What Consulting Firms Can Teach us About New Ways of Working
Welcome to this week’s newsletter which is about what consulting firms can teach us about how to reimagine how we work. It’s a bit on the longer side, so if this isn’t your jam, check out my interview with Angela Cheng-Cimini (CHRO, Harvard Business Publishing) on the the manager’s role in the employee experience, or this article about why Zuck is wrong about middle management.
What Consulting Firms Can Teach us About New Ways of Working
My first job out of college was working at a management consulting firm around the time period of 2010-2017, long before we all went remote, had to return to office, and hybrid work.
Despite the fact that this was over a decade ago I saw a lot of really good practices and ways of working from consulting organizations during my time at the firm and I still do a quite a bit of work with professional services organizations and I can say that many of them are working in ways that a lot of other companies and organizations can learn from.
I want to highlight some of these elements to provide context of how organizations might think differently about how we work so that we can be better about leading teams and improving the state of our organizations
To set context, a few key things to understand:
In the simplest form, professional services is a people based business. Companies hire consultants in exchange for their services in solving a business problem
While firms vary, for the sake of this article, consultants are employees inside a professional service firm (of varying levels) who work on different projects on a team
It’s very possible for a bunch of consultants to work on a team together that are from different geographies and different home offices who have never worked before. It’s also very possible for some people to work on the same
#1) Clear Hierarchy and Org chart
One of the hallmarks of a professional service firm is that the hierarchy and org chart is generally very legible and clear. Where I was, it looked like this:
Staff: Analyst, Consultant & Senior Consultant - These people worked on specific modules, workstreams and tasks on an engagement
Managers: Manager or Senior Managers - These people managed the day to day engagement, staffing, deliverable development, and some client relationships
Leadership: Partners - These people were the leaders of the engagement and owned the final decisions around the outputs and client relationships
This is for several reasons. First, since firms are doing lots of projects for lots of clients and project teams don’t always have previous work history, having clear lines around roles, responsibilities, chain of command, and tasks for each person is really helpful to setting context and also making work go more efficiently and effectively.
Even if you’ve never met Jane or John, if you know that they are a consultant level 2, you already have a decent understanding of what they might be doing and their level of competence.
The second reason is that firms often recruit top talent who want to grow and advance. To the degree that you as an organization can provide clarity around next steps for career growth is going to be helpful to individuals so they can see they have a path. Finally, many firms have an expectation of “up or out” so making that clear helps set expectations.
#2) Manager as the focal point
Of all the roles and levels within the firm, one of the most important was the role of the engagement manager. In layman's terms, this was the person responsible for managing the day to day work on the case.
We know from research that a manager has a critical role on employee engagement and business outcomes. Working for a great manager could make or break your experience, and as a staff member, you were always keeping your eye out for the good engagement managers.
As part of the consulting model, once you finished a project, you had to find another one. And generally speaking, if you ended up working for a good manager, you would probably want to keep working with that manager. If you ended up working with a poor one, you were probably more likely to want to get a better one for your next project.
This also meant something else: Being a good manager mattered, because if you weren’t one, people would find out.
As an Engagement manager, part of your job was to staff your team. As I’ve said before, your success in your work and career is often correlated to the amount of people who want you to succeed. It’s not rocket science: being a great manager makes it a lot easier to attract great staff. Having a personal brand and being referable really mattered, because staffing really came down to your ability to have a strong reputation. The more that you acted like a good manager, the more likely people were going to A) say that you were a great person to work under and B) your ability to sell people on coming to work on your projects.
While it’s true people are different and want different things, most people at a consulting firm were looking for things like:
Opportunities to develop and grow
Being in positions to use their strengths and talents
Having a chance to be heard and seen
A positive team environment
Due to the nature of consulting where you are constantly working on new projects and working with diverse groups of people, in many ways you were always working on becoming a better manager, because having great relationships was not a one time thing - it was something you always had to rely on if you wanted to continue to grow in the firm.
At the firm, it was not uncommon for individuals to take on a project even if it wasn’t the most interesting project because the people were good and they knew that the manager and project leadership would take care of them.
#3)Making Career Growth Part of Manager Effectiveness
In my view, a manager has 3 responsibilities:
Get a team to deliver a business outcome
Create conditions that enable success
Unleash the purpose and potential of each employee’s career
Part of why I think #3 is so important because time and time again, I saw great junior consultants' careers take off when they had a manager who invested in their career development. And selfishly, this is true for me personally.
The managers I had who took the time to partner with me on my career growth is what has enabled me to go down the path that I’ve been on. While some of this was attributed to an individual manager, the other reality is that because developing others was seen as a critical capability of a manager (and something they measured and rewarded) this actually happened.
Many well-intended organizations in an effort to promote career growth to improve something like retention roll out career conversations, individual development plans, and leadership development programs. While the latter can work for a small amount of people (but not always) the first two initiatives often fall short because there isn’t a structural system in place that makes career growth behaviors of a manager that are championed, and rewarded.
If companies wanted to focus on improving retention and encouraging more proactive upskilling in their organizations, this could be a place they could start.
#4)Rewarding Behaviors for Sharing, Mentoring, and Collaborating
Consulting is a profession that relies on repetition, shots on goal, and expertise. When you’re younger and entering the workforce, the first two are things that you just don’t have yet. That means that you’re often getting put in positions, at a young age, where you don’t know the answer or how to do something.
Some of this is why oftentimes consultants can get a bad rap, but the value prop of a big consulting firm is the collective ability to solve a business problem and generate a significant outcome, which relies on each of the individuals working together, sharing knowledge and information, and mentoring and apprenticing one another.
Time and time again, at an early age in my career I saw people my age making an impact and driving real results. It really showed you that regardless of your level, if you had good ideas and learned, you could contribute from anywhere. But that doesn’t just happen magically. It happens because the company both attracts, and rewards those who mentor, develop, and coach other people.
When you don’t know how to do something as an analyst or consultant, you have to ask for help or learn on your own. But the beauty of hiring thousands of smart people who have expertise and then rewarding them when they actually coach, develop, and mentor others, is that people you don’t always have to know, because you can ask for help, or bring others in. Conversely, if you want to move up in the firm, you need to have a track record of actually sharing your knowledge, mentoring others, and developing other people.
Once I figured out and got over the fact that not knowing things was okay, and that I could do things like ask other people for help, find experts who did the thing I was doing previously, and phone in a subject matter expert to talk to a client, I began to gain confidence in what I was doing, and started building some expertise. I couldn’t have learned all of this on my own, I had to rely on others, but fortunately, the system and culture around me made it so that as long as I proactively asked for help and pushed myself to learn, I could find the help I needed.
What it also made me do, is that once I had knowledge or expertise, it pushed me to be more open to sharing it with others. I knew that if I did this, I could not only make an impact, but I could also build stronger relationships, so that the next time I needed help, others might be willing to help me.
Mentoring and apprenticeship has been identified as one of the core challenges over the past few years as a result of the changes in where and how we work. And due to all the ups and downs and transitions inside companies, there’s been a ton of loss of knowledge and brain drain.
Figuring out how to get your people to share knowledge and ideas, and mentor and support one another (regardless of in-person, virtual, remote) is not something you can just solve with a mentoring program, but something that you embed into the culture, and make known to leaders is something that needs to be measured and rewarded.
#5) Space to learn and grow
Professional service firms recognize that their product is their people, and if they invest in their product, they can generate more value for the business. In this case, investing in people means giving them both time, space, and resources to learn and gain new skills, so that they can be smarter and more skilled to serve clients. In the case of my firm, having a well-resourced Learning and Development team was critical, as was the well-run training, leadership programs and opportunities to learn. But bigger than that, was a commitment to give people the time and space to do this and to create a culture where people wanted to prioritize this.
I have the chance to work with professional service firms, and the ones I work with usually do believe in giving the resources to learn, but the time and space is often the hardest part to overcome. Too often, companies see things like learning and training as an afterthought, or since it’s not “doing” it’s seen as not being “productive.” But what separates these companies from the ones I’m referring to is that these other companies intuitively understand by taking time to invest in learning, even if it takes away from core “doing” activities actually leads to better productivity over the long run.
Conclusion
Consulting and professional services firms aren’t perfect, but they do understand a few things that companies can learn from.
Whether it’s the importance of the role of the manager, encouraging behaviors around mentoring and knowledge sharing, or just knowing that it’s important to invest in people’s learning and growth, if more companies focused on those elements I think you’d see more engagement of employees and results for the business, and a more expansive and dynamic way of thinking about how to work in ways that drives results.
Above all, what I think consulting firms understand is that they are in the business of people, and at the core, business is really people connecting with other people. The best consultants and leaders I worked with not only had a combo of great book smarts and street smarts, but also, “People Smarts, or the ability to understand how to engage and connect with others, and cultivate relationships that fuel greater success.
This insight allows them to attract these kinds of people who want to work there, and then focusing on the five elements and ways of working, giving those people the best chance to do great work to deliver for their clients. Even if you’re not a consulting firm, considering how you enable your people to develop their own PeopleSmarts might be your ticket to success.
If you’re a consultant, I’d love to hear your takes on this, and if this aligns (or not) with your own experience.
Have a great week!
Al