I\u2019m big on the idea that consultants don\u2019t have to be really smart people, or that they have to have an incredible amount of experience around the subject matter they are tackling.\u00a0 It\u2019s helpful of course, but it\u2019s actually not the core competency for consulting.<\/p>\n
First, I\u2019m a huge advocate of liberal arts college educations.\u00a0 The reason for this is not anything to do with small colleges or personal relationships you build with professors.\u00a0 It\u2019s about how they teach and what they teach.\u00a0 At small liberal arts colleges, you don\u2019t necessarily learn a \u201ctrade\u201d like accounting or engineering or IT.\u00a0 More often than not, people come out of small colleges with largely \u201cunusable\u201d degrees like anthropology and sociology.\u00a0 Few people who get Psych degrees go on to be psychologists.\u00a0 I am a good example myself with a double in Economics and Asian American studies before getting my Masters in HR.\u00a0 What the small liberal arts colleges teach is a way of thinking, connecting objects throughout the disciplines and throughout the world.<\/p>\n
Second, it\u2019s not about how smart you are, but about how you approach the problems that clients give you.\u00a0 Given a solid framework about how your mind approaches a problem and how to solve it, you can figure out just about anything.\u00a0 At its core, consulting is less about your expertise and more about your approach.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t get me wrong, the more you know the better.\u00a0 But there are great HR people in the consulting world, and there are great technologists who are way more knowledgeable than I am that I can out solution any day, only because I can approach a problem with more discipline and connect more dots than most other people.\u00a0 When we get into topics like HR service delivery or data governance, are you getting an organization who has a particular \u201cbest practice\u201d model they will inevitably try to fit you into? Or do you have someone who knows all that and will tailor something that works for your organizational parameters instead within the context of the industry\u2019s leading practices?<\/p>\n
(And no, this is not an advertisement.\u00a0 Please note that the great majority of you still have no idea who I am.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019m big on the idea that consultants don\u2019t have to be really smart people, or that they have to have an incredible amount of experience around the subject matter they are tackling.\u00a0 It\u2019s helpful of course, but it\u2019s actually not…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-strategies","category-vendors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1137"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1138,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1137\/revisions\/1138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}