Management consulting

The benefits to the client of a trust-based relationship with a consultant are obvious. In business and management, it is crucial to have colleagues and partners who can be trusted. The considerable risks involved in choosing and employing consultants are thus minimized. Trusted advisers can be involved in difficult and delicate issues and are likely to be easily accessible. Their advice is often available at short notice and will be provided informally if necessary. Conversely, clients know that their trusted advisers will not accept assignments for which they do not feel competent, and will not promise results that cannot be achieved.

3.4Behavioural roles of the consultant

This section examines the concept of the consultant’s behavioural roles (consulting modes), a topic that is very popular in the literature on consulting. It describes, in a condensed form, the most typical and frequent consulting behaviours, how consultants relate to clients, what inputs they make, and in what way and how intensively clients participate. The roles assumed depend on the situation, the client’s preferences and expectations, and the consultant’s profile.

There is no shortage of descriptions and typologies of consulting roles. We have found it useful to make a distinction between basic roles, which include the resource and the process role, and a further refinement of the role concept, in which many more roles or sub-roles can be visualized in order to facilitate the understanding of the various intervention modes used in consulting.

Basic roles: the resource role and the process role

In the resource role (also referred to as the expert or content role), the consultant helps the client by providing technical expertise and doing something for and on behalf of the client: he or she supplies information, diagnoses the organization, undertakes a feasibility study, designs a new system, trains staff in a new technique, recommends organizational and other changes, comments on a new project envisaged by management, and the like.

Management collaborates with the resource consultant, but this collaboration may be limited to providing information on request, discussing the progress made, accepting or declining proposals, and asking for further advice on implementation. Management does not expect the consultant to deal extensively with the social and behavioural aspects of the change process in the organization, even if the consultant is expected to be aware of these aspects.

In the process role, the consultant as an agent of change attempts to help the organization solve its own problems by making it aware of organizational processes, of their likely consequences, and of intervention techniques for stimulating change. Instead of passing on technical knowledge and suggesting solutions, the process consultant is primarily concerned with passing on his or her approach, methods and values so that the client organization itself can

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The consultant–client relationship

Box 3.4 Why process consultation must be a part of every consultation

The essence of consultation, viewed in its most general sense, is to provide help to a client. Help is often defined in the traditional consultation literature as advice or counsel, generally in response to a question that the client asks. It has become normal to further define such help as a set of recommendations to the client. It is often argued that the consultant’s duties are finished when the recommendations have been delivered, and it is up to the client to implement them. If the client does not handle the implementation well, it is the fault of the client. The consultant has collected his or her fee and it is the client’s problem from that point on.

What is wrong with this picture?

1.The client may not have adequately formulated the problem and hence the consultant is working on the wrong thing.

2.The consultant may not have sufficient understanding of the personality of the client or the culture of the organization to know whether or not a given set of recommendations is implementable or not.

3.The consultant may not have established a trusting relationship with the client and, therefore, may not be getting the information that would enable him or her to understand the problem in sufficient depth to make workable recommendations.

4.The problem may be of such a nature that the client must solve the problem for him or herself because only the client knows ultimately what will work in his or her organization.

5.The consultation process should train the client in diagnostic and problemsolving skills, not merely provide a solution.

The only way to deal with these five issues is to begin any consultation with “process consultation”, in which the primary goal is to establish a helping relationship with the client such that the client and consultant become a team, jointly sharing the diagnostic interventions and responsibility for whatever interventions are implemented.

In this model the client continues to own the problem, but the consultant and client as a team must recognize that figuring out what the problem is, what forces are acting, and what one might do differently is a joint responsibility, not something that the consultant should own. Such joint ownership also forces the client to recognize from the outset that even bringing the consultant into the organization is an intervention and that all so-called “data gathering” activities are themselves major interventions in the organization.

Once the client and consultant have a working relationship in which they trust each other and are working together, it is quite possible to give advice, to confront, to argue, to convince, or whatever else seems appropriate, but the consultation process cannot start out in that mode. Therefore, any consultation must begin with building that helping relationship which is the essence of process consultation.

Author: Edgar H.Schein.

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Management consulting

diagnose and remedy its own problems. In various descriptions of process consulting, the organizational behaviour approach comes across loud and clear.

Expressed in simpler terms, while the resource consultant tries to suggest to the client what to change, the process consultant suggests mainly how to change and helps the client to go through the change process and deal with human and other issues as they are identified and understood. Edgar Schein describes process consultation as “the creation of a relationship with the client that permits the client to perceive, understand and act on the process events that occur in the client’s internal and external environment in order to improve the situation as defined by the client”.3 According to Schein, “at the core of this model is the philosophy that the clients must be helped to remain proactive, in the sense of retaining both the diagnostic and remedial initiative because only they own the problems identified, only they know the true complexity of their situation, and only they know what will work for them in the culture in which they live”.4 While any consulting involves some collaboration with the client, the process approach is a collaborative approach par excellence.

Choosing between the basic roles

Some years ago, “pure” resource or expert consulting was quite common. In today’s consulting practice, it tends to be used mainly in situations where the client clearly wants to acquire and apply, in one way or another, special technical expertise, and does not want the consultant to become involved in human problems and organizational change. In most situations, the resource and process roles are combined in a complementary and mutually supportive way. This is possible thanks to the increased competence of management consultants: today even technical specialists intervening in a relatively narrow area tend to have some training in the behavioural aspects of organizational change and of consulting, and are keen to help in implementation. On the other hand, the “pure” behavioural scientists, the traditional protagonists of process consulting, have recognized that their ability to help in organizational change would remain limited if they did not improve their understanding of technical, economic, financial and other problems and processes in client organizations. Thus, more and more consultants feel comfortable in both roles.

Nevertheless, there are situations, or phases in assignments, where one or the other approach predominates and is more effective. A consultant may start an assignment in a resource role in order to become acquainted with key data on the client organization and demonstrate to the client that he fully understands what is going on as an expert in the technical field concerned. As time goes on, he may act more and more as a process consultant, involving the client in looking for solutions likely to make effective use of the client’s capabilities and to be internalized by the client. He may temporarily switch back to the role of resource consultant to provide missing technical knowledge so that the process of change does not stop.

Conversely, other consultants emphasize that they would start every assignment in the process mode in order to ensure the client’s active involvement and

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