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other consultants and the client. As this is carried out in a real-life situation which may be very sensitive to errors, at the beginning the trainee will be guided and controlled by the trainer in more detail than might be necessary in other situations. It may not, however, be easy to find situations in which new consultants can practise a wide range of the techniques that should eventually make up their consulting kit.

Here again, feedback on what the consultant did and how he or she did it is an essential dimension of training. The team leader or supervisor acting as field trainer must provide this feedback, creating an atmosphere in which any aspect of work and behaviour can be openly discussed without embarrassing the new colleague.

Role-playing can be used to rehearse activities before the “live” show. In this form of role-playing, the new consultant and the trainer rehearse in the office or at home in the evening, and are able to anticipate snags.

In certain cases a complete real consulting project can be used as a training experience. This has been done in several courses for consultants, as well as in various types of course for managers and students of management. Such a simulation exercise can be very close to an actual situation. Yet the differences should not be lost from sight: if the client has agreed to a consulting project, but does not pay a normal fee for it, this may affect the participation and attitudes of the client staff when working with the trainee consultant.

37.4Further training and development of consultants

In management consulting lifelong education is a must. This idea is not new. Many consultancy firms have gained and maintained their excellent reputation precisely because of their continual efforts to upgrade staff competence.

Principal directions of consultants’ development

Most staff development activities in consulting firms fall under one or more of the following five areas.

Upgrading functional proficiency. Keeping abreast of developments and becoming more knowledgeable and competent in their own field together form the basis of operating consultants’ further development. Many training and development activities in consulting firms are geared to this objective.

Mastering new fields. Consultants may learn new subjects complementary to their main field in order to broaden their ability to undertake assignments touching on several management functions, perhaps with a view to becoming all-round consultants, able to lead teams of mixed functional specialists, to act as advisers on general management problems, and to undertake diagnostic surveys of business companies and other organizations. Another reason for

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learning new subjects may be the consulting organization’s intention to become active in new technical fields. Many consulting firms prefer to transfer their more dynamic consultants, familiar with the organization’s philosophy and practices, to these new activities rather than staff them with new recruits.

Upgrading behavioural and process-consulting skills. Experience has amply demonstrated that the initial training of new consultants is just a first step in developing the know-how needed to perceive, diagnose, understand and influence human behaviour in organizations. Further training of all consultants (without exception) therefore deals with the “how” of management consulting as it relates to people, including effective client–consultant relations, the consultant’s role in organizational change, and the process-consulting skills required for various situations.

Upgrading knowledge-sharing skills. Sharing knowledge is both an attitude and a skill. Many consultants need more and better training in working with information; searching for relevant information; assessing relevance and filtering information overload; identifying and recognizing new patterns and trends; structuring and formulating knowledge in ways that make it suitable for sharing and transfer; sharing information, experience and knowledge with colleagues; transferring knowledge to clients and working with clients to develop new knowledge; combining and harmonizing knowledge transfer with other consulting tasks and interventions, etc.9

Preparing for career development. This includes personal development needed for the positions of team leader, supervisor, division head, partner and other senior positions concerned with client relations, management and business expansion. Career advancement carries with it the need to use a broader approach and develop technical competence in several fields.

Organization and methods of further development

Certain features of consulting practice make further training and development difficult to organize. Typically, consultants working with one firm in the same discipline are geographically dispersed on individual assignments. To arrange a technical discussion among specialists may require a special organizational effort. Furthermore, the highly individualized character of many consulting assignments encourages consultants to become individualists, and this creates a constant problem in sharing work experiences with other colleagues.

Nevertheless, the profession also has many features that facilitate the consultant’s development. A consultant’s energy and time are much less absorbed by routine matters and established procedures than those of a manager in the same technical field. The consultant can approach every new assignment as a challenging exercise where innovation is both possible and desirable, and can thus refine his or her method almost continually. Consultants are never short of opportunities to apply ideas and suggestions found in the literature or other sources. Furthermore, consultants learn a great deal from their client organizations; to reinforce that learning they must compare, evaluate, generalize,

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conceptualize and try to apply a new, more effective approach to successive assignments. They have to remember that every client organization and every assignment is unique, and that past solutions cannot be mechanically applied to new situations.

Clearly, most of the learning from experience, including the consultants’ own and their colleagues’ experience, as well as the clients’ experience, takes place on the job: it is learning by doing and by observing how others do. It should, however, be enhanced by other learning opportunities and approaches.

Professional guidance and coaching by senior consultants. Partners, supervising consultants and team leaders, among others, are generally responsible for the development of consultants who report to them. They provide guidance when assigning work, examining work progress and discussing solutions to be proposed to clients. Such discussions can easily be broadened to inform the operating consultants of experience from other assignments, or techniques used by colleagues. A major feature of coaching by senior consultants should be to help operating consultants to develop their personal qualities and communication skills. Informal discussions should be arranged within the assignment teams on experience gained from joint work, and used for staff development on a regular basis.

Workshops and conferences. Short workshops and conferences for professional staff are organized in many consulting firms. There may be an annual conference which deals with technical and methodological topics useful to all consultants, as well as policy and administrative matters. Workshops and seminars may be organized in functional divisions, on a regional basis, or in other ways. There are also various external seminars on management and consulting topics from which consultants might benefit. Such services are available from consultants’ associations, management institutes, and in some countries also from private consultants who train other consultants.

Knowledge management. Consultant development is one of the main purposes of knowledge management in consulting and other professional firms. Learning is facilitated by, for example, easy access to relevant information and its sources, posting of and pointers to information of particular interest, internal bulletins and intranets, regular events for exchanging information and experience, and systematic debriefing following completed projects (see Chapter 34).

Reading. Consultants have to acquire the habit of reading the main business and professional periodicals, technical papers, important new publications and internal consulting reports relevant to their field.

Research and development assignments. Special project assignments, such as developing a new line of consulting, preparing an operating manual, or evaluating the methodology and results of comparable consulting assignments, are excellent learning opportunities for senior staff members.

Training others. One of the best methods of self-development is training other people. Consultants have many opportunities to do this: for the client’s personnel during assignments, at the consulting firm’s training centre, as

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supervisors of younger consultants during operating assignments, as part-time teachers at management institutes and schools, or as speakers at professional conferences.

Preparing for supervisory and managerial functions. Promotion to the role of supervisor usually takes place after several years in an operating role. Some experience of the role is gained by seeing seniors in action, and by guiding new consultant trainees. Training on promotion is usually quite short and provided by experienced seniors who are good trainers. Training may be given partly in formal sessions at head office and partly with experienced seniors in action. Head-office training and briefing require about three weeks, while coaching by an experienced senior may extend over some months. During this time the promoted consultant works largely alone, with only occasional guidance and advice from a more experienced colleague.

Planning and budgeting

The diversity of individual consultants’ career paths and training needs, as well as the desire to be flexible in meeting current clients’ requirements, make it difficult to plan staff development and to stick to what has been planned. Yet some planning is useful.

Some consulting firms use indicative standards showing the amount of formal training which, on average, a staff member would undergo in one calendar year: for example, between 40 and 60 hours of formal training. A corresponding budget can then be worked out, bearing in mind whether the training will be arranged internally or externally. As a rule, the cost of training per staff member will be higher than in many other sectors.

Individual planning is even more important. It is useful to establish training objectives that reflect career objectives, against which the consultant can measure his or her progress. In particular, such training objectives should be defined for the first years of operating, based on the evaluation made at the end of the initial training programme, and the subsequent periodical performance reviews. While some flexibility in deciding on participation in specific training events will always be required, training must not constantly be put off in order to cope with the current workload.

37.5 Motivation for consultant development

In consulting, more than in many other occupations, the individual bears the main responsibility for his or her own development. The consultant’s professional development is above all self-development, and the results achieved will depend mainly on the person’s ambition, initiative, determination, perseverance and intellectual capabilities. This is self-evident to the sole practitioner, who knows very well that he or she takes full responsibility for his or her own future. However, a member of a consulting firm working on jobs assigned by manage-

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ment can also show a great deal of initiative and interest in achieving career goals and training objectives, and can find a great many opportunities for improving competence. After all, if consulting is your career choice, you want to be sure that you control your career and that you will fare well in this rapidly changing sector. Self-development is a key to achieving this goal.

Most consultants understand that stopping learning makes them vulnerable, less interesting to clients and an easy target for competitors. Invariably, personal development and learning get high marks in consulting firms’ priority concerns. To many consultants, learning is a vital need, a natural part of their lifestyle. There are, however, forces and constraints that can hamper consultant development quite seriously.

A consultant’s natural desire to learn tends to wane if he or she sees that the firm is more interested in, and remunerates its staff better for, achieving shortterm objectives such as high personal billing and bringing in new clients. In a similar vein, if the firm is keen to get more of any business, the consultant will be discouraged from looking for assignments that provide good opportunities for learning something new, but are more risky and difficult to negotiate or execute.

If promotion and pay clearly favour other criteria (e.g. seniority or higher management’s personal preferences), this policy may have a negative effect on self-development. To see senior partners occupying the same positions for years and collecting the same pay cheques without any self-development or performance-improvement effort is demotivating, not only to younger consultants but also to other partners.

A poor choice of trainers can be equally damaging. This has happened in consulting firms where the trainers’ jobs were given to those seniors who were not so good at dealing with clients or managing operations.

Most importantly, all professional firms stress that training and coaching the staff members assigned to them is a crucial responsibility of all professionals, including those in the highest management functions in the firm. In practice, however, many senior professionals devote all their time and know-how to firm management, business promotion and dealing personally with important clients. This tends to be encouraged by the compensation system, which may ignore, or allocate a small weight to, the senior consultants’ contribution to the development of other staff members. If this has been the prevailing practice for years, it has probably turned into a cultural value. Senior professionals who remember that they “had to make it” without any help from their superiors often think that the next generation should be treated in the same way.

In summary, to be successful in consultant development, a consulting firm has to achieve coherence between policy statements, strategic objectives, resource allocation, current assignment management, organization of training and staff motivation at all levels, starting with the newly recruited trainees and ending with the firm’s managing partners. Consultants must know what the policy is and must be encouraged to comply with this policy throughout their career.

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