The Chameleon Consultant

Culturally Intelligent Consultancy

Andrew Holmes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138718234
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351765657
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Business

This title was first published in 2002. How do you add value to your clients? Is it the process you use, or the technical skills you deploy? Or perhaps it's your ability to adjust the way you sell and deliver your services based upon your tacit understanding of your client's culture - the way we do things round here. Such chameleon-like behaviour is fundamental to successful consulting, and yet it is neither widely understood nor practised within the profession. Until now. This book describes a powerful way to improve the consultancy process, from selling the service to delivering the engagement, through a concept called cultural intelligence - the missing dimension of effective consultancy. By revisiting the consultancy process using a simple model of organizational culture, this text creates a potent technique for tailoring the principal consultancy processes of selling, relationship management, account management and engagement management. Such tailoring that ensures the consultant and consultancy firm can blend into their clients' organizations more effectively and as a result add immediate and lasting value.

PART I

The foundations of cultural intelligence

Being a consultant is difficult, but being an effective and successful one is considerably harder.

Although consultancy is one of the most popular professions for graduates, and in particular those with masters degrees in business administration (MBAs), it is extremely tough. Most graduates – be they fresh from business school, or from a period in industry – do not realize just how tough consultancy is until they join. Consultants work long hours, very often away from home, and are always under the spotlight of their clients and paymasters alike. On the one hand, clients expect them to deliver value for the high fees they are charged, no matter what personal sacrifice is required, and on the other, their paymasters expect them to deliver, sell, develop new ideas and products, and share their knowledge whilst delivering high-value client service. Many people new to consultancy have a rose-tinted view of the consultant’s lifestyle, and soon find that high salaries require high sacrifice.¹

DILBERT reprinted by permission of United Feature Syndicate, Inc.

Surviving within the consultancy profession requires many things, not least resilience, high intellect and the ability to get on with a variety of different clients. But one of the key skills that is often missing is the ability to behave and deliver the service in a way that includes the client. To do this successfully requires more than technical skills; it needs a real strength of character and relationship-building and management skills. But even these are not enough, as it also requires an understanding of what works and what doesn’t work within the client organization – this is what 1 term cultural intelligence.

Developing cultural intelligence means understanding organizational culture, but not in a pure academic sense. It means using a practical framework of culture that facilitates the development of a competence that will reduce some of the culture shock experienced by consultants and clients alike as consultants move from one client to another. Part 1 is therefore designed to develop the foundations on which it is possible to develop the culturally intelligent consultant and consultancy firm. It consists of three chapters:

•Chapter 1 brings the reader up to date with some of the latest thinking about consultancy skills, such as neurolinguistic programming and emotional intelligence, and places these into the wider context of cultural intelligence.

•Chapter 2 discusses the topic of culture, which forms the basis of the cultural intelligence concept. Consultants will come into contact with national, organizational and functional cultures, and each is dealt with. At the end of this chapter the reader will have gained a general understanding of culture in all its guises.

•Chapter 3 introduces the model of culture on which cultural intelligence can be developed, along with an assessment of the dominant behaviours within organizations. Two self-assessment questionnaires have been included within this chapter to allow the consultant to begin to apply the concepts introduced within Part II more readily.

CHAPTER 1

Where does cultural intelligence fit with emotional intelligence and NLP?

The changing nature of consultancy

For a long time, consultancy was about interviewing clients, writing reports and making recommendations. In such instances it was possible to pull together a small team of consultants and complete the assignment without much need for lengthy client contact. And, because of the limited presence, it was always a hit-and-miss affair whether the organization would implement the advice given. Of course, in those cases where the organization had hired consultants to reinforce and legitimize an internal idea, they were more likely to accept the conclusions, especially if they were the same as those derived internally. It was this sort of assignment that led to the expression ‘Give a consultant your watch and they will tell you the time’. However, in response to the increasing scale and complexity of change, and the higher levels of client sophistication, these comfortable days have long since gone. Clients now demand more for their money and are no longer satisfied with fancy reports that gather dust. Instead they want action and usually expect consultants to implement their recommendations.

A recent survey of consultancy highlights some interesting differences between the perceptions of clients and their consultants:¹

•Whereas over 55 per cent of consultants felt they were good at coming up with original ideas for their clients, only 25 per cent of their clients agreed.

•40 per cent of clients felt that consultants gave them no new ideas at all.

•It was believed that consultants were good at fleshing out their clients’ problems, acting as catalyst for change and delivering results faster than their clients could on their own.

•Value for money was seen to be a real issue. Although this is a particular problem for the Big Five, whose fee rates are typically two to three times that of second and third tier consulting firms, value for money does not wholly relate to fees. It goes much deeper than that. After all, clients will pay more if they believe they are getting the value they expect.

•Over 55 per cent of clients believe that consultants had more loyalty to their firm than them as clients.

•Of the many reasons why clients seek out consultants to help them, the most frequent are:

– to help them with changing their organizations

– to get them out of a crisis; in essence to supplement their skill requirements where these were lacking

– to implement change more rapidly than they could themselves

– facilitate internal processes and to learn from the consultants.

Clients were far less interested in the ‘latest thing’, be it technology, management techniques or the consultancy’s methodology. This suggests that consultancies that pride themselves on fancy methodologies or push the latest buzzwords may be wasting their energy.

The demand for consultancy has grown considerably. As we saw in the Introduction, fee income has risen from $5 billion to over $100 billion in a little under 20 years. This growth has proved to be a double-edged sword for most consultancies. On the one hand profitability has increased sharply, as has the remuneration of consultants and partners alike. Even new graduates without any business or consultancy experience can earn upwards of £30,000 per year. On the other, it has meant that the war for talent, especially within the Big Five consultancies has hotted up. For example, the £600 million increase in fee income for the United Kingdom’s top 100 consultancies between 1998 and 1999 is believed to have created between 4500 to 5000 additional consulting posts.² And over the last few years, the largest consultancies have introduced significant joining bonuses for new graduates in order to attract them to their firm, rather than a competitor’s. In some cases these can be as high as 30 per cent of the first year’s salary.

Of course, in the very recent past we have entered a significant downturn and possible recession, itself precipitated by the fallout from the bursting of the technological bubble which started in 2000 and got a whole lot worse in 2001. As this bites, consultancies everywhere are tightening their belts, reducing headcount and freezing recruitment. For example, Accenture has been offering its staff sabbaticals and asking new joiners to defer their start date by up to a year. Most firms have reduced headcount by around 10 per cent. Such adjustments do not reduce the need for reliable, effective and knowledgeable consultants, especially those that are culturally intelligent. If anything it makes it all the more important.

The increasing complexity and global nature of commerce has also had an impact on the consultants themselves. The consultant of today has to endure longer assignments, longer hours and more complex environments, and is under constant pressure to perform. With lengthy assignments, consultants and consultancies alike have had to learn how to work effectively with the client over extended periods. This has led firms to consider skills and attributes that extend beyond those based on intelligence and technical know-how alone. This, of course, is not to say that intelligence is not a factor, as clients still expect to get the best brains for the fees they pay. It merely suggests that client success is not predicated on technical brilliance alone, but on some other skills that are not born out of pure intellectual capability. Consultancies have therefore sought to enhance the skills of their professional staff. Initially focused on relationship management, and client–consultant team working, this has recently been extended into developing skills associated with inter-cultural working, self-awareness, and interpersonal influence.

Consultancy skills

Consultancies work hard to ensure that the people they recruit are able to work to the high standards expected of them. Being an effective consultant is not easy, as there are significant demands placed upon the individual. Nor is survival in the largest consultancies always guaranteed, as, for some, the demands are too great. This is particularly true for those consultants who enter the profession after a significant period in industry. Observation suggests that during the boom times, many firms dropped their guard when it came to recruitment. Because there was such a high demand for consulting staff, people were added to the headcount who were really not suited to the role. Many were no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I The Foundations of Cultural Intelligence
• Part II Applying Cultural Intelligence in Consultancy
• Part III Creating the Culturally Intelligent Firm
• Further Reading
• Notes
• Index