The Practice of Professional Consulting

Building Stage Guidelines

• Integrity forges long-term client relationships. Because most new business should be coming from existing clients, it follows that consultants ought to run their business with rules and procedures that create long-term relationships with their clients. Such relationships are built with integrity. For consultants, integrity means ensuring complete consistency between one’s spoken word and one’s behavior. Therefore, throughout the entire consulting process, consultants must be alert to the expectations they are setting, their spoken intentions, and communications that set standards of work and behavior. Broken integrity is very difficult to restore. It breaks trust—the most fundamental psychological tenet of human relationships—with ...