane skills in implementation when it’s actually the skills of defining issues and building consensus around approaches to them that carry the day.