As we all know, many consultants are simply \u201cyes men.\u201d\u00a0 They tell you exactly what you either want to hear, or already know.\u00a0 In many cases, there is really nothing wrong with this.\u00a0 They tell you what you already know simply because it is the general truth.\u00a0 Consultants often go through many hours of interviews and surveys to find out what you already know intuitively based on our experience.\u00a0 It makes perfect sense that they will usually validate what you have already discovered through years of working within the organization.\u00a0 However, to gain credibility, you often need an \u201coutside expert\u201d opinion.\u00a0 In many cases, you either hired the consultant because you didn\u2019t have the expertise or the bandwidth internally, or you simply needed the external validation.\u00a0 This is ok.<\/p>\n
The problems creep in when the consultant does not do their discovery appropriately.\u00a0 They interview who you tell them to interview, and don\u2019t go outside your boundaries with interviewing the people they want to talk to.\u00a0 They don\u2019t do adequate survey work and work within narrow scopes which don\u2019t allow them to find out what is going on \u201cbeneath the covers.\u201d\u00a0 When all this happen, they simply become \u201cyes men.\u201d\u00a0 Rather than having a consultant that is telling you the truth of the mater, they are telling you what you want to hear.\u00a0 This is not because you have demanded this from the consultant, but because you have possibly steered the consultant to sources who are biased to agree with you.\u00a0 A consultants findings will then also be biased based on how you created their scope of work and directed their project.<\/p>\n
But this is just the surface of the problem.\u00a0 This is not a question about whether your consultant is telling you the truth.\u00a0 This is a question about you not wanting the truth.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been in more than enough situation where the consultant is really telling the client to do something quite different than the path the client is currently on.\u00a0 I\u2019ve had these experiences during projects when clients professed to what the truth and guidance.\u00a0 But when it comes down to it, senior HR leaders often have an interest or their consultants to say that the course they have been on for years was indeed not a waste of time.\u00a0 They would like to hear that the money they have spent was spent with some form of reflection.\u00a0 And when a consultant reveals that your organization is in samples with no direction or infrastructure, you rebel.<\/p>\n
Now, I\u2019m fairly politically savvy I think, and I don\u2019t lay things out harshly.\u00a0 I\u2019m a pretty darn good consultant and generally can sway a client to my explanation and point of view.\u00a0 But there are certain times that I realize my clients didn\u2019t actually want my version of the truth.\u00a0 All I can really say is that if you are going to spend thousands of dollars (often hundreds of thousands) then you should really keep an open mind.\u00a0 You hire consultants for a number of reasons.\u00a0 Among these should be the fact that they do indeed have much more market and industry exposure than the average practitioner.\u00a0 Some consultants have a point of view that should be tempered, but some clients have a point of view that needs to be challenged.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As we all know, many consultants are simply \u201cyes men.\u201d\u00a0 They tell you exactly what you either want to hear, or already know.\u00a0 In many cases, there is really nothing wrong with this.\u00a0 They tell you what you already know…<\/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":[39,47,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-consultancies","category-governance","category-strategies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/974","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=974"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/974\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":975,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/974\/revisions\/975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}