Consulting Journal: Techniques - Consultant qualities

Techniques: Consultant qualities

by David Blakey

What are the basic qualities that consultants need?

[Monday 17 February 2003]

What qualities do you need to be a consultant? This question is answered in a number of articles and books. Some of the answers mention qualities such as being diplomatic or relating well with people or recognizing opportunities. These are mainly qualities that can be learned or acquired through experience. The Consulting Journal is aimed at two kinds of people: those who want to be consultants; and those who want to be better consultants. I shall suggest three basic qualities. I believe that you need to have them before you become a consultant. Once you are a consultant, I believe that you need to have more of them than the average person in order to be a successful consultant.

The qualities

These three qualities are knowledge, intelligence and wisdom.

Knowledge

One of the major reasons for becoming a consultant is that you have particular knowledge that is needed by a number of clients. That knowledge is usually restricted to a small number of people, who have received training and have gained experience in their individual discipline. This is true. Someone who knows a lot about supply chain management or the telecommunications sector can become a consultant and provide that knowledge to their clients

The knowledge can be something like supply chain management, which is needed across many different sectors and industries. It can be something like knowledge of the telecommunications sector, which is needed by a narrow range of companies within that sector.

As you continue to work as a consultant, you should gain more knowledge. Consider why. A phrase that was popular amongst some consultants was ‘knowledge transfer’. During an assignment, the consultants would impart some of their knowledge to their clients. Sometimes ‘knowledge transfer’ would be controlled: the clients would gain some knowledge but not enough to be able to do the work themselves. Rather than freely transferring their knowledge, the consultants were rationing it. These ‘knowledge transfer’ assignments were an alternative to these consultants' favourite form of assignment: the ‘black box’ assignments, during which no knowledge was actually imparted to the clients. This form of assignment is largely dead today, due, sadly, not to the enlightenment of these consultants but to the demands of their clients, who had become increasingly impatient of consulting assignments that delivered results that they could neither reproduce nor extend themselves.

Because your knowledge will be shared with your clients, you need to increase and extend that knowledge to remain in business as a consultant. You may have two years in the market with your speciality before it becomes hard for you to sell it to clients. You need your knowledge to grow.

Part of this growth of your knowledge must be to keep it current. Remember that there will be other people like you who want to become consultants too, and if their knowledge is more current - more ‘state of the art’ if you like - then you will find it hard to compete with them.

Intelligence

Knowledge alone will not make you a good consultant. You also need intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to reason. It is largely independent of knowledge. In practice, knowledge and intelligence work together. Given your knowledge, you can apply your intelligence to solve problems. The problems that consultants encounter are not pure challenges to intelligence: they are not about finding the fifth element in a series out of a list of five options. Intelligence enables you to form all the available options. There might be only one option; there might be five; there may be many. When you are faced with a business problem in your consulting speciality, your knowledge of that speciality supports your intelligence in forming the options.

You should certainly increase your knowledge throughout your consulting career. I do not know if you can increase your intelligence. I do know that you should continue to use it. It is easy to fall into the trap of working to a formula. It is rather like having a methodology that is not capable of being tailored to each client's needs. It may be that you manage an assignment in exactly the same way that you managed the previous assignment. This should be because you have decided to manage it the same way; it should not be because you have developed a routine.

You should apply your intelligence continuously throughout every assignment.

Wisdom

As well as knowledge and intelligence, you need wisdom. Wisdom is the ability to make the best use of knowledge. On a consulting assignment, your intelligence may help you to define the most logical answer to your client's problems. This logical answer may not be the best approach to describe to your client, however. Your wisdom may help you to describe the best way for you to describe your answer so that your client will accept it.

A practical example may be in information systems. Your knowledge of the client's requirements may prompt your intelligence to suggest a highly-integrated, enterprise-wide application. Your knowledge of your client's previous attempts at large-scale systems implementations may prompt your wisdom to suggest a gradual approach, so that there is a series of manageable implementations rather than a ‘big bang’.

You can increase your wisdom through experience. Much of your knowledge will be gained from experience as well, but your wisdom will be built entirely from your experiences. Each experience should give you some lessons about that experience. There will be some things that you will want to repeat in future. There will be other things that you will want to avoid.

A new client's awareness of your knowledge and your intelligence may get you your first assingment. Your clients' awareness of your wisdom will get you repeat business.

What to do

Here are my tips.

First, you should try to increase your knowledge. This may be by expanding it within your own speciality or by extending it into other areas. Your knowledge should be current. In some sectors, it is useful to have historical knowledge, too.

Second, you should never stop applying your intelligence. Never do anything out of habit. Always think it through and justify your actions.

Third, you should continue to learn, to increase your wisdom. Learn from your successes and your failures. Watch what happens around you and think about why it happens.

Finally, let me tell you about a real assignment.

The assignment was to manage a project that had already started. The manager in charge of the project had doubts about whether it would succeed. I checked the project plan and the availability of staff within the client and within the supplier. The project could not be completed on time. My knowledge and intelligence led to my conclusion. The general manager of the client had made a commitment to the holding company that the project would be completed by a certain date. I told him that it could not be. The supplier's project manager assured him that it would. Wisdom told me to walk away from the situation. I did. The project collapsed shortly afterwards, for exactly the reasons that I had given the client.

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