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Each yr direction consultants in the Us receive more than $ii billion for their services.i Much of this money pays for impractical data and poorly implemented recommendations.two To reduce this waste, clients need a meliorate understanding of what consulting assignments can attain. They demand to enquire more from such directorate, who in plough must learn to satisfy expanded expectations.

This article grows out of current research on effective consulting, including interviews with partners and officers of five well-known firms. Information technology also stems from my feel supervising beginning consultants and from the many conversations and associations I've had with consultants and clients in the Us and abroad. These experiences atomic number 82 me to propose a ways of clarifying the purposes of management consulting. When clarity virtually purpose exists, both parties are more likely to handle the engagement procedure satisfactorily.

A Hierarchy of Purposes

Management consulting includes a broad range of activities, and the many firms and their members oftentimes ascertain these practices quite differently. I way to categorize the activities is in terms of the professional's area of expertise (such equally competitive analysis, corporate strategy, operations management, or human resource). Only in exercise, every bit many differences exist inside these categories as between them.

Another approach is to view the process equally a sequence of phases—entry, contracting, diagnosis, information drove, feedback, implementation, so on. Even so, these phases are usually less discrete than most consultants admit.

Perhaps a more useful way of analyzing the process is to consider its purposes; clarity most goals certainly influences an appointment'south success. Here are consulting'due south eight fundamental objectives, arranged hierarchically (too see the Exhibit):

Showroom A bureaucracy of consulting purposes

1. Providing information to a client.

2. Solving a client'southward bug.

3. Making a diagnosis, which may necessitate redefinition of the trouble.

iv. Making recommendations based on the diagnosis.

5. Assisting with implementation of recommended solutions.

6. Building a consensus and commitment effectually corrective action.

vii. Facilitating customer learning—that is, teaching clients how to resolve like problems in the future.

8. Permanently improving organizational effectiveness.

The lower-numbered purposes are better understood and practiced and are besides more requested by clients. Many consultants, notwithstanding, aspire to a higher stage on the pyramid than nigh of their engagements reach.

Purposes i through 5 are generally considered legitimate functions, though some controversy surrounds purpose 5. Management consultants are less likely to accost purposes vi through 8 explicitly, and their clients are not as likely to request them. Simply leading firms and their clients are beginning to approach lower-numbered purposes in ways that involve the other goals as well. Goals half-dozen through 8 are best considered past-products of earlier purposes, non additional objectives that become relevant only when the other purposes have been achieved. They are essential to effective consulting fifty-fifty if not recognized equally explicit goals when the engagement begins.

Moving up the pyramid toward more ambitious purposes requires increasing sophistication and skill in the processes of consulting and in managing the consultant-client relationship. Sometimes a professional tries to shift the purpose of an engagement fifty-fifty though a shift is non called for; the house may accept lost runway of the line betwixt what's best for the client and what'south best for the consultant's business. But reputable consultants do not usually try to prolong engagements or enlarge their scope. Wherever on the pyramid the relationship starts, the outsider'southward start task is to address the purpose the customer requests. Every bit the need arises, both parties may agree to move to other goals.


1. Providing Information

Perhaps the near common reason for seeking assistance is to obtain information. Compiling it may involve attitude surveys, cost studies, feasibility studies, market place surveys, or analyses of the competitive structure of an industry or business. The company may desire a consultant's special expertise or the more accurate, upward-to-date information the firm can provide. Or the company may be unable to spare the fourth dimension and resources to develop the data internally.

Often information is all a client wants. But the information a client needs sometimes differs from what the consultant is asked to furnish. One CEO requested a study of whether each vice president generated plenty work to take his own secretary. The people he contacted rejected the project because, they said, he already knew the answer and an expensive study wouldn't convince the vice presidents anyway.

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After, the partner of the consulting house said, "I frequently inquire: What will you exercise with the information once yous've got information technology? Many clients take never idea about that." Often the client just needs to make amend use of data already available. In whatsoever case, no outsider can supply useful findings unless he or she understands why the information is sought and how it will be used. Consultants should likewise determine what relevant data is already on mitt.

Seemingly impertinent questions from both sides should not exist cause for offense—they tin be highly productive. Moreover, professionals have a responsibleness to explore the underlying needs of their clients. They must reply to requests for information in a way that allows them to decipher and address other needs every bit an accepted part of the engagement'southward agenda.

2. Solving Issues

Managers often give consultants difficult problems to solve. For example, a client might wish to know whether to make or buy a component, learn or divest a line of business, or alter a marketing strategy. Or management may ask how to restructure the organization to exist able to adapt more than readily to change; which financial policies to adopt; or what the most applied solution is for a problem in compensation, morale, efficiency, internal advice, command, management succession, or any.

Seeking solutions to issues of this sort is certainly a legitimate function. Only the consultant also has a professional responsibility to ask whether the problem as posed is what most needs solving. Very often the client needs help most in defining the real event; indeed, some authorities argue that executives who can accurately determine the roots of their troubles practise non need management consultants at all. Thus the consultant'due south first task is to explore the context of the problem. To do and then, he or she might ask:

  • Which solutions have been attempted in the by, with what results?
  • What untried steps toward a solution does the client have in mind?
  • Which related aspects of the client'south business are not going well?
  • If the problem is "solved," how will the solution be applied?
  • What can be done to ensure that the solution wins wide acceptance?

A management consultant should neither pass up nor accept the client's initial description besides readily. Suppose the problem is presented equally depression morale and poor performance in the hourly work force. The consultant who buys this definition on faith might spend a lot of time studying symptoms without ever uncovering causes. On the other manus, a consultant who also speedily rejects this fashion of describing the problem will terminate a potentially useful consulting process earlier it begins.

When possible, the wiser form is to structure a proposal that focuses on the customer's stated business at one level while information technology explores related factors—sometimes sensitive subjects the customer is well aware of but has difficulty discussing with an outsider. Equally the 2 parties work together, the trouble may be redefined. The question may switch from, say, "Why do nosotros have poor hourly attitudes and performance?" to "Why do we have a poor process-scheduling organisation and low levels of trust within the management team?"

Thus, a useful consulting process involves working with the problem as divers by the client in such a way that more useful definitions emerge naturally as the engagement proceeds. Since well-nigh clients—like people in general—are ambivalent almost their need for help with their most of import problems, the consultant must skillfully respond to the customer'southward implicit needs. Client managers should sympathize a consultant's demand to explore a problem earlier setting out to solve it and should realize that the definition of the most important trouble may well shift equally the study proceeds. Fifty-fifty the virtually impatient client is likely to agree that neither a solution to the wrong problem nor a solution that won't be implemented is helpful.

iii. Effective Diagnosis

Much of direction consultants' value lies in their expertise as diagnosticians. All the same, the process past which an accurate diagnosis is formed sometimes strains the consultant-client relationship, since managers are oftentimes fearful of uncovering difficult situations for which they might be blamed. Competent diagnosis requires more than an examination of the external environment, the engineering science and economics of the business organisation, and the behavior of nonmanagerial members of the arrangement. The consultant must likewise inquire why executives made certain choices that now appear to be mistakes or ignored certain factors that now seem important.

Although the need for independent diagnosis is often cited as a reason for using outsiders, cartoon members of the customer organization into the diagnostic process makes good sense. One consultant explains: "We usually insist that client team members be assigned to the project. They, not united states, must practice the item work. Nosotros'll help, nosotros'll button—but they'll do it. While this is going on, we talk with the CEO every day for an hr or ii about the problems that are surfacing, and nosotros meet with the chairman in one case a week.

"In this way nosotros diagnose strategic problems in connection with organizational issues. We get some sense of the skills of the key people—what they tin practice and how they work. When we emerge with strategic and organizational recommendations, they are usually well accepted considering they have been thoroughly tested."

Clearly, when clients participate in the diagnostic process, they are more likely to acknowledge their role in bug and to accept a redefinition of the consultant's task. Top firms, therefore, establish such mechanisms as articulation consultant-customer chore forces to work on data analysis and other parts of the diagnostic process. As the procedure continues, managers naturally begin to implement corrective action without having to wait for formal recommendations.

4. Recommending Deportment

The engagement characteristically concludes with a written report or oral presentation that summarizes what the consultant has learned and that recommends in some item what the customer should practise. Firms devote a slap-up bargain of attempt to designing their reports and then that the information and analysis are clearly presented and the recommendations are convincingly related to the diagnosis on which they are based. Many people would probably say that the purpose of the engagement is fulfilled when the professional presents a consistent, logical action plan of steps designed to improve the diagnosed problem. The consultant recommends, and the client decides whether and how to implement.

Though it may sound similar a sensible partition of labor, this setup is in many ways simplistic and unsatisfactory. Untold numbers of seemingly convincing reports, submitted at groovy expense, have no existent touch considering—due to constraints outside the consultant's causeless field of study—the relationship stops at formulation of theoretically sound recommendations that can't be implemented.

For instance, a nationalized public utility in a developing country struggled for years to improve efficiency through tighter fiscal control of decentralized operations. Recently a professor from the country'due south leading management school conducted an all-encompassing written report of the utility and submitted 100 pages of recommendations. According to the CEO, this advice ignored large stumbling blocks—ceremonious service regulations, employment conditions, and relations with state and local governments. And so the study ended up on the client's bookshelf next to ii other expensive and unimplemented reports by well-known international consulting firms. This sort of thing happens more oftentimes than management consultants like to admit, and not only in developing countries.

In cases like these, each side blames the other. Reasons are given like "my customer lacks the ability or courage to take the necessary steps" or "this consultant did non help interpret objectives into deportment." About all the managers I interviewed about their experiences as clients complained virtually impractical recommendations. And consultants ofttimes blame clients for not having enough sense to do what is apparently needed. Unfortunately, this thinking may lead the client to await for yet another candidate to play the game with 1 more fourth dimension. In the about successful relationships, there is not a rigid distinction between roles; formal recommendations should contain no surprises if the customer helps develop them and the consultant is concerned with their implementation.

v. Implementing Changes

The consultant's proper part in implementation is a affair of considerable argue in the profession. Some contend that 1 who helps put recommendations into effect takes on the role of manager and thus exceeds consulting's legitimate bounds. Others believe that those who regard implementation solely every bit the client's responsibility lack a professional mental attitude, since recommendations that are not implemented (or are implemented desperately) are a waste product of money and fourth dimension. And simply as the client may participate in diagnosis without diminishing the value of the consultant's role, so at that place are many ways in which the consultant may aid in implementation without usurping the manager's job.

A consultant will oft inquire for a second appointment to assist install a recommended new system. Yet, if the process to this point has not been collaborative, the customer may reject a request to assist with implementation simply because information technology represents such a sudden shift in the nature of the relationship. Constructive work on implementation problems requires a level of trust and cooperation that is developed gradually throughout the appointment.

In any successful date, the consultant continually strives to empathise which actions, if recommended, are likely to be implemented and where people are prepared to practice things differently. Recommendations may be confined to those steps the consultant believes will exist implemented well. Some may call back such sensitivity amounts to telling a client only what he wants to hear. Indeed, a frequent dilemma for experienced consultants is whether they should recommend what they know is correct or what they know will be accepted. Simply if the assignment's goals include building commitment, encouraging learning, and developing organizational effectiveness, there is trivial point in recommending actions that volition non be taken.

A Pervasive Outcome

Viewing implementation as a central concern influences the professional'due south behave of all phases of the appointment. When a client requests information, the consultant asks how information technology will be used and what steps have already been taken to acquire information technology. Then he or she, along with members of the customer organization, determines which steps the company is ready to pursue and how to launch further actions. An adviser continually builds support for the implementation phase by request questions focused on activity, repeatedly discussing progress made, and including organization members on the squad.

It follows that managers should be willing to experiment with new procedures during the course of an engagement—and non await until the finish of the project before showtime to implement modify. When innovations bear witness successful, they are institutionalized more effectively than when simply recommended without some demonstration of their value. For implementation to exist truly effective, readiness and commitment to change must exist developed, and customer members must learn new ways of solving bug to better organizational performance. How well these goals are achieved depends on how well both parties understand and manage the process of the unabridged appointment.

People are much more probable to utilise and institutionalize innovations proved successful than recommendations simply set along on paper. Experiments with implementing procedures during the grade of a project rather than later on the assignment's completion have had very good results. All in all, effective implementation requires consensus, delivery, and new problem-solving techniques and management methods.

six. Edifice Consensus & Commitment

Any appointment's usefulness to an system depends on the degree to which members accomplish accord on the nature of problems and opportunities and on appropriate corrective deportment. Otherwise, the diagnosis won't be accepted, recommendations won't exist implemented, and valid data may exist withheld. To provide sound and convincing recommendations, a consultant must be persuasive and take finely tuned analytic skills. But more important is the ability to design and conduct a process for (1) edifice an agreement about what steps are necessary and (ii) establishing the momentum to see these steps through. An observation by one consultant summarizes this well.

"To me, effective consulting means convincing a client to take some action. Only that is the tip of the iceberg. What supports that is establishing enough agreement inside the organization that the action makes sense—in other words, not only getting the client to move, but getting plenty support so that the movement volition exist successful. To do that, a consultant needs superb problem-solving techniques and the ability to persuade the client through the logic of his analysis. In add-on, plenty primal players must exist on lath, each with a stake in the solution, then that it volition succeed. So the consultant needs to develop a process through which he can place whom information technology is important to involve and how to interest them."

Consultants can gauge and develop a client'south readiness and commitment to change past considering the following questions.

  • What information does the client readily accept or resist?
  • What unexpressed motives might at that place exist for seeking our assistance?
  • What kinds of data does this client resist supplying? Why?
  • How willing are members of the arrangement, individually and together, to piece of work with the states on solving these bug and diagnosing this state of affairs?
  • How tin we shape the process and influence the relationship to increase the client's readiness for needed cosmetic action?
  • Are these executives willing to learn new management methods and practices?
  • Do those at higher levels listen? Will they be influenced by the suggestions of people lower down? If the project increases upward communication, how will top levels of management respond?
  • To what extent will this client regard a contribution to overall organizational effectiveness and adaptability as a legitimate and desirable objective?

Managers should non necessarily await their advisers to ask these questions. But they should expect that consultants will be concerned with problems of this kind during each stage of the appointment.

In add-on to increasing commitment through client interest during each phase, the consultant may kindle enthusiasm with the assist of an ally from the arrangement (not necessarily the person most responsible for the engagement). Whatever the ally'southward place in the organization, he or she must empathise the consultant'due south purposes and bug. Such a sponsor can be invaluable in providing insight virtually the visitor's operation, new sources of data, or possible problem spots. The role is similar to that of informant-collaborator in field research in cultural anthropology, and it is ofttimes most successful when non explicitly sought.

If conducted skillfully, interviews to gather information can at the same time build trust and readiness to accept the need for modify throughout the organization. The consultant's approach should demonstrate that the reason for the interviews is not to discover what'south wrong in order to classify blame but to encourage constructive ideas for improvement. Then members at all levels of the organization come to run across the project every bit helpful, not every bit unwanted inquisition. Past locating potential resistance or credence, the interviews help the consultant learn which corrective deportment will piece of work and almost always reveal more sound solutions and more willingness to confront difficulty than upper management had expected. And they may too reveal that potential resisters accept valid data and viewpoints. Wise consultants acquire that "resistance" ofttimes indicates sources of especially of import and otherwise unobtainable insight.

The human relationship with the primary client is particularly important in developing consensus and commitment. From the first, an effective relationship becomes a collaborative search for acceptable answers to the client'due south existent concerns. Ideally, each coming together involves two-way reporting on what has been done since the last contact and discussion of what both parties should exercise next. In this way a process of mutual influence develops, with natural shifts in calendar and focus as the project continues.

Although I accept somewhat exaggerated the level of collaboration usually possible, I am convinced that effective management consulting is difficult unless the relationship moves farther in a collaborative direction than most clients expect. Successful consulting is expensive not only because skilful consultants' fees are high merely besides considering senior managers should be involved throughout the process.

7. Facilitating Client Learning

Direction consultants like to leave behind something of lasting value. This means not just enhancing clients' ability to deal with immediate issues but also helping them larn methods needed to cope with future challenges. This does not imply that effective professionals work themselves out of a job. Satisfied clients will recommend them to others and volition invite them back the adjacent time there is a need.

Consultants facilitate learning by including members of the arrangement in the consignment'southward processes. For case, demonstrating an appropriate technique or recommending a relevant book often accomplishes more than quietly performing a needed analysis. When the task requires a method outside the professional's area of expertise, he or she may recommend other consultants or educational programs. Nonetheless, some members of management may need to acquire complex skills that they tin can learn but through guided experience over time.

With strong client involvement in the entire process, there will be many opportunities to help members identify learning needs. Often a consultant can advise or assistance design opportunities for learning about work-planning methods, chore force assignments, goal-setting processes, and so on. Though the effective professional is concerned with executive learning throughout the engagement, it may be wise not to cite this as an explicit goal. Managers may not like the idea of existence "taught to manage." As well much talk near client learning comes across as presumptuous—and it is.

Learning during projects is a two-way street. In every appointment, consultants should acquire how to be more effective in designing and conducting projects. Moreover, the professional's willingness to learn can be contagious. In the best relationships, each party explores the experience with the other in lodge to learn more from it.3

8. Organizational Effectiveness

Sometimes successful implementation requires not only new direction concepts and techniques simply as well different attitudes regarding management functions and prerogatives or fifty-fifty changes in how the basic purpose of the organisation is defined and carried out. The term organizational effectiveness is used to imply the ability to suit time to come strategy and behavior to environmental change and to optimize the contribution of the organization's human being resources.

Consultants who include this purpose in their practice contribute to elevation direction's most important task—maintaining the organization'southward future viability in a changing globe. This may seem as well vast a goal for many engagements. Merely simply equally a physician who tries to improve the operation of ane organ may contribute to the health of the whole organism, the professional is concerned with the company every bit a whole even when the immediate assignment is limited.

Many projects produce modify in ane aspect of an organization's functioning that does not last or that proves counterproductive considering information technology doesn't mesh with other aspects of the system. If lower-level employees in one section presume new responsibilities, friction may result in another section. Or a new marketing strategy that makes keen sense because of changes in the environment might flounder because of its unforeseen impact on production and scheduling. Because such repercussions are likely, clients should recognize that unless recommendations take into account the entire flick, they may be impossible to implement or may create futurity difficulties elsewhere in the visitor.

Promoting overall effectiveness is part of each stride. While listening to a client'south concerns about 1 section, the consultant should relate them to what's happening elsewhere. While working on current issues, he or she should besides think about future needs. When arresting managers' explanations of why progress is difficult, the consultant should consider other possible barriers as well. In these ways, the professional contributes to overall effectiveness by addressing immediate problems with sensitivity to their larger contexts. And clients should not automatically presume that consultants who raise broader questions are but trying to snare more work for themselves. To look at how the customer's firsthand concern fits into the whole motion-picture show is, after all, the professional person's responsibility.

Important change in utilization of human resources seldom happens just because an adviser recommends it. Professionals can have more than influence through the methods they demonstrate in conducting the consulting process itself. For example, if consultants believe that parts of an arrangement need to communicate better, they can consistently solicit others' thoughts on what's being discussed or suggest project task forces of people from different levels or departments. When a manager discovers that an adviser's hole-and-corner weapon in solving some problem was not sophisticated analysis but simply (and skillfully) asking the people most closely involved for their suggestions, the managing director learns the value of better upward communication. The best professionals encourage clients to improve organizational effectiveness not by writing reports or recommending books on the subject area but by modeling methods of motivation that work well.

Consultants are non crusaders bent on reforming management styles and assumptions. Merely a professional diagnosis should include cess of overall organizational effectiveness, and the consulting process should assist lower any barriers to improvement are discovered. Adept directorate are practitioners, non preachers, but their practices are consistent with their beliefs. When the consulting procedure stimulates experiments with more effective means of managing, information technology can make its about valuable contribution to management practice.

More Accent on Process

Increasing consensus, commitment, learning, and future effectiveness are not proposed as substitutes for the more customary purposes of management consulting but as desirable outcomes of any actually constructive consulting process. The extent to which they tin can be built into methods of achieving more than traditional goals depends on the understanding and skill with which the whole consulting relationship is managed. Such purposes have received more attention in organisation development literature and in the writings of behavioral consultants than in the field of management consulting. (For recommended reading in these fields, encounter the sidebar, "Selected Readings.") Simply behavioral objectives can all-time be achieved when integrated with more traditional approaches. And clients have a right to expect that all direction consultants, whatever their specialty, are sensitive to human relationships and processes and skilled in improving the organisation's power to solve future as well as present problems.

The idea that consulting success depends solely on analytic expertise and on an ability to nowadays convincing reports is losing ground, partly considering there are at present more than people within organizations with the required analytic techniques than in the boom years of "strategy consulting." Increasingly, the all-time direction consultants ascertain their objective as not just recommending solutions just also helping institutionalize more constructive direction processes.

This tendency is meaning to consulting firms because it requires process skills that need more emphasis in firms' recruitment and staff development policies. Information technology is equally significant to managers who need not just skilful advice simply too practical help in improving the organization's futurity performance.

As managers understand the broader range of purposes that excellent consulting can assist achieve, they volition select consultants more wisely and wait more of value from them. And as clients learn how to express new needs, skilful consultants learn how to address them.

1. James H. Kennedy, ed., Directory of Direction Consultants, (Fitzwilliam, N.H.: Consultant's News, 1979).

ii. Encounter Jean Pierre Frankenhuis, "How to Get a Adept Consultant," HBR Nov–December 1977, p. 133.

iii. For an excellent word of learning from consulting, see Fritz Steele, Consulting for Organizational Change (Amherst: Academy of Massachusetts Press, 1975), pp. 11–33 and 190–200.

A version of this article appeared in the September 1982 issue of Harvard Business Review.