Using the right resources every time

Many companies may need to call for process expertise on the fringes of- or beyond- a consultant’s core competencies. Projects that do not play to the strength of the experts’ strengths will most likely experience mediocre outcomes and budget or time over runs all of which can make clients cranky.

Let us look at ‘some’ of the categories of process expertise and associated skills to determine the right resources for the engagement. This could help determine the makeup of the team: whether they can handle it alone, whether they might collaborate with others who have complementary skills, or whether the client engagement team should include the experts at all.

Consultant:

A consultant is typically an external resource who assists in achieving a complex corporate or organizational goal with which internal resources have been struggling. 

The consultant

• brings objectivity,
• a new perspective,
• specialized industry or functional expertise. 
• has the ability to assess the situation quickly,
• determine the real issues and
• propose alternative courses of action.

Management and OD consultants have the skills that most overlap with coaches, trainers and facilitators. They help improve organizational performance and often address organizational dynamics, change management and leadership issues. Strong management and OD consultants may have facilitation, personality instrumentation, and team building techniques and coaching process skills in addition to analytical skills in their tool bag.

When consultants are internal, they typically will not have direct line control. They are more likely to be consulted for their special content or process expertise, and their recommendations are seen as input to the final executive or managerial decision. External consultants also provide specialized expertise but rarely make final decisions.

Benefits:

Consultants apply their analytical and process methodologies and tools to the problem or issue, with improved effectiveness, efficiency and profitability being key outcomes. The client’s ROI can be as much as 20 times a management consultant’s fees.

Case Scenario of a Successful Consulting engagement

Gupta’s fortune 1000 client hired him to support the executive team in developing its product strategy for the next three years. Agarwal he VP of marketing asked Gupta to research industry trends and competitors prior to facilitating the strategy discussion with the executive team. He was an optimal fit for this particular assignment because he had the research skills and industry knowledge to keep the team grounded in the market realities and the facilitation skills to engage the entire team in this complex decision-making process. Gupta was so successful with this consulting assignment that VP Agarwal asked him to help the divisions with their research and implementation plans as well.

Case Scenario of wrong choice:

Anand an executive coach gained the confidence of CEO Harpal Singh. He asked him to facilitate the company’s strategic planning session, which would drive strategic initiatives for the next two years. Anand had excellent coaching and facilitation skills but was not financially savvy enough to ask the questions needed to focus the conversation on critical success factors. As a result, the strategic plan was not rooted in the financial or market reality of the competitive industry situation and would not generate results soon enough for stockholders. Anand could have avoided this outcome with a referral to a strategy-savvy consultant colleague.

Executive Coach:

Purpose:

Executive coaches often are brought in to help a star player navigate a new role or advance faster inside a company. To put it in a nutshell a coach can help a start become a super star. A coach can also be retained to help a valuable executive overcome performance gaps. Coaches fulfill needs for continued education such as interpersonal communications or client sensitivity. The use of coaches has grown in the past decade as management scope has widened and middle management layers have thinned. Examples of executive coaching needs include:

a.      understanding strengths and development needs and how teams, clients, peers perceive the executive ( Coached)

b.     dealing with conflict or improving conflict resolution skills

c.      mastering and practicing new skills and styles through role play such as leadership or public speaking.

d.     changing specific behaviours such as influence decision making defensiveness or assertiveness

e.     increasing leadership competencies thinking more strategically or communicating more effectively for example.

f.       creating and managing a development plan

What is the difference between coaching and consulting?

Coaching is typically a one-on-one process, whereas consultants tend to work at a team, department or corporate level. Consultants typically bring content and analytical expertise or highly specialized processes into the organisation to address specific issues. Coaches use process expertise and tools to support clients in developing their own answers through expanded ways of seeing themselves and their situations.

What is the difference between coaching and mentoring?

Both work one –on-one but mentors tend to offer specific content as well as contacts, while coaches focus on process to support clients in doing their own learning.

Benefits:

Faster integration of leaders into new roles and cultures, higher executive effectiveness, improved communications and morale, and improved job satisfaction and retention. A study by Manchester Inc., found coaching produced an ROI of almost six times its cost. A DBM study stated, Changes in skills and performance of executives who received coaching are still evident two years later.

Success story:

A growing entrepreneurial company recruited 51 year old Thomas from a senior position at its primary competitor where he had spent 25 years rising through ranks. In his new job, Thomas continued to use his top-down management style and expected the automatic compliance he had received before from long time subordinates who trusted him. Not surprisingly his new entrepreneurial colleagues were unhappy about this. Coaching increased Bills awareness of his unsuitable style and provided the insight he needed to change

Case scenario of a situation where a wrong choice was made:

Lena needed some advice on how to optimize an interview for a senior position. She went to her mentor who had helped her many times with her questions on technical subjects. Leena’s mentor did not have any connection to the position she was interviewing for and was not knowledgeable in the area of peak performance interviewing, but he tried his best to give her some pointers. A personal coach in the area of job search and interviewing or a career coach would have been the better choice, as someone who knows the latest technique and interview questions being used in the industry.

Mentor

Purpose:

Mentoring is a formal engagement for a defined time period between a person who had walked the path in a particular area (mentor) and another, less experienced person (mentee) who is seeking help and guidance in order to walk in the similar path. The most sought- after mentors are often successful executives. The quality of the results obtained through mentoring depends on the follow-through, commitment and initiative of the mentee.

The mentor and mentee, by mutual agreement, determine the duration and frequency of meetings. By definition mentors are internal to the organisation or community and generally volunteer their services. Formal mentor-mentee relationships usually last three, six or twelve months with weekly or biweekly meetings.

Mentoring is often confused with personal or executive coaching. A mentor, generally a volunteer, uses his or her knowledge, connections and skills to help another reach desired goals. A personal coach, usually for a fee, helps an individual uncover his or her own answers or direction. However, some mentor-coaches will interject their knowledge into their dialogue with the client.

Benefits:

Swift and rapid improved effectiveness of the mentee

Case scenario of a Success story

Joe wanted to increase his effectiveness in handling his multi project assignments. As part of a formal mentoring program, he was paired for six months with Maria, a senior project manager who was skilled in time and project management. Joe and Maria agreed on the logistics (when, where, length) and goals for their meetings. Maria tutored Joe in project management basics and arranged introductions for him with others in project management positions that could provide input, suggest a course of action or point him to additional resources. Joe’s effectiveness in managing his projects improved greatly and his stress level decreased as a result.

Case scenario of making a wrong choice:

Using the wrong modality is counterproductive for participants and decreases the credibility of the sponsors of the program. For example, as part of a management development programme, the company required Sheela to sign up for coaching. Sheela is a self directed individual who is excellent at managing her time and her projects. Her self development goals were to improve her negotiating skills and to increase her connection with managers in the company. The personal coach did not provide any support for improved negotiation skills or for Sheela’s expansion of management contacts. The sessions, according to Sheela were a waste of time and money. Sheela needed a mentor to help her understand the informal workings of the management organisation and to provide introductions to other management resources.

Facilitator:

Purpose:

A facilitator is a professional who is skilled with group dynamics and whose job it is to bring forth the opinions, data, and wisdom that exists within a group. A facilitator’s role is to encourage all participants, inviting persons with different learning styles including closed persons to express their views and to manage the energy so that the most vocal do not dominate the discussion. Facilitators provide value to multifunctional teams who need to develop common language to brainstorming or strategy sessions that require generation of free flowing ideas. Pure facilitation is content neutral, the goal being to create a safe environment for participants to share thoughts, feelings and beliefs so that a team can develop its own culture and norms. A facilitator can also operate within an agenda or with a given goal.

Any meeting can benefit from a facilitator, although many facilitators tend to be part facilitators, part masters of ceremonies, and part management experts responsible for agenda completion. Department managers or executives have difficulty in facilitating meetings in their own organisations. Their authority hampers their ability to be neutral, and the managers’ subordinates tend to defer to their opinions.

Effective facilitation skills are desirable for consultants, coaches and trainers.

Benefits:

The highest use of talent and ensuring that the best ideas of each participant are integrated into the most important decisions. A skilled facilitator can assist the group to synthesize the best input from all of the participants into a more sophisticated whole than any one member could have created alone.

Case scenario of a Success story

 Frank has content expertise in organizational development and is skilled with group dynamics. He facilitates meetings of many cross functional product teams and is good at balancing multiple interests without inserting his opinion into the discussion. He helps quieter voices get heard and takes care to summarise what has been said, helping the group find energy in the discussion. Teams become more productive with Frank’s assistance, reaching common ground more rapidly in spite of team members’ different backgrounds and points of view.

Case scenario of a wrong choice made:

Nikil, the division manager, attempted to facilitate his own strategy meeting. He believed there was no need for a facilitator because he understood the issues as well as any one and wanted to avoid the expense. Nikil shared his own expertise fist, in the process shutting down contributions from his subordinates. Participants nodded their heads in a show of support for Nikhil’s authority, but in reality they did not feel heard and did not buy into his plan. Months later, Nikil is dissatisfied by continued resistance to his initiative and the slow pace of its implementation.

Trainer:

Purpose:

Trainers provide large blocks of content to participants who must use the new knowledge or skill to achieve job success. Usually trainers are selected to keep employees upto date on the latest business practices and technologies and to address a specific skill or knowledge gap in the organisation. Employees seek training to add to their value in the market place.

Trainers are often confused with speakers and lecturers. Many similarities exist- such as the transfer or information, expertise, and the need to engage the audience- but professional speakers tend to experience less face time with the audience, are expected to be topical and highly entertaining, and must tailor the talk to the audience’s needs. A trainer knows course development, typically transfers a higher density of information per hour than speaker, and is expected to transfer detailed content for attendees to retain and use in their jobs.

Benefits

Knowledge is disseminated in a rapid, consistent and cost-efficient manner to large or small groups of people.

Success story

Ahmed wanted to learn to use Microsoft Excel in order to build and maintain his department’s data. He enrolled for a class available through a local training organisaion. The instructor, Rajesh was an expert on the use of excel and spread sheet, skilled in engaging his students and in creating course material. This course was easy to follow, challenged the students, and enabled follow up after its completion. Rajesh was able to field questions from Ahmed and the other students, and Ahmed was able right away to use the spread sheet to build his data.

Case scenario of a wrong choice:

Tom was, hired to do a key note talk at an association conference. The conference organizers wanted a speaker to provide pearls of wisdom in an entertaining manner. Tom was a renowned trainer, knew the content but did not have the platform skills to carry of a key note talk in front of 3000 conference participants. His talk was too detailed and stiff and had little entertainment value. Moreover, the audience had difficulty determining his key points. Many became bored and left before the end of the talk, and conference organizers were disappointed.

Professional Speaker

Purpose

Professional speakers are experts in their chosen field who are paid to motivate, impart their knowledge and connect with their audience to provide a memorable experience. They master sophisticated platform skills to achieve these aims. Training is not the same as professional speaking, even though both convey information to an audience. Nor is professional speaking the same as public speaking, which occurs when any one presents to a group of individuals.

Benefits.

Attendees are educated, entertained, motivated and inspired.

Case scenario of a Success story

Cathy is an expert in effective communication and the mis-use of e-mail, phone mail and snail mail. She has written a book and articles and is well known in the field. Technical companies and conferences hire Cathy to help employees and attendees become more effective in gaining control over information overload and to do this in an entertaining way. She has been speaking for several years, and audiences respond to her authentic presence and dry humour.

Case scenario of a wrong choice made.

Anytime an expert with poor platform skills is asked to give a keynote talk before a large audience at a conference, disappointment and wasted time will be the result for the audience.

A note on ROI

Having a good fit between client needs and the resources needed to fill them can have effects that go well beyond the fees and time allocated to a project. For example, if the Manchester study (which indicated that coaching produced benefits worth six times its cost) were indicative of the typical coaching return on investment,

• Why wouldn’t every oganisation do as much of it as they could?
• Why can’t they achieve 600% ROI?
• All the stock exchanges would have it so good.

When a Fortune 1000 company offers training to accompany implementation of a major enterprise wide software initiative, it increases the value of the software investment by increasing employees’ comfort level with the application. The difference between no training versus training everyone is the difference between nobody using the software, a total waste of the investment, versus a high proficiency in its use in multiple applications by everyone. The increase in the value of the software to the company might be as much as tens of millions of dollars.

On the other hand, after Anand, the executive coach, facilitated the strategic planning retreat, the executive team chose an ill-advised course of action due to Anand’s lack of finance and business knowledge. That error cost the organisattion a market window for introducing a product and wasted technical resources. The cost of using this particular highly skilled, but wrong resource was $400 million in lost revenue.

So we need to make certain that the right resources are used for the engagements which are likely to generate a high ROI both for clients and for the right partners.

Sources

1. Wall Street journals
2. The case for executive coaching…by Laurie Voss
3. Getting started in Personal and Executive Coaching..... by Stephen Fairley

Names used in the case scenarios are fictitious while the cases mentioned are real time.