Successful Consulting: Teach Yourself

Anna Hipkiss

• Publisher: Teach Yourself
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781444100631
• eBook ISBN: 9781444129700
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consulting
• Index: Business

If you are a consultant in any field, working for any size organisation from 'one man and his dog' to massive or thinking of moving into this field, then this is the book for you! Coverage includes:
·What makes a successful consultant ·Setting a clear vision ·Assessing resources ·How to write reports and give presentations ·Building up your customer facing skills ·Dealing with difficult clients ·Balancing your work with the rest of your life.
Containing lots of practical advice, this book also features interviews with successful consultants who have a wealth of experience to share. Written in an accessible style, it will give you the confidence to shine in consultancy.NOT GOT MUCH TIME? One and five-minute introductions to key principles to get you started.
AUTHOR INSIGHTS Lots of instant help with common problems and quick tips for success, based on the author's many years of experience.
TEST YOURSELF Tests in the book and online to keep track of your progress.
EXTEND YOUR KNOWLEDGE Extra online articles at www.teachyourself.com to give you a richer understanding of consulting.
FIVE THINGS TO REMEMBER Quick refreshers to help you remember the key facts.
TRY THIS Innovative exercises illustrate what you've learnt and how to use it.

1

What do you want from this book?

This chapter covers:

• what this book has to offer you
• how to use this book as a self-employed consultant
• how to use this book as a corporate consultant

What if …

… every consulting project I did counted as a stunning success?

… all my clients were perfectly reasonable and a pleasure to deal with?

… business just flowed in my direction, with no effort at all?

This book is about helping you to make those dreams come true. You may be a seasoned professional, or new to this field. You may work alone from an office in your spare room, or you may be employed by one of the major consultants. The aim of this book is to help you on your way to achieving greater success as a consultant.

Why this book is different

This book is different from other books you may read on the subject, because apart from offering you plenty of ‘real meat’ or serious content, in the way that most books offer you things on a plate, it also provides you with a knife and a fork, and an appetite, which is what you will find in the early chapters. You may feel that you already have these, but it is worth checking. They will make the difference between just reading a useful book, and actually doing something with what you have learned from it.

THINKING INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE BOX

What you will get on your plate is plenty of sensible, ‘inside the box’ thinking, spiced with lots of practical experience. The way we help you to develop your appetite, and the tools we give you to consume what is on that plate, are generally ‘outside the box’ ideas. As an example, we cover classic ways of handling conflict, with gritty case studies from real life. We also give you a new tool to help you get inside the head of your opponent, to better understand how to meet their needs and reach a successful outcome. As with any aspect of a book, you can take it or leave it, but consider it before you decide!

GETTING INSPIRED

When you embark on a road that is new to you, but well trodden by others, it is very helpful to have a role model to inspire you. Someone you can relate to, whose footsteps you feel capable of following. We have therefore included a number of potential role models for you to choose from, and details of the road they followed to success. We ask you to work on the principle that if they can do it, so can you! You may not believe this one hundred per cent, but if you take on the belief temporarily, and act as if it were true, this opens up your mind and your options for achieving success.

SOURCES OF LEARNING

The learning in this book will come from three sources. First of all from you, as we help you to unpick your own magic and apply it in different ways to different situations. It is easy to underrate your own skills. Have you noticed that people admire a skill in you that you simply take for granted? We will examine how to transfer that skill and broaden its use.

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Insight

We often take our strengths for granted, or may not even be aware of them. Other people may recognize what you are good at, and don’t say – not deliberately, but because they think you know that you have a special knack with customers when things go wrong, or can conjure up a spreadsheet in no time.

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The second source of learning will be from studying the experts, the special group of consultants we have chosen as models for success. These are prominent figures in their different fields, who have a track record we want to emulate, and skills we want to analyse and use.

The third source of learning will be from all the real life case studies, which are woven into the book. Not just from our experts, but from many different sources. They are, of necessity, anonymous, in order to honour that key commitment of any consultant to protect client confidentiality, but they are no less real for that, and provide solid experience that we can learn from. Often these examples cover what went wrong, as well as what went right, so that we can learn from others’ mistakes as well as their expertise.

When you have absorbed all three sources of learning, we will challenge you to be creative in applying ideas in new ways, to enable you to capture and develop the difference that makes the difference – that will deliver greater success to you as a consultant in whatever way you choose to define it.

Using this book if you are a self-employed consultant

This book covers all the skills you need to be a successful consultant: these do not change with your employment status. However, you also need skills in running a business, such as finance and marketing. In Chapter 20 you will find information on marketing your services. In Chapter 21 we cover the elements of setting up and running an independent business.

Some of the material in this book refers to the consultant as part of a project team, and suggests that you refer to your manager for advice. You may often work alone with the client, and certainly will not have a manager to refer to. However, you will often be part of a client team, even if that is not specifically your brief, and it is important to take team considerations into account. Similarly you may be working as part of a provider project team, in which case, although you are not an employee, you will certainly be acting as part of that provider’s organization, and will have a project manager to refer to.

When you are working alone and you hit a real problem, instead of taking advice from your non-existent manager, think of a mentor or a friend who could be a sounding board for you, and perform much the same function as a manager. Many lone consultants have very useful reciprocal relationships, where they offer each other advice and support. It is a kind of ‘buddy’ system, which is very useful to cultivate. So when you see the words ‘Consult your manager’, think in terms of a helpful colleague.

Using this book if you are a corporate consultant

You will find this book a source of rich material. It often takes the viewpoint of a consultant who is part of a project team, frequently based on a client site. It deals with the problems that a consultant faces internally within his or her own organization, as well as externally with the client. The manager who is never there when you need them; the colleagues who let you down; the training that you miss; the left hand who never tells you, the right hand, what they are doing; the conflict between loyalty to your distant company, and to your good friend the client; the recognition and career progression that you do not get when you are hidden away on some remote site. If these issues sound familiar to you, then read on because the book contains much experience and potential learning on these subjects.

Because many consultants, unlike you, are self-employed, with concerns about things like VAT and being lonely, we have also included a chapter on setting up your own business. It contains several case studies, including people who have moved from being an employed consultant to setting up on their own. You may find it useful to understand this perspective, if only to confirm to yourself that this is not a career route for you!

The thinking behind this book

Much of the content of this book is built on years of practical consulting experience, and the perspectives of many different people. This will take you a long way along the road to success.

A new way of thinking will take you further and faster along that road. Adopting it will open your mind to new perspectives and enable you to see how you might find the difference that makes the difference for you.

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Insight

Learning more facts about consulting will be very useful, and will take you a long way, but it may not enable you to make a step change in performance. To do that you need to examine your beliefs, and find any that are holding you back or leading you astray. Start by taking on some new ones…

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To think in this new way, you simply adopt some new beliefs, such as, ‘There is a solution to every problem.’ You may believe this already, so that will be easy! You may be saying no, you simply do not accept that a nice solution is sitting round every corner. That is a very normal response, so could you just try the belief on for size, and see how it feels, knowing you can take it off again? Doing this is the equivalent of adopting a presupposition – something which you do not have to permanently accept, but which you hold for the time it is useful to you.

So can you now adopt the presupposition that there is a solution to every problem, whilst you are reading this book, and seeking to find ways of becoming more successful as a consultant? Can you see how enabling it will be, if you can hold that belief for this period?

If you can, you are ready for the whole list. These are the presuppositions that you will find useful to hold whilst you are becoming a more successful consultant.

• There is a solution to every problem.
• The map is not the territory. This means that the way I see things – my map – is not the same as anyone else’s, nor is it ever going to be a completely accurate view of the piece of the earth it claims to represent. Everybody sees life in different ways, even though they think they are seeing the same thing! This is a vital presupposition when managing a client relationship.
• The meaning of communication is in the response you get. In other words, what you intended to say is irrelevant; it is what the person hears that matters.
  A man might say to his wife ‘Is it time for lunch?’
  She might hear, ‘Lunch is late, you are failing in your domestic duties, and are therefore less lovable.’
  The husband might be amazed by that, when all he was really doing was checking the timing of a meal!
• There is no failure, only feedback. This is a very constructive way of looking at life. Learning usually involves making mistakes of some kind. Those mistakes are usually a vital part of the learning process. When you do something incorrectly, you learn how to adjust so that you do not repeat the same mistake again. Sometimes it takes many attempts before you get it right. In a learning environment, such as a training course, this is considered normal; in the ‘real world’, it is often viewed as unacceptable. Obviously you make every effort to avoid failure, but when it happens, treat it as a source of learning, and you will progress farther and faster towards success.
• If someone else can do something, so can you. This is linked to another presupposition:
• Everyone already has everything they need to achieve what they want. If you can believe both of these things on a temporary basis, it will enable you to do so much more. You are almost certainly going to want to say that an unfit 40-year-old could never become an Olympic athlete, and of course there are going to be some physical limitations, but they do not generally apply to becoming a consultant, do they?
• The person with the most flexibility in thinking and behaviour has the most influence on any interaction. This is a vital presupposition, which underlies most of the teaching on negotiation and influencing skills. Overt exercise of power, unless taken to extremes, will not necessarily win the battle against the flexible thinker.
• If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got. The fact that you are reading this book suggests that you want to do things differently, so adopting all these presuppositions is a great place to start.

Here is an example of taking on a presupposition:

Kay hates giving presentations. Her boss, Nigel, is a brilliant public speaker, witty and fluent; just being with him makes her feel more inadequate. When she thinks about the presupposition ‘If someone else can do something, so can you’, she thinks of Nigel and dismisses it. Just the thought of him stops her taking it on.

Now she forces herself to imagine that she does believe she can do public speaking – she can’t quite make the stretch to Nigel, who seems at Olympic standard to her, but she can imagine being competent, perhaps very competent. As she imagines that, she starts to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Meet the author
• Only got a minute?
• Only got five minutes?
• Acknowledgements
• 1 What do you want from this book?
• 2 Consulting excellence at work
• 3 What makes a successful consultant?
• 4 Setting a clear vision
• 5 Bringing power to your aim
• 6 Assessing your resources
• 7 Tools to make it happen
• 8 Client project management
• 9 Managing client expectations
• 10 Avoiding project pitfalls
• 11 Image
• 12 Writing a client report
• 13 Giving a client presentation
• 14 Running a client workshop/project meeting
• 15 Building client relationships
• 16 Handling client politics
• 17 Influencing and negotiation
• 18 Dealing with difficult clients
• 19 Dealing with internal relationships
• 20 Marketing your services
• 21 Starting and running your own business
• 22 Balancing your work with the rest of your life
• 23 Going forward
• Taking it further
• Index