- I'm very much looking
forward to this video because today's topic is both quite juicy but also highly educational. And inspiration for today's topic, was coming from a Harvard
business review article that was reading, the article is called, How Consultants Project Expertise and Learn at the Same Time. I will link the article
in the video description. I do think it is quite insightful and it pretty much asked the question, are all consultants conman? Are they sincere? What tactics do they apply to potentially create an impression from the
client that is not accurate? And as an introduction to the topic, I want to read out to you
one paragraph of the article. "The challenge with effective
consulting is that it depends on in-depth situational
knowledge that consultants simply can't have when
they start an assignment. What's more, they may not
yet be completely clear on what the client -
who's paying top dollars and expect results
immediately - really wants. So consultants must rapidly and discreetly gain knowledge of the client's business while simultaneously giving an impression of competence and self-confidence. We call this challenge,
learning credibility tension." And this is indeed a
challenge that you almost always face as a consultant
if you start on a new project. Because on the one hand, the client expects you
to be super competent, highly knowledgeable on
the topic from day one, from the very first day you set forth at the client's office. But on the other hand, you might be young, you might come fresh out of University. Maybe you did a similar
project in the past, for sure you do not know in detail, the client's current processes. So how can it be perceived as credible and confident by the client, if actually you are not. If actually you might
need a couple of weeks, a couple of months to get up to speed, to really get all the knowledge and learnings that you need to really come to a great and valuable
recommendation for the client. So this is the topic we're
going to talk about today. So welcome to another coffee break here on my channel, Firm Learning. My name is Heinrich, I'm a
former strategy consultant and I want to help you
to become successful in the first years of your career. Now, before we jump into this, I know that this topic is
a little bit controversial. And after watching this video, some of you might really indeed think that
consulting is a conman job. This is not really what I want
to say here with this video, this is not my position. And I also want to open
with a little disclaimer that all the things that
I would talk about now are to my knowledge,
not officially endorsed by any large consulting firm, for sure not by the employers
that I worked for in the past. And these things are also not part of any official training, curriculums, of any of these large consulting firms that I'm aware of. This is a rather practical,
street-smartness, type of knowledge type of tips that you will pick up by
doing this job over time. So let's start by putting ourselves into the shoes of a consultant. You're sitting at the client
in your first one or two weeks of the project, and
you need to learn more. You need to learn more
about the client's business, the client's industry, what exactly the problem
is that you need to solve, how the client's
processes work, and so on. But what can you do? Of course you can just
blatantly ask the client. What does this mean? How does this work? How is this supposed to go? But if you do this, if you ask these type of direct questions, you will often get not so
nice answers from the clients. They might say, "Well, this
is why I hired consultants, for them to give me the answers. I shouldn't train you. You should know these things. Why are we paying you so much money if you're not even aware
of these basic things of our business, of our
industry?" And so on. And trust me that these are not some theoretical considerations, you'll hear things like that
all the time on projects, these things happen quite frequently. And indeed a partner I
worked with in the past once taught me, "Well, Heinrich, consulting is like close quarter combat. You really need to be careful,
need to watch every step behind every corner, behind every door, there might be danger, be careful." So it might be fair to
argue that as a consultant, often you need to fake it till you make it in the first week, so in the first months, you somehow need to
pretend to be knowledgeable to be an expert, until you really build up that knowledge over time. And this is now where the
juicy part of this video begins because now I want to share
four of these sneaky tactics that you could employ as a consultant to create exactly this impression. And again, I do not say
that every consultant is using techniques like this, and also do not necessarily
endorse to behave in this way. But let just say the tactics like this can be quite helpful
in certain situations. And the first tactic
is to leverage the fact that you as a consultant
have an opportunity that many other employees
of the company do not have. And this is that you,
as part of the project, will very often be able to talk
to lots of different people at the client, from lots
of different departments. And by that you will
collect lots of information that probably many employees
will not be able to have, if they just work on one specific task and one specific department
for their whole career. So often by talking to one client, you will pick up some industry trends, some certain specific information on what is going on in the company, that probably another client of yours, and another employee of the
company, is not really aware of. So the next time you then
talk to this other person at the client, you can
then selectively share some of the information that you
got from the first client. And by that, because this other client might not be aware of that, he or she will then often
perceive you as very competent, very well-informed, that
you really know your things, if you tell him information
about their company that even they do not know. And indeed, there's this
sarcastic saying that "Consultant just borrow your
watch to tell you the time." And while of course,
that over simplifies it, I do think that there
is some truth to that in the sense that this works
up to the highest levels. Often after a project in the end that if you already
present your final results to the board, to the C level, in your recommendation
it will not be unusual. That is some of the
recommendations that you make will be ideas that you more
or less directly derived from information that you
got from other people working in the organization, from
people really working in the machine room, that just
shared some ideas with you on what the company
needs to do to improve. And to not digress too far
from the topic of this video, I do not want to debate
the merits of this. I do think though, that there
is an argument to be made that even if consultants do that, there still can be a significant value add in the way that consultants do this. But again, let's maybe part
this for another video. The second sneaky tactic that
I want to talk about today is just how you frame your information, and specifically to frame
information that you have as your very own experiences. So let's imagine that you
indeed do some research on the client, on the industry, before you start the project
and you may be read a book or report about specific things, maybe you even talk to some experts, some other people, some senior partners. So you do know some things about the topic that now you need to work on. But of course the problem here is if you're having a debate with a client, and you want to share some
pieces of information, and you just say, "Oh yeah,
I read this in a book" or "I read this in a report." Of course this will often
not be very convincing. This is will not really portray you as a big expert on a certain topic. So instead you can frame
this as your own experiences, you can say, "Oh yes, last
time I worked on this, this is how we did it." You can say, "From my experience, this is how this is handled." "This is how you usually this works." "This is what other
companies in this field do." And this frames you as
not only being book-smart, it's not only being a student who read about a certain
topic in the past, but as being a professional, as being an expert who has done
similar things in the past, who has worked on these specific topics, on prior engagement, on
prior jobs, or whatever. My third little sneaky tactic
is on how to frame questions. And actually this I picked up in one of my very first internships. I was working with a project lead and she always seemed super confident. She always seemed like she
really would know her things. So one day I just asked her as an intern, "How do you do this? You always seem so confident. No, clearly these topics need to be new to you at least to some extent as way." So I asked her, "How do you do this?" And she indeed shared one little tactic with me that I really found helpful and frankly also applied
several times myself then afterwards. And she told me, whenever a client uses a term
that you do not understand or say something that is
not really clear to you, instead of asking, what does this mean? What does this term mean? Instead of asking this, because these questions of course potentially make you look ignorant. Instead, rather ask what
do you mean with this term? What does this mean to you? What exactly do you mean if you say this? Because what this implies is that not only you
understand the general meaning of what this person was talking about, but even have this higher
more abstract knowledge that you are aware that not
everybody in every company is using this term in the very same way. So now you want to know
specifically how this client and this company is using this. So you completely turn around the frame from you have no idea at all about what this person was talking about, to you really completely
understanding this, but now you really want to understand how exactly this is meant, this is to be understood in this company, for this client, for this person. So the fourth tactic is
maybe the most sneaky one. And I even asked myself
whether I should include it but I want to be open
and transparent with you because I do know that
some people do this, but reflect on this for yourself and only use at your own discretion. And this tactic can help you
to be perceived as intelligent. Of course, the client, when
he or she hires consultants, especially when the client
hires MBB consultants, everybody knows what the fees are for these type of professionals. They expect to work with
highly intelligent people. And of course it might help you if you are indeed perceived
to be intelligent. But how can you signal
that you are intelligent? And indeed, at least from my experience, one of the strongest signals that always have a very
strong effect is mental math. If you're really good at mental math, everybody would think that
you are highly intelligent. Interestingly, this is
not only true for clients but for your own team, for your partner, your project lead, you work with this way. And of course, ideally you
really are good with mental math. If this is really easy to you, and then you can indeed impress people just by doing some crazy
calculations in your head. So what do you do if actually your mental math is really bad? You're just not good at all of it. So what you could do is when
you prepare for a meeting, and when you know that you will present for instance some parts of a document, or maybe a whole document, some pages of a PowerPoint presentation, then already think about
are there some pages with numbers on them and then potentially you could do some little
calculations on your presentation, that would seem quite impressive. Because then what you can do is that you can fake the mental math. So before you walk into the meeting, you think of a calculation, you already calculate the result with Excel or with the calculator. And then you walk into the meeting, you present the document
and then live, on the spot, you pretend that you're
calculating something saying, okay so you multiply this by this, and then divide it by this, then this is the number
that you would get. So again, yes, this is
probably more than just sneaky. So take responsibility
for your own actions and decide whether you really
want to do this or not. So now reflecting on these tactics and I'll also want to make a clear that these tactics are not
only relevant for consultants but also for temporary
workers, for freelancers, for other professional advisors. These are just things that
are to some extent necessary to bridge the so-called
learning credibility tension that the article is describing. To brush this tension, from the very beginning, you just need to be perceived as credible if you want to succeed in your job. But then at the same time
you also need the time to get some learning from the client to really get up to speed
and really understand what this whole project is
all supposed to be about. So I'd really love to hear
your perspective on this topic. How do you see this, did you already applied
similar strategies? What is your experience with this? As you know, I will do
my very best to answer every single comment that you write. And yes, every comment that
you do write also helps me with the YouTube algorithm. If you want to continue
your learning journey with this channel, Firm Learning, check out my other
video on how consultants solve tough problems for their clients. Really the video somewhere of our fear, trust that it will be
worth to check it out. And if you took any value
at all out of this video, please hit the like button
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members of this channel, you're really making a big contribution to the cause of this channel. Thank you so much for your support. So if you watch them till the end, also let me know in the comments. I very much appreciate that. Thank you for your support. Good weekend to all of you,
see you back next Saturday. This is Heinrich from Firm Learning, all the best to you and bye-bye.
