A good consultant is an intuitive and expert communicator with a broad vocabulary. They know when and how to add a complementary tone to a customer's environment and can communicate their experience through a variety of means. As oral communicators, they are effective presenters able to state points clearly and concisely. The first thing that comes to mind for most people about consultants is that they are very knowledgeable.
They know their industry and their area of specialization to perfection. But knowing a topic doesn't necessarily mean being able to share that knowledge and, more importantly, apply it to solving problems. The voice of your consulting company will emerge and will be uniquely yours. Not because your company is trying to be unique or stand out.
Because, without worrying one iota about its uniqueness, it has dedicated time to being excellent and creating outstanding results for its clients. Increasing consensus, commitment, learning, and future effectiveness are not intended as substitutes for the more common purposes of management consulting, but as desirable outcomes of any truly effective consulting process. On the other hand, a consultant who too quickly rejects this way of describing the problem will put an end to a potentially useful consulting process before it begins. As managers understand the broader range of purposes that excellent consulting can achieve, they will select consultants more wisely and expect more value from them.
Your job as a consultant is to drive the conversation forward and keep it productive, so that it brings the client closer to their business goals. Twenty years without marketing are the exception, not the rule, in the case of individual consultants and the extremely rare exception in the case of boutique consulting firms. A big part of business consulting involves expanding and reducing these layers and finding the points where they are disconnected. Most consulting company leaders don't care whether or not they're “the only cat that does what it can do” and are more interested in having a profitable business that supports their lifestyle.
Consultants must have an extraordinary perspective on all levels of the strategy, from the most abstract and visionary ideas to everyday life as always. Whether you've just started a consulting job or are considering it as a professional career, think about how you can develop the following qualities that will help you go from being a good consultant to an excellent one. The idea that consulting success depends solely on analytical expertise and the ability to present compelling reports is losing ground, in part because there are now more people within organizations with the necessary analytical techniques than in the boom years of “strategic consulting”. As your consulting firm develops its skills by learning and practicing fundamental and advanced techniques, and by emulating the excellent consulting firms in your field, you will naturally develop your own points of view.
Creating a profitable, profitable, and thriving consulting practice doesn't require a consultant to be the best in the world. It is also due to my experience overseeing beginning consultants and to the numerous conversations and partnerships I have had with consultants and clients in the United States and abroad. These purposes have received more attention in the literature on organizational development and in the writings of behavioral consultants than in the field of management consulting. No one is going to tell you how to conduct a consultation session or what your next steps should be, so this profession requires an entrepreneurial spirit, especially if you work as an independent and autonomous consultant.
