Consulting Journal: Trifles - Building authority

Trifles: Building authority

by David Blakey

If you have authority, you can manage your clients and your assignments. Here's how to get it.

[Tuesday 1 April 2003]

It is important for consultants to appear authoritative in all their dealings with clients.

Meetings

Your entrance

Imagine a meeting that is scheduled to begin at ten o'clock. If you are already sitting in the meeting room before ten, then you may not be noticed sufficiently by the other people as they enter. In order to make the greatest impression on these people, you need to enter the room after they are all already seated.

Anyone who is truly authoritative is in control of their own schedule, so there is no excuse for you to be late for a meeting if you have travelled from your home or your office to be there. You must therefore present the best possible excuse to the other people in the meeting room. One of the strongest is to say, ‘I'm sorry I'm late. My meeting with Bob Taylor ran over time.’ Bob Taylor is, of course, the chairman or chief executive of the client.

What you need to do, then, for a ten o'clock meeting, is to book a meeting with the chairman for nine-thirty. In fact, you should avoid scheduling any meeting with anyone unless you can get an appointment with the chairman or chief executive for half an hour before it.

Agenda

If a meeting has an agenda covering both strategic and operational issues, try to get the strategic issues discussed first. Here is how to handle them. Remember the meeting that you had half an hour earlier with Bob Taylor? During that meeting, you will have discussed with Bob each of the strategic issues on the ten o'clock agenda. For each item, you will have made a mental note of whether he is against it, is cautious about it, or agrees with it.

In the ten o'clock meeting, for each item, you should wait until someone asks your opinion. Then, use one of the following responses.

‘Actually, Bob and I have some serious reservations about it.’
‘Well, I was discussing this earlier with Bob, and he agrees that we should take a cautious approach to it.’
‘I think I can safely say that Bob is in favour of it.’

You should note that, in the third case, you should say only that Bob is in favour of it. If the plan does not work, then you can rightly claim that Bob was in favour and that you reserved your judgment. In all cases, you will establish your authority in two ways. First, it will be clear that you are in close contact with Bob Taylor. Second, the people in the meeting will understand that, whatever they decide, the real decision will be made by you and Bob.

Discussion

If the people at the meeting are mainly senior, with only one or two junior people, you should continually ask the younger people for their views. This establishes you as an important communications link within the client's hierarchy. It also puts the junior people through a test, as they must be able to answer your questions at all times. This will allow you to identify the weak and the strong junior staff, depending on how well they handle your probing. You can then change your tactics so that your questions demonstrate that weakness or strength. When the stronger people are promoted, because of you bringing them to the notice of senior staff, your authority will be increased. You may have established yourself as a ‘king-maker’.

Papers

If a paper is handed out during the meeting, then decide whether the paper is important. The importance of a paper is proportional to the opportunities for new consulting assignments that it presents. If a paper is relatively unimportant, then discuss it point by point in the meeting. If a paper is important - that is, it presents at least three new consulting opportunities - then say that you need to study it at length and have the discussion postponed until the next meeting. You will need to prepare for this discussion. If a paper seemed unimportant but some consulting opportunities arise during your discussion of it, then say that the people at the meeting need more time to think about it and suggest discussing it at the next meeting.

Focus

If the meeting moves from strategic to operational issues, then you can actually excuse yourself and leave. You can say ‘As we have moved on to purely operational issues, I suggest that I leave. I don't want to run up fees unnecessarily.’ This establishes you as having a responsible attitude to your client's budget, as well as being engaged purely to deal with strategy. If people at the meeting insist that you stay, then they will have to say that you will be useful to the meeting and that they think that paying for your presence at it will be beneficial. This will enhance your authority considerably.

Skilful consultants can actually refuse this request, by saying that they really think that the issues to be discussed are an internal matter only. When insecure people hear this, they imagine their own lack of experience. They may ask you again to stay, by stating their need for your experience and knowledge. You can then accept their invitation. This ploy increases your authority substantially. You have to know when to use it, however.

If the meeting begins with operational issues, despite your suggestion of dealing with strategy first, then you should say nothing. You should look at each person when they are speaking. You should take no notes. This achieves two objectives. First, it demonstrates your interest. Second, it establishes that the discussion is not actually useful to you. Not only that, but there is nothing that you consider noting down to mention to Bob Taylor later. As the meeting progresses, people will notice your attentiveness and will begin to wonder why you are so interested. It is not because of what they say, because you take no notes. They may begin to imagine that you are evaluating them for some reason. This will enhance your authority, especially if you have established yourself as a ‘king-maker’ already.

If, by some chance, someone is not sufficiently cowed by your behaviour and actually asks you a question, you should reply that the issue is really an operational one and that you will leave any decisions to them, given their experience and knowledge. This implies that their experience and knowledge fit into a lower stratum than your own. They are managers rather than directors. This adds to your authority.

Notes

Your notes of meetings should be restricted to the following areas.

Note any consulting opportunities and the items on the agenda that can lead to them.
Note all suggestions and ideas that are rejected.
Note all decisions.

Your actions are listed in order of priority. If a decision is made that may lead to consulting opportunities, then note it as an opportunity, with the highest priority. As a result, your list of decisions, which have the lowest priority, will be only of those decisions that do not present consulting opportunities. You will need this list of decisions later.

After the meeting

After the meeting, review your list of decisions. Check that they do indeed offer no opportunities for future consulting assignments for you. If they might provide assignments for other consultants, then this is a strong reason for destroying them: move these to the top of your list. Attempt to find some strong strategic argument against each one. Do not spend much time upon this task. If you can find a reason to overturn only one decision, then you have succeeded. Write a memorandum that describes the effects of implementing the decision. Include how the decision will have a negative effect on some strategic initiatives.

My advice is to avoid doing this for decisions involving IT, even if they would provide assignments for consultants with skills that you lack. Decisions about new systems and applications are rarely implemented successfully and your client already knows this. Attacking IT projects is like picking the lowest fruit from a tree. You should have to climb higher to find something worth picking. There should be a strong link to the client's strategy. To reinforce my point about IT, there is rarely a strong strategic link between strategy and IT projects and usually no link at all for any kind of Web or intranet development. Consultants engaged for these projects will probably be fired when they fail, and your distance from them will further enhance your authority.

Your memorandum should go to Bob Taylor. Its tone should be regretful. You should state that you were in the meeting when the decision was reached, but that you did not appreciate its strategic implications until after the meeting. This actually establishes your authority in several ways. First, it suggests that you are loyal to the other people in the meeting, as it does not attempt to blame them for decisions that they made without being able to appreciate ‘the big picture’. Second, it implies that you were the strategic ‘watchdog’ in the meeting. Third, it emphasizes your commitment to the client, because you thought through the decisions again after the meeting. Some consultants are willing to forego their fees for this additional thinking time, but I think that this sets a bad precedent.

Next, review your list of consulting opportunities. Check your list of rejected ideas. If any of the rejected ideas are related to any of the consulting opportunities, then cross those opportunities off the list. You should now have a list of consulting opportunities that are free of any ideas that have already been rejected. Select at least one of these and write a memorandum to Bob Taylor. This memorandum should describe the agreed agenda item and the actions that you intend to take on a consulting assignment to study the item further. You are, in effect, demanding that Bob gives you the consulting assignment. This is a clear sign of your authority.

Research

You should spend some time on research. If your client is considering off-shore outsourcing, for example, you should find out all you can about what other companies are doing and have done. You should only be interested in companies larger than your client and companies in the same sector as your client; if you can research larger companies in the same sector that is ideal.

Note all indisputable facts about failure. If another company's off-shore outsourcing initiative collapsed, then note the financial loss rather than the reasons. Any reason can be disputed; the facts cannot. If you were to say that the project failed because of ineffective back-office communication, someone could argue either that it did not happen that way or that the client would not repeat the same mistake. If you were to say that the project had cost n million before it collapsed, then no one can argue against it.

Note all opinions about success. You use the opposite technique for this. Ignore any actual facts. Use quotations, especially from sources that the people in your client will regard as untrustworthy or unreliable. The best quotations are those from previous employees of the client. If Joe Soap left your client to join So-and-So and if someone in a meeting says that So-and-So saved n million a year through off-shore outsourcing, you can add, ‘Yes, according to Joe Soap, who's with them now.’

You can dismiss anything written in newspapers or magazines. If someone in a meeting says, ‘I read that So-and-So are saving n million a year by outsourcing with XYZ,’ add ‘That's according to XYZ's press release, anyway,’ or ‘That was in XYZ's advertorial in magazines, wasn't it?’ (Check the dates of your sources; some publications publish nonsensical articles on 1 April.)

It is a long-held consulting practice never to recommend anything to a client. You should also never criticise anything. You should not directly attack a product or service. Your method should be to remain neutral of any decision. Your tone of voice is important. When you say ‘That was in XYZ's advertorial,’ you should use a neutral, matter-of-fact voice. You should avoid using a sneering or superior tone.

My advice

A useful analogy is to consider a ticket inspector. A conductor - who sells tickets to passengers - has little authority. An inspector - who checks ticket - does. The conductor stays on a bus (or tram or train) for an entire journey. A bus inspector moves from bus to bus, waiting in the street for each new bus to come along. Have you ever noticed that a ticket inspector may get onto a bus but not actually check any of the passengers' tickets? You might have assumed that the inspector was simply moving around. In fact, as an inspector gets onto a bus, he looks at the faces of the passengers. People who do not have tickets may look guilty. If our bus inspector sees a look of guilt among the passengers, he will not inspect the tickets. If he found a passenger without a ticket, he would get involved in the work of selling them one or of putting them off. This would reduce his authority. As long as he only checks the tickets of passengers who have valid tickets, he has authority. As soon as he has to do any real work, he loses that authority.

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