What is the best car on the road?

What are the best flowers to give on Valentine’s Day?

What is the best computer you can buy?

At the risk of sounding like a consultant, the answer to all of these questions is…It depends.

The best car?  You can get the best selling car or the one with the most options.  You could say the best one is the most expensive car, or perhaps the least expensive one. 

Best flowers?  That depends on the tastes of the person you’re buying for.  It could also depend on the message you want to send.  If you’re sending to a platonic friend, sending the traditional red roses may give the wrong idea.

Best computer?  You could go for the one with the most horsepower or the most storage.  But what are you going to use it for?  Is it for grandma who wants to send emails and use Facebook?  Then you probably won’t need a lot of storage...or horsepower.

I meet competitive people who have a deep-seated need to always be the best.  Playing racket ball?  They’ll try to win at all costs.  Driving to the Movieplex separately?  They’ll beat you there and get a better parking spot.  They win.

Companies often act the same way.  Maybe they’re run by the same competitive people.  They have strategies to “be the best professional services firm in town” or “to have the best customer service in our industry”.

The problem comes when it’s time to measure that goal.  Are we the best?  It depends.  Depends on the people you ask and what they wanted.  You can’t strive to be the best and then expect people to live up to it.

You can however, use satisfaction surveys and strive for a specific aggregate rating.  Hopefully, you asked the right questions on that survey.  You can strive to be the top seller in the industry if you can obtain verifiable sales numbers on your competition.

If your goal is to be the best, you had better go back to the drawing board and determine how you’ll measure that.  Then set your goal with specific numbers that you can measure and see whether you met your goal or not.

And that’s my best advice.

As always, I welcome your comments and criticisms. 

About the author: Lew Sauder is the author of Consulting 101: 101 Tips for Success in Consulting.  He has been a consultant with top-tier and boutique consulting firms for seventeen years.  He is currently a Senior Project Manager at Geneca.  Lew can be reached at Lew@Consulting101Book.com.

As a consultant you’re supposed to be an expert in your field.  Many mistake that expert label as a know-it-all. This error is usually fueled by the fact that many consultants act like they know it all.

The obvious truth is that you can’t know everything about any subject.  But an expert knows an above-average amount.  A subject matter expert (SME) is usually the go-to person that either knows the answer to a question or knows where to go to get the answer.

Even if a consultant is not a SME, a good consultant needs to stay up to date on her industry or subject area of focus.  For instance, a health care consultant needs to be aware of the latest trends in the health care industry.  When a client asks her a question about a new government regulation or the latest trend affecting the industry, it can be embarrassing to be caught completely unaware.

So how does a busy consultant stay up to date on her industry?  Some of the most common ways include:

Blogs: It’s good to keep a list of blogs that you regularly check.  You can either have an RSS feed of blogs that you regularly want to check out or you can subscribe to some to be sent to your inbox whenever an update is posted.

Podcasts: In metropolitan areas like Chicago, where I live, commutes to and from work can be notoriously long.  To make the time more productive, I regularly download industry related podcasts to my smart phone and listen in the car on my way to and from work.  You can listen to a podcast during your workout or any time your mind isn’t otherwise occupied.  Note: I don’t recommend listening to them during conversations with your significant other. Don’t ask how I know this.

Professional organizations: Joining a professional trade organization related to your chosen industry provides a number of benefits.  Most of these groups hold monthly dinner meetings which are great opportunities for networking.  They also usually have guest speakers that provide great content on the latest trends in that industry.

Videos: Video content is all the rage today.  There are entire YouTube channels on various industries.  Performing a Google search on ‘Videos on Project Management’ resulted in 349 millions items for me to peruse.  Searching ‘Videos on Consulting’ resulted in another 157 million items.

There are other video series such as TED Talks, which provide content-filled videos on a myriad of professional topics.  One project I was on held “Ted Talk Tuesdays”, where everyone brought their lunch on Tuesday, gathered in a conference room for lunch and watched a selected Ted Talk.

Lunch and learns: You might be surprised how much information lives right in your own organization.  My company organizes lunch and learn sessions, where the internal staff members take turns giving a presentation on a topic that’s near and dear to them.  Whoever is interested in that topic brown bags it and listens in.  It’s an added bonus when the audience starts sharing their own input for an interactive discussion. Few people walk away from these sessions less enlightened.

Beware of information overload: Subscribing to RRS feeds, newsletters video series and other content related mediums sounds great, but you can quickly get an overwhelming amount of content in your inbox.  Most of us have to spend some time doing some billable work.

I recommend setting aside some set amount of time each week for learning. This could include your lunch hours, a certain amount of time on certain evenings, or in my case, my Sunday morning quiet time before anyone else in the house is up.

There’s only so much time in your day.  It’s good to budget time for learning, but you must be sure to prioritize it appropriately with everything else that needs to be done. 

As always, I welcome your comments and criticisms. 

About the author: Lew Sauder is the author of Consulting 101: 101 Tips for Success in Consulting.  He has been a consultant with top-tier and boutique consulting firms for seventeen years.  He is currently a Senior Project Manager at Geneca.  Lew can be reached at Lew@Consulting101Book.com.

It starts at an early age.  Teachers and parents tell us that to be successful and smart we have to get good grades.  Their intentions are good.  They assume that if you get a good grade in a class, that you studied hard and learned the material. But some students figure out that you don’t have to study.  You can copy from your neighbor, steal the test scores or find some other creative way to get the grade if that’s all you want.

Some kids are given an allowance if they keep their room clean.  If the parent doesn’t check the closet, under the bed or the hamper full of clean clothes, the allowance is easily earned.

Throughout life, we’re given incentives that are intended to encourage a certain behavior.  Make your numbers and get rewarded.

I’ve worked for consulting firms that had incentives for client-serving consultants at all levels based on a combination of sales and utilization.  The lower on the rung you stood, the more weighted it was toward utilization – billable hours to the client.  As you moved up the ladder in your consulting career, sales nudged utilization hours in importance.

The intent was that early in his consulting career, a good consultant would provide service so superior, that he will be in demand, thus increasing his utilization.  The longer he’s in the business, the more networking he will do and soon, he will be influencing sales.

And as he embeds himself more in the sales function, he’ll begin moving up the ladder and less time will be required for billable hours – as long as he’s selling.

I wonder how many consultants with those incentives pad their time sheets to increase their utilization. As sales becomes the larger focus, the incentive is to warm up to the executives within their firm who dole out the credit for sales when a project is won.  Consultant Bill is a good friend of mine and we want to keep him on board, so he’ll get 10% credit for that sale, even if he didn’t play that big of a role. 

In some consulting firms, there are sales people that do no delivery.  They are 100% dedicated to sales – ‘business development’ as it is affectionately known as.

Most of these business development professionals are given incentives to increase revenue.  If you sell something, you get credit.  If you spent thirty hours last week developing relationships but didn’t sell anything, nothing got accomplished.

These types of incentives encourage anyone trying to sell services to just go out and sell.  It doesn’t matter whether we know how to do it.  Just sell it and we’ll get some training or Google it.  Maybe we’ll hire an expert on it to help us out until we come up to speed.  Hell, if we do well on this, maybe it’s an opportunity to create a new practice within the firm.

This is a thorny route to becoming a trusted advisor to your clients.  The firm is essentially using the client and billing them for the time it takes them to come up to speed.  The firm will then use that knowledge to bill other clients.

The commonly held belief is that performance evaluations should be based on as much objective criteria as possible, minimizing subjective appraisals. Because of this, we tend to focus on the numbers of sales revenues, billable hours, and anything else we can count.

What if we skewed it the other way?  What if we said, you will be evaluated on how well you communicate?  A project will not be measured based on whether it was completed on time and under budget, but by how well it addressed the business needs.

Business development reps will not be measured on how much revenue they generate.  Instead, they will be measured on the quality of the relationships they develop.  And when they do sell a project that generates revenue, the evaluation will be based on how well it falls into our core capabilities.  If you sell what we do best, you get credit.  If you sell services that we don’t have experience in, you may eventually get the boot, regardless of the revenue involved.

You may say that that’s a system waiting to be gamed.  Can it be gamed any more than the numbers game?

The way to avoid employees from gaming any incentive system is to focus on hiring employees who will do the right thing in the first place.  Hiring individuals that are focused on the strategy of the company – doing the right thing and delighting customers – will eliminate gamers. 

Then you won’t have to worry about the measurements. Simply verify with that employee’s direct reports, peers, superiors and clients.  Did he do the right things? Great.

As always, I welcome your comments and criticisms. 

About the author: Lew Sauder is the author of Consulting 101: 101 Tips for Success in Consulting.  He has been a consultant with top-tier and boutique consulting firms for seventeen years.  He is currently a Senior Project Manager at Geneca.  Lew can be reached at Lew@Consulting101Book.com.

A colleague of mine recently went to the doctor a while back.  He was having some severe pain in his knees.  The doctor quietly analyzed the problem and then sat down with him and started talking to him about his diet. 

He asked how many alcoholic drinks he had per day, what types of food he generally ate and asked if he knew how many calories he consumed each day on average.

My friend answered his questions gradually becoming confused. 

“Why are you talking about my diet when the problem is my knees?” he asked.

The doctor explained that the knees are the most vulnerable joints in the body.  We don’t make it any easier on them when we become overweight and tax them more than they were designed to be.

My colleague wanted the doctor to prescribe a pain reliever or physical therapy or maybe some miracle treatment that would remove the pain in his knees.

Instead the doctor focused on what had caused the pain and prescribed something that would be much harder and take much longer to fix.  It wasn’t the answer my colleague was looking for.

As consultants, we advise clients who often think they know what they need.  Perhaps a client hires project management consultants to implement a new order entry software application that allows them to process orders faster. 

That consulting firm could just follow orders.  They could present the client with a proposal for the software implementation.  If they win the proposal, they could do everything the client thinks needs to be done. 

But what if that’s not the right solution?  What if the real issue had to do with their distribution process?  The consulting firm could implement the software system without the client seeing a significant increase in order processing speed. 

You can’t blame the consulting firm.  They did everything the client asked for. Or can you?

Should the consulting firm have refused to do what the client asked them to do? Maybe refused is too strong of a word.  But if the consultant wants to develop a long-term relationship with the client, they need to make sure they understand the issue, its root cause, and advise the client of the best way to treat the issue.

It may not be what the client wants to hear.  And it may not be as easy as the client thought – and hoped – it would be.  But treating the symptom will often not cure the ailment.

As always, I welcome your comments and criticisms. 

About the author: Lew Sauder is the author of Consulting101: 101 Tips for Success in Consulting ().  He has been a consultant with top-tier and boutique consulting firms for seventeen years.  He is currently a Senior Project Manager at Geneca.  Lew can be reached at Lew@Consulting101Book.com.

Last November when the latest James Bond motion picture, Skyfall was released, I found myself in a conversation with my co-workers about the new movie.  The conversation evolved to comparisons of the new movie to previous Bond flicks.  It occurred to me that, although I love movies and watch a lot of them, I had never seen a single James Bond movie.  It wasn’t on purpose.  I just never got around to seeing any of them.

So I started a quest to watch every James Bond movie in order.  Starting with 1962’s Dr. No starring Sean Connery I viewed all twenty-four 007 flicks ending with 2012’s Skyfall starring Daniel Craig this past weekend.

As I enjoyed these movies, it occurred to me that there are many project management lessons we can learn from 007:

1.     Lack of Appendages.  Being the man-whore that James Bond is, particularly in the promiscuous 60s and 70s when he was played by Sean Connery and Roger Moore, he had no need and no time for a wife and family.  This fits in perfectly with the demands of a project manager who puts in long hours that extend well into the evenings and weekends.

2.     Training. In a scene in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974 – Roger Moore), Bond is in a hotel room when the beautiful Bond girl Mary Goodnight appears out of his hotel room closet.  (A dime for every time that has happened to me.) Bond immediately pulls a gun on her and, as he realizes her identity, explains “I was trained to expect the unexpected”.
Project managers have to be prepared for unexpected changes as well.  It’s probably best not to be armed and ready, but then again, project managers don’t have a license to kill.

3.     Tools. Every project manager needs to have the proper tools to plan, manage and close a project appropriately.  Although we can’t shoot oil slicks from behind a flip-out license plate, fly in a jetpack or shoot people with a trick cigarette dart, we’re not allowed to drive, fly or smoke in the workplace anyway. 
Lacking an advanced lab technician like Q, we need to come up with our own toolkit to defend ourselves against the evil scope creeps who plot to rule the world by sabotaging our projects and infiltrating our business users with diabolical schemes that add unplanned functionality.  I’d love to see the change control strategy that Q would come up with to combat these project perpetrators.

4.     Don’t get too personal.  In Licence to Kill (1989 – Timothy Dalton), Bond’s friend Felix is fed to sharks by drug lord Franz Sanchez, resulting in Felix losing a leg.  Bond is denied permission to pursue Sanchez and resigns from the British Secret Service.  He follows this personal vendetta and eventually catches his man.  In the process, he interrupts two investigations being run by other organizations working undercover.
In the movie, his end justified the means.  All the bad guys were either caught or killed in interesting ways and everything worked out well. 
We all know that it just doesn’t work that way in real life.  A leader has to be as much of a team player as anyone else on the team. Allowing your personal views and biases to cloud your judgment results in bad decisions that can negatively affect the entire project.

5.     You get more accomplished working together.  In Tomorrow Never Dies (1997 – Pierce Brosnan), Bond finds himself working on the same case as Chinese spy Wai Lin (played by Michelle Yeoh).  After being handcuffed together by evil media mogul Elliot Carver, they escape.  While showering together (how appropriate for Bond), she picks the lock to separate them and tells him that she prefers to work alone. 
He persistently follows her.  They end up working together and (spoiler alert) board Carver’s ship to fight his nasty team, killing them all in the end. As good as Bond is, he knew they needed each other to get the job done right.
A project manager needs to be able to work with every team member and help them all work together to reach their goals as a team.

6.     Pass it on. Albert (Cubbie) Broccoli produced the first Bond film, Dr. No in 1962 going on to produce the next fifteen.  He produced his last Bond movie, Licence to Kill in 1989.  He began involving his daughter Barbara Broccoli in the production of Bond movies when she was seventeen, working in the publicity department for The Spy Who Loved Me (1977 – Roger Moore).  She worked her way up to associate producer and, ultimately producer beginning with Goldeneye (1995 – Pierce Brosnan).
Albert Broccoli knew he wouldn’t live forever, but that was no reason the Bond legacy couldn’t.  (After all, Ian Fleming, the original author of the Bond book series died in 1964 after only seeing two of his books made into movies.)  Broccoli began training others to succeed him to ensure a smooth transition and succession plan.
Project managers should keep their eyes open for willing mentors to prepare them for future careers in project management.

7.     Prioritization skills. In The World Is Not Enough (1999 – Pierce Brosnan), Bond impersonates bad guy Davidov and ends up meeting fellow bad guy Renard in an underground silo.  Soon after Bond finds their nuclear bomb, the lovely nuclear physicist Christmas Jones, played by Denise Richards, blows his cover.  All the bad guys start shooting.  Before Bond runs for cover, he grabs Jones and saves her too.  The bad guys get away, killing everyone in the silo except Bond and Jones.  Saving Jones turns out to be quite beneficial to Bond by the movie’s end.
Project managers need to ensure their decisions are based on well-established priorities based on what is best for the project.  Well prioritized decisions early on will result in beneficial outcomes at the end of the project.

8.     Make yourself useful.  In Die Another Day (2002 – Pierce Brosnan), M approaches Bond after his release from fourteen months of North Korean captivity.  Because they believe he may have leaked confidential information while he was tortured, she tells him that he’s no longer useful to MI6.  Bond escapes from the secured hospital room, hunts down the bad guys and obtains valuable information on them. M ends up mending fences with 007 and assigns him to work undercover in Iceland.  Even when his superior thought he was no longer valuable, he knew he was.  He maintained his self-confidence and proved it to them. 
The role of the project manager is a valuable one.  It’s up to you to make sure you are providing value in that role on a daily basis.

9.     Trust but verify. In Casino Royale (2006 – Daniel Craig) and Quantum of Solace (2008 – Daniel Craig) – the only two serialized Bond movies to date – trust becomes an issue for Bond.  In Casino Royale, he befriends René Mathis, a local MI6 contact, who ends up being a double agent with villain Le Chiffre.  Bond falls in love with Vesper Lynd, who also betrays him in the end because she was being blackmailed.
In Quantum of Solace, M has Bond arrested because she does not trust him to follow orders.  He escapes, only to sneak back to speak to M in order to vouch for a murdered agent’s bravery.  In the end, her trust in Bond returns.  Additionally, in Quantum, Bond reconciles with Mathis (from Casino Royale) and they once again trust each other.
To be a successful project manager, a great deal of trust must be granted to the project team.  That doesn’t mean that the project manager should not verify critical status updates provided by the team.  Mistakes get made and are sometimes covered up.  The project manager is responsible and needs to substantiate things from time to time.

10.            You may have to step outside your job description to get the job done. When Quantum of Solace (2008 – Daniel Craig) was being shot, the writer’s strike was in full force.  Daniel Craig and director Marc Forster actually wrote parts of the script, although they received no screenwriting credit in the film.
The project manager’s job is to remove obstacles to allow the team to get their jobs done and enable successful completion of the project.  A good project manager doesn’t confine herself to rigid job descriptions and does whatever it takes to make the project successful.

11.            Skill trumps tools. In Skyfall (2012 – Daniel Craig) Bond takes M to his childhood home.  He is attacked by Raoul Silva’s henchmen in two separate waves.  Although the two attacking armies heavily outweigh Bond in weaponry and ammunition – including incendiary grenades and a machine gun mounted on a helicopter, Bond, M and the Skyfall groundskeeper create traps and figure out a way to outsmart Silva and his men with skill and capabilities.
Project managers often have a tendency to get caught up using their project management tools and processes, forgetting to stop and think about how to handle each situation.  Although tools are important, knowledge, intelligence and skill will always outperform the most advanced tools and techniques.  Don’t forget to think.

12.            Hang on for the ride.  In the climax scene of A View to a Kill (1985 – Roger Moore), James Bond grabs on to the hanging tether of Max Zorin’s dirigible in which he had just kidnapped the lovely Stacy Sutton (played by the equally lovely Tanya Roberts).  Max tries to force Bond’s fall in many ways, but 007 hangs on tight.  After Zorin tries to run him into the Golden Gate Bridge, Bond ties the tether to the bridge and is able to rescue the girl.
You may not get the girl at the end of the project, but you do get rewarded for sticking with it to the end.

As always, I welcome your comments and criticisms. 

About the author: Lew Sauder is the author of Consulting 101: 101 Tips for Success in Consulting.  He has been a consultant with top-tier and boutique consulting firms for seventeen years.  He is currently a Senior Project Manager at Geneca.  Lew can be reached at Lew@Consulting101Book.com.

Published job descriptions are full of ambiguous skill demands.  Demonstrated leadership skills…Flexible, powerful intellect…Creative and curious…Great team player.

Those traits are hard to prove; and hard to disprove unless you were a total slug in college.

But one of the things most companies are looking for is someone with strong communication skills.  That should be the easiest to prove of all of them shouldn’t it?

I mean, communication is about talking.  I talk all the time.  I’ll just talk in the interview and they’ll know that I’m not shy.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.  So what is it that firms are looking for when they want someone with strong communication skills? It covers many areas.

One-on-One Communication

When you talk to me, do you make eye contact?  If not, I’m going to wonder if you lack self-confidence.  Or maybe you’re just not telling me the truth.  It’s possible that you could look me in the eye and lie but it’s less likely. 

How do you choose your words?  Do you take a moment to prepare a concise statement?  Or do you just start regurgitating every fact you know regardless of its relevance.  When you tell a story, do you have a point?  Or does it meander along directionless like a Sunday drive in the country?

Is every third word “like” or “you know” or “um”? Do you start your sentences with “dude”?  You may not be applying for a job in the British House of Lords, but there are still some formalities to observe.  If you talk to someone who decides your professional fate like she’s your rugby teammate, how should she assume you’ll talk to a paying client?

Do you dominate the conversation, or do you let the other person speak? Trying too hard to show what a great communicator you are may just prove the opposite.

The interviewer will pay equal attention to your tone.  Are you positive and enthusiastic or just a little too casual and negative?  She honestly doesn’t care how cool you are.  If you focus more on the things you don’t like, don’t have patience for and are annoyed by, the interviewer will very likely develop the same feelings about you.

Group Communication

Are you comfortable talking to a group of people?  Or do you get nervous and shaky, forgetting what you said?  A consulting interview may include a panel of people asking you questions.  This is not an effort to intimidate you.  Instead, they want to see if you’re comfortable in a situation you may frequently face at a client site. 

The interview may include having you go to the white board to draw out a process or some other impromptu presentation to test whether you have the confidence to speak up in a meeting or to facilitate it.

In addition to confidence, they’ll want to see if you can take charge, challenge them with good questions and facilitate the group to a resolution.  Or do you simply follow their lead and write whatever they tell you regardless of whether it makes sense or not.

Written Communication

As a new consultant, your opportunities to speak in or facilitate a lot of important meetings may be limited.  Most of the communicating you will likely be doing will be in written form.  You may be expected to document business requirements or current and future state processes.  There may not be a formal writing test, but the firm will want to know if you can write a complete sentence.

They will review every form of writing you submit to them.  Did your resume have a typo? No matter how good you look otherwise, a typo on your resume is a likely death sentence to an offer.

When you sent the interviewer an email thanking him for his time (you did send one right?), did you proofread it for typos, grammatical errors and just to make sure it made sense?  Did you take the time to customize it to include relevant topics you discussed in your conversation or did you use the same form you used for every interviewer?

Did you try to be cute by throwing in an LOL?  If so, they may wonder WTF.

The Bottom Line

The main objective of the whole “strong communication skills” test is: are you interesting?  In any company that you interview with, the question running through the interviewer’s mind is ‘Would I want to work with this person?’  In consulting, the additional question they ask is ‘Could I put this person at a client site and have confidence that they will be able to interact with the client?’

The common denominator from a communication perspective is whether you’re interesting.  I want to know if you can talk enough about yourself to make me interested in you, while including others enough to make them want to share with you. If you speak and write clearly so that it’s not an effort to decipher your message, but a pleasure to interact with you, my answer may be ‘yes’.

As long as you can show me your ‘flexible, powerful intellect’.

As always, I welcome your comments and criticisms. 

About the author: Lew Sauder is the author of Consulting 101: 101 Tips for Success in Consulting.  He has been a consultant with top-tier and boutique consulting firms for seventeen years.  He is currently a Senior Project Manager at Geneca.  Lew can be reached at Lew@Consulting101Book.com.

Managing teams in any environment is a challenging undertaking.  You’re trying to accomplish some goal as a team. But each member of the team has their own individual goals that may conflict or at least may not be in line with the team goal.

An approach that can help is to have a regular one-on-one meeting with each team member.  These meetings are not meant to be long discussions.  If they regularly exceed fifteen minutes, you may be doing it wrong and wasting valuable time for both parties.

It’s best to have a regular schedule on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.  The purpose is to get feedback from each team member and to provide feedback to them if there are areas where you feel they need to refocus to accomplish the team’s goals.

It’s important to keep their goals in mind as well.  Focusing on their short-term and long-term goals lets them know that you want them to succeed just as much as you want the team and the project to succeed.  It’s hard to expect them to dedicate any time to the team’s goals if you have no regard for their consulting career. 

Even if their goals diverge from those you have for the team, you may find a way to achieve a win-win situation.

Short-term Success

When focusing on a team member’s goal for short term growth, you want to find the common ground between their goals and those of the project they’re serving.  Questions like: How do you define your personal success on this project?

Their answer may surprise you.  You may find that they want to work on newer technologies and have goals you never would have considered.  This may allow you to reassign them to something that interests them more and adds more value to the project.

Moreover, the team member may be surprised.  Often, an employee is assigned to a project only to put in their time.  They don’t think about how they can learn and grow from the assignment.  They face it day-by-day and just try to get through it.

Asking them how the project can affect their personal success may prompt them to think about their short-term goals and focus on personal achievements.

Once you’ve asked them and prompted them to think about it, the next level is ‘How is it going so far?’ This makes them perform an assessment of their progress and provide feedback to you.  If they feel they’re not accomplishing what they had hoped, you can help them with suggestions.  If need be, you can ask them to be more patient through this phase of the project.

Long -term Success

Similarly, it’s good to ask questions like ‘How does this project fit in with your consulting career goals?’  This allows – or forces – them to think on a longer term basis.  It’s good to achieve some short-term goals by the end of a project, but how can this project as a whole help them move to the next milestone in their career.  Again, you might both be surprised by the answer once you compel them to think about it.

Once again, the follow up to this in subsequent meetings is ‘How is that going?’  Having a regularly scheduled checkpoint allows them to assess their personal short-term and long-term progress and provide feedback to their manager regarding their status.

It goes both ways

The one-on-one is also an excellent vehicle to find out how you’re doing.  Forcing your team members to think about their growth, performing a self-assessment and providing them with advice for the project and their careers is a great start to the one-on-one.

Asking them for feedback on how you can better serve the project and the team may give you input on how to better achieve your personal goals for the project as well as your long-term goals for your consulting career.

Feedback loops like this are a great investment in time which facilitates better performance for a project as well as for all the individual team members involved.

As always, I welcome your comments and criticisms. 

About the author: Lew Sauder is the author of Consulting 101: 101 Tips for Success in Consulting.  He has been a consultant with top-tier and boutique consulting firms for seventeen years.  He is currently a Senior Project Manager at Geneca.  Lew can be reached at Lew@Consulting101Book.com.

I once worked with a woman who had a habit of saying ‘I don’t disagree’.  This was invariable a response to a point her manager made.

I thought this was a very safe approach to commenting on one’s boss’s comments.  You don’t have to agree while you don’t disagree.  You get to remain the business equivalent of Switzerland while still speaking up.

Depending on the environmental politics you work around, safe may be the best approach.  But if you don’t disagree, does that mean that you agree?  Or does it mean that you’re speaking up without having the gumption to take a stand?

For example, let’s say you’re in a meeting and your boss suggests outsourcing the entire IT department.  Perhaps you’ve read a few articles on outsourcing but don’t consider yourself an expert by any means. 

You could reply to your boss with the old “I don’t disagree”.  And that may be true.  You probably don’t know enough about it and the ramifications to either agree or disagree.  But aren’t you actually just saying “I don’t know”?

Some people, particularly those working in political cultures fear admitting that they don’t know something.  Admitting that you don’t know may make you sound uninformed and stupid.  Who wants to open themselves to the ridicule of being the only one in the room who doesn’t know – or at least admits to it?

But saying “I don’t disagree”, well that’s almost like saying you agree.  It seems a hell of a lot more informed than admitting that you don’t know.  Or does it?

I don’t make a habit of embarrassing people in public meetings, but I’ve always wanted to ask them, does that mean you agree if you don’t disagree?  Or are you just spinelessly trying to make a statement by not saying anything?

Consultants don’t have that luxury.  A good consultant must give an opinion when he or she has one.  And a good consultant should not be afraid to say ‘I don’t know’ when that’s the case without hurting his consulting career. 

Not knowing everything is acceptable.  Making a statement that says nothing is not.

As always, I welcome your comments and criticisms. 

About the author: Lew Sauder is the author of Consulting 101: 101 Tips for Success in Consulting.  He has been a consultant with top-tier and boutique consulting firms for seventeen years.  He is currently a Senior Project Manager at Geneca.  Lew can be reached at Lew@Consulting101Book.com.

The growing trend in the employment world is toward consulting.  This is driven by a number of factors.  The two most notable trends are first, as hiring organizations see slow tepid growth, they have begun to see a need for additional staff, but are hesitant to hire full-time employees.  The pain and cost of massive layoffs a few years ago still has a bad taste in the mouths of hiring managers.  They’re once bitten and twice shy about making that commitment to more full-time employees.  They would rather work with temporary consultants where they can bring them on board with specific skills for a project.  Then, when the project is done, they can bring in another set of consultants with another set of skills for the next project.

The second reason consulting is as popular as it is today is due to the unemployment rate.  As of this writing it stands at 7.7%.  There are many individuals out there that have been out of work for months and years.

A gaping valley of unemployment on one’s resume never looks good.  One way people get around that is to state that they were an “Independent Consultant”.  They may not have had any clients, but they did have business cards.

But let’s assume that when they went independent they had a few gigs with paying clients.  Does that make them a consultant or simply a vendor, a contractor that performs tasks for a client?

A consultant answers questions for a client and helps them resolve the issues that those questions bring up.  A contractor fills in gaps by performing tasks under the client’s direction.

A consultant strives to become a trusted advisor to the client, someone the client consistently goes to when they need help with difficult decisions.  A contractor must sell his services to the client after every contract has been finished.

A consultant differentiates himself with the client.  The client looks to the consultant as a premium brand, worthy of paying a premium rate.  A contractor is a commodity and competes with similar contractors based on price.

Consultants often start out as contractors.  It’s a chance for them to get a foot in the door and establish a reputation for quality and trustworthiness.  Gradually, they begin developing a relationship with the decision makers at the client.  They talk to the client as an equal, pushing back on decisions and making the client think about whether they are making the right decisions.

Most importantly, a consultant doesn’t make recommendations based on how it will affect their own billable hours.  A consultant’s advice has the client’s best interests in mind at all times.  It may not result in additional business in the short run.  But if a consultant gets to the point where the client trusts their advice and relies on the consultant, billable hours won’t be a problem in the long run.

As always, I welcome your comments and criticisms. 

About the author: Lew Sauder is the author of Consulting 101: 101 Tips for Success in Consulting.  He has been a consultant with top-tier and boutique consulting firms for seventeen years.  He is currently a Senior Project Manager at Geneca.  Lew can be reached at Lew@Consulting101Book.com.

I grew up in a small town of about 2,000 people.  My high school graduating class size was 63.  It was a small, tight-knit community and still is.  I don’t live there anymore, but enjoy my visits back.

There was a woman who worked in the high school office for over 40 years.  I knew her well and waited on her often at the restaurant that I worked at in that small town when I was in high school.  I knew her kids growing up.  She was a nice sweet woman.

She recently pleaded guilty to embezzling over a million dollars from the high school over the period of about a decade.  Along with my former community members, I’m shocked.  No one ever suspected her of such a thing.  Now, instead of enjoying her retirement years, she may serve the rest of her life in prison.

For years, like many people, I looked up to Joe Paterno.  Paterno was the head football coach for Penn State University for nearly 62 seasons.  He seemed to stand for honesty and integrity; aspects that were missing from many college sports programs.

In late 2011 it was revealed that he had been involved in concealing facts related to a sexual predator on his staff.  He in essence, allowed young boys to be sexually molested to protect the reputation of his football program.  Ironically, his actions did more to destroy that program than to protect it.

Lance Armstrong recently did a two-part interview with Oprah Winfrey (if you haven’t heard about this interview, please send me the location of the rock you’ve been living under).  In this interview, he admitted that he had used performance enhancement drugs (PEDs) while winning seven Tour de France titles; all while he vehemently denied using them and sued, bullied and chastised anyone that accused him of using them.

The common thread in all of these is trust.  Many people unquestioningly trusted these individuals and were let down when the truth finally came out.

As consultants, we strive to be a client’s trusted advisor.  We’re constantly trying to prove ourselves as trustworthy to the client and many times we find that whatever we do, it’s not enough. 

Much of that can be attributed to the fact that it seems harder to trust people.  After being betrayed by people we never dreamed would betray us, why would anyone choose a consultant to trust?

It just makes our job that much harder.  But gradually, by proving ourselves over and over, and showing that we’re there for the client and not just for us, we can get to the point where we are trusted advisors.

It doesn’t stop there.  Once we find ourselves in the client’s inner circle, we have to continually maintain that trust.  I remember once, some years ago when a politician was wrapped up in a sex scandal.  A mentor of mine said, “You can spend your whole life building a reputation.  But one mistake like that can throw it all away.”

It takes a lot of work to get into the client’s inner circle.  And further work to continue to earn the client’s trust.  But once you’re in, it’s the beginning of a great relationship.  Just don’t screw it up.

As always, I welcome your comments and criticisms.