Flawless Consulting, 4th Edition

CHAPTER 5Contracting Overview

AT THE BEGINNING OF EVERY WORKSHOP we conduct on consulting skills, we ask people what they want to learn about consulting. The first wave of answers is very reasonable and task oriented:

• How do you set up a project?
• How do you measure consulting effectiveness?
• Can you act as an umpire and helper at the same time?
• What do you do to elicit client expectations?
• How do you get in the door when you are not welcome?
• How do you establish trust?
• What are consulting skills anyhow?
• When do we break for lunch?

… and on and on.

As we get into the workshop, it is easy to see the real desires that underlie these wishes. What do consultants want to learn about consulting? We want to learn how to have power over our clients! How do we influence them, get them to do what we want, manage in our own image? And while we are doing all of this to them, how do we keep their respect and appreciation?

The phrase “power over our clients” is a distortion of the more promising expectation to have power with our clients. If we want to control our clients, we put ourselves on a pedestal and our clients on the ground. This arrangement is highly unstable because clients soon realize we want to control them and they are able to topple us with ease. And why shouldn't they be able to topple us? Managers get rewarded for keeping control and have to be politically savvy or they wouldn't be managers. So the desire to have power over the client is a no‐win position for consultants. ...