The Need for Enhanced Consulting Skills

-- By Greg Baker, President and CEO, Advance Consulting

For sixteen years the professionals at Advance Consulting have been teaching our clients what we know – and our clients have been teaching us.  Every time we deliver a workshop, coach an executive, or provide a consulting service we go to school on our clients’ circumstances and challenges, as well as their innovation and creativity in transforming and growing their businesses.  This constant learning enriches our experience and knowledge, and gives us a unique vantage point to witness extraordinary developments in the business world.

Over the past several months we have shared, through our newsletters, our knowledge and perspectives around some of the more important developments in the business world today.  This is not a “normal” period.  It is an extraordinary time.  We have used the metaphor of the Perfect Storm to describe the unique circumstances in business today, the pressures they cause, and the opportunities they present for us to grow, transform, and prosper in a turbulent environment.

This creates an unprecedented need for companies to focus on their two most important assets - their knowledge and their people.  Knowledge and people will be the source of the innovation and adaptability that organizations need to survive in this environment.

Why Consulting Skills?

As we discussed in recent newsletters, we are witnessing a major shift in the circumstances surrounding organizations.  These circumstances are adding tremendous pressure to the daily working lives of our people, at a time when we are looking to them to carry us through the storm.  Our rapidly changing business environment is making work more uncertain.  People are being asked to do more, do different things, and play different roles.  Learning is constant.  The need to show value quickly is always there.  Customers expect results.

Seasoned consultants will tell you that, while the pressure is greater than ever, there is nothing terribly new about these circumstances for them.  What we realize in all of this is that people in virtually all organizations today are facing the same conditions that consultants have faced for years.  That is precisely why we need to help them acquire and enhance their consulting skills.  Consulting skills are no longer the exclusive domain of consultants.

Why Enhanced Consulting Skills?

As with any discipline or knowledge domain, consultants and people who practice working consultatively tend to get more proficient over time.  So we tend to see a greater depth of knowledge and experience among experienced consultants than we do among junior professionals.  Because of that, our clients want to make sure that any consulting skills training made available to their people is equally relevant to both seasoned and junior professionals.

Secondly, the pervasive need for consulting skills means that these skills are being applied across more, and more disparate, business cultures and operations.  In addition, these skills must be understood and utilized by people working in a wide variety of jobs and functional areas.

These market demands are characteristic of one of the three storms the make up the Perfect Storm – Segmentation.  Essentially, the market has segmented itself all the way down to the individual customer, and they all want custom solutions. 

So while we at Advance Consulting work with organizations to heighten their awareness around the affects of the Perfect Storm, we also find ourselves in it.  Our clients are demanding custom solutions.  Listening to the voice of our customers, we recognize that enhanced consulting skills are skills personalized to the individual, their circumstance, and their experience level in their particular profession.  

Custom Solutions

The trick in this situation is to figure out what parts of our products and solutions should be the same for every client, and what parts should be customizable to the individual client and participants.  In our case, how do we make sure our consulting skills training is strong at its core and relevant across all experience levels, industries, jobs, cultures, and operational models?  This was the challenge we tackled in our new revision to our Workshop.  For more information on this, please see “What’s New.”