Consulting Tips and Tools

After you have determined what your consulting customer wants and you have an agreement to work together, you can turn your attention to discovering what is needed to achieve their desired outcome.  This phase of consulting may be referred to as “assessment”.

A trap at this point is to begin observing and collecting information without first getting clear on key questions to be answered in order to prepare a solid set of recommendations for the client.  Another trap is to limit assessment to description of existing problems or needs.  A third trap is to miss obtaining buy-in from key stakeholders.

The key in our experience is to focus on an assessment endpoint which produces:

a)  a draft of one or more SMART supporting results that together enable the customer to obtain their outcome, and
b)  a set of resources and action options to most efficiently achieve those results.

To conduct assessment in this way, we recommend asking and answering the 3 sets of questions below:

1)  Results Alignment:

Relative to achieving your customer’s desired outcome, what are the wants or needs of key stakeholders who may be impacted by this outcome, or upon whom the customer’s outcome may depend?

These stakeholders could be employees, family members, customers served, suppliers, investors, or others who have significant importance or influence related to your consulting customer’s outcome.

What specific results would fulfill these needs, and how can these results support achievement of your customer’s outcome? (You are looking for high alignment between stakeholder results and client outcome.)

Which of these results would have the highest leverage in realizing your client’s outcome?

2)  Current situation:

Relative to each of these key results, what is the current situation or state of affairs?

3)  Actions to Get from A to B:

Given the answers to questions in #1 and #2 above, and your knowledge of what the client wants, what are the actions or resources needed to realize the customer’s desired outcome?  Which of these resources are available to the client now, and which need to be added?  Which of the latter could you provide?

Answering these questions will help you understand and describe what results and actions are needed to most efficiently move the client and associated stakeholders from their current situation to the desired outcome.  Assessment is treated in more detail in our workshop “Consulting Tools” at http://www.aligned4results.com/ToolsforConsultingOverview.html .

Randy and Susan

© Aligned for Results, LLC

One important aspect of discovering and describing the outcome your consulting customer wants is to identify any concerns or conflicting desires associated with that result.

Your client may not be consciously aware of concerns or conflicts.  However, the customer’s body language or the way they speak about what they want may tip you off.  Unless concerns or conflicts are identified and their impact minimized, you may find that the client holds back during the consultancy, making achievement of their stated result much more difficult.

Bringing Concerns to Light

You are not expected to be a psychoanalyst when uncovering these concerns. Rather, you can ask your consulting customer: “How will achieving the result you want impact (or affect) you, the team you lead, others in the organization, customers, your family, or the community?”  Follow up with questions that enable the customer to be specific.

The customer may respond with additional benefits.  This will help both of you understand the importance of achieving the customer’s desired outcome, and can increase motivation to succeed.

If you still sense hesitance or incongruity, be patient.  To surface any concerns or other desires which may conflict with the stated result, you may need to ask the question in different ways over the course of one or more conversations.  Your question can be as simple as:  “Now that I understand the benefits you can achieve from this result, I would like to know if you see any downside to getting or having it.”

Using Concerns to Sharpen the Outcome

Make sure that, if and when you identify any concerns or conflicts, you obtain enough information to be effective in resolving them.  Ask about and discuss ways in which issues can be handled as part of achieving the overall outcome desired.  You’ll then have the chance to research details during your larger assessment.  Addressing client concerns as part of project assessment  gives you the opportunity to discover more about related factors and potential resources for resolution.  It also gives you the opportunity to present and discuss specific mechanisms for resolving concerns when you finalize specific results, targets, and strategy in a subsequent conversation.

Randy and Susan

© Aligned for Results, LLC