How to Pick the Right Consultant for You
Finding the right people outside of your organization to partner with can be tiresome and confusing, if only it was as easy as picking your favorite ice cream flavor. Okay, so that isn’t really that easy either, how about your go-to shoes?!
Working with a consultant can be one of the best things for you and your organization when you’re faced with a challenging situation or even when you’re faced with a new opportunity and you’re unsure which direction to head. Consultants provide expertise, relief from time constraints, experience, outside perspectives, new ideas, and can assist with effective problem solving. Whatever your need for a consultant, working with one should always leave you and your organization better off. So how do you pick the right one?
1. Find someone who listens well.
One of the most important traits that a consultant brings to the table is their ability to listen well to others. It might seem like it goes without saying, but I assure you, it doesn’t. Consultants can have years of experience, plenty of expertise, and the latest tools, but if they don’t listen to you and actually hear what you’re saying about your situation, I promise, they will not be able to help you out. And they can do more harm than good when you’re done working with them. Every consultant has tools that they’re familiar with, but their tools are a means to an end. If they don’t actually serve you and your situation well, they aren’t effective at all, no matter how shiny and dazzling they appear.
In order to best serve their clients, consultants must listen, learn, and understand them. Providing value to clients requires that consultants understand the unique needs, wants, and opportunities for each client. Don’t settle if you don’t feel heard.
2. Make sure they put their clients first.
Simultaneously, you want to make sure you work with a consultant who puts their clients first, yes even above their own needs. Consulting is obviously a business, but consultants exist first and foremost to serve their clients and make sure their clients’ needs are met. Due to the transparency that exists between clients and consultants, opportunities exist for consultants to take advantage of their client’s situation in order to profit from it themselves. Find a consultant that is client-centered and committed to serving their clients well.
3. Confirm that they are trustworthy.
Trust is paramount for effective consultant-client relationships. Effective consulting projects require a deepening level of trust between consultants and clients. Here’s why: the level of risk any client is willing to engage in when it comes to change is completely dependent upon the degree to which they trust their consultant. Whenever we face needing to make changes, we’re also faced with the inherent risks involved because we’re about to do something we haven’t done before and the outcomes cannot be guaranteed 100%. Successfully engaging in change, and therefore risks, means we have to be able to trust the people we’re working with. Find a trustworthy consultant who is credible, reliable, emotionally available, and cares deeply for the people they work with.
4. Enjoy working with them, or don’t.
Working with consultants is as much relational work as it is technical. The only way to truly get to the root of the issues in front of you, and your organization, is to be completely transparent with your consultant. Consultants can’t actually be that helpful if they don’t have all the information they need. And more often than not when we’re working with a consultant it’s because things just aren’t quite right, and we can’t figure it out ourselves. The people we generally are willing to pull back the curtain for and let them see how the sausage is made are those we feel comfortable with and genuinely like. So, expertise aside, find a consultant you like, you can easily talk to about anything (you’d be surprised what can be the true root cause of many circumstances), and you’d probably be friends with outside of work — someone you feel like you can be completely yourself with.
Working with a consultant might be just the thing you need to make those improvements you’ve been meaning to make. When you start looking for one, make sure you pick the right one!