CONSULTING PROFESSION

The previous parts of this book have shown how management consultants operate in serving their clients. Chapters 27–35 look at the consultant’s work from a different angle, showing that management consulting must be managed as a professional service and as a business if is to satisfy clients’ needs and, at the same time, achieve good results in commercial and financial terms.

In practice this is often ignored. There are consulting firms, including some fairly large ones, that devote all their talent and energy to finding new assignments and dealing with the problems of their clients, while neglecting the management of their own operation. The inevitable consequences are inefficiencies, internal conflicts, and flaws in the services provided.

Clients are often aware of this. The message is often heard, “Healer, heal thyself”, or “Consultant, take your own medicine”. While any professional service firm requires management reflecting its nature and complexity, the case of management consultants is a particularly delicate one. Management is their daily bread and helping clients to manage better is their main activity. If clients are to take their advice seriously, consultants must be seen to practise what they preach. If this is not the case, clients will understandably doubt the consultant’s ability to deal with other people’s problems.

27.1 The management challenge of the professions

As a relatively young profession, management consulting should be able to draw some lessons from the management experience accumulated by older and better-established professions, such as law or accounting. Unfortunately, management is a relatively new and underdeveloped field in all professions. Professional firms historically have been managed in one of two ways – badly or not at all.

Management, as a distinct function and approach to running an organization, starts being practised systematically and consistently only when it becomes a

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Management consulting

recognized necessity. As long as professionals operate as individuals, independently or through loose groupings, sharing some physical facilities and administrative support, but each serving his or her own clients and ignoring the clients of colleagues, the management function looks superfluous, even undesirable.

The key factor leading to the management of professions was the growing size and complexity of professional firms and of the tasks they tackled. The second factor was changes in the market and in competition. With the gradual disappearance of protective regulations and traditional attitudes inhibiting competition, professional firms started to be exposed to market pressures and opportunities like businesses in any other sector of the economy. Issues such as marketing, selling, product life-cycle, profitability, innovation and efficiency became important and had to be addressed.

Conversely, certain factors have hampered the advent of modern management in the professions. First is the ambiguous attitude of many professionals to management. While they generally do not object to belonging to a wellestablished and financially strong firm, as individuals they cherish their freedom and dislike discipline. Many of them do not want to have anything to do with management or paperwork. This creates paradoxical if not inextricable situations. In Bruce Henderson’s words, “the basic paradox is the requirement to manage the unmanageable”.1

Another constraint has been the shortage of managers for professional service organizations. The best professionals can be the worst managers. Many professionals are prepared to devote some time to management, say by supervising a small team, if this does not take up more than a third or a half of their time. Few are prepared to give up all client work to become full-time managers of other professionals. Also, their colleagues must be willing to accept them as managers. Compromises therefore have to be adopted, mostly by combining management with direct work for clients, or rotating managerial roles. This, however, is more difficult in large firms, some of which have recruited full-time managers from outside – with mixed results.

A third constraint has been the underdeveloped body of knowledge on the management of professions. Understandably, meaningful concepts and theories could not start developing as long as there was no practical ground, accumulated experience and demand. Significant contributions are few, and these date mainly from the past decade.2

In summary, the case for competent and effective management of professional service organizations seems to have been made. In addition to the competence, integrity and motivation of individual professionals, the management of professional teams and organizations is increasingly recognized as a key factor of service quality and business performance. Yet many professional firms have a long way to go to become well-managed organizations.

In identifying the management requirements of consulting activities, we look first at consulting from two different perspectives. First, consulting is a professional service and some of its management requirements are determined

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