Ethics In Consulting Your Competency And How To Get Value From Client.?
Consulting firms guided their clients and help to
develop strategies that lead to business success. Ethical behavior is an
imperative part of success. It is therefore necessary for consulting firm to
have an ethical strategy. Ethical behavior must be encouraged in the consulting
organization, so that it can be passed on to the other.
Consultants is the great opportunity to be leaders
in encouraging an ethical business practices. This opportunity can help towards
success to their clients while at the same time benefiting society as well.
Consulting involves many things. But if we need to
prioritize and put a structure to it, I would think consulting could boil today
few things that logically center on the client.
a) Understand consulting client's situation,
challenges and issues
b) Identify consulting opportunities
c) Propose a recommendation to solve the problem
I would think in a larger context consulting
revolves around these 3 broad areas. Needless to say each of these areas of
consulting firm would constitute smaller areas of activities with measurable
results. The combination of these activities becomes a consulting assignment
requiring project management efforts.
As all are well known it is practically impossible
to consolidate the expected competencies of a consultant for each of these
areas in a single article. Hence, the competency under each of this broad area
of work would potentially flow as multiple articles. Here in this article, we are
going to focus on the competency required from a consultant by which can be
able to understand client situation, issues and challenges.
Let’s start some of the sub activities under each
of these areas.
Understanding client's challenges and issues
It depending on the type of consulting firm you are
in and there could be different variants to this phase. For example - If you
are:
A financial consultant, you may be making
observations on the client's financial planning and analysis process or their
working capital management process or their bench marking competency amongst
others.
A strategy consultant, you may be making
observations on the client's strategic plan, the strategy implementation
process, effectiveness and evaluation of the strategy, marketing strategy for
new products etc.
An operational consultant, you may be making
observations on process involved in product development or in raw-material planning,
overall operational effectiveness, methodology and production planning etc
In a management consulting, executives and
consultants both are primarily responsible for adding as well as creating value
and safeguarding the interests each of their clients. Therefore they should
also protect society by pursuing their goals in an ethical manner. They always focus
on their clients' businesses towards making sound profit and continuous growth,
but it is also their responsibility to align the interests of their clients
with the general benefits.
In essence, irrespective of area of expertise you
are, as a consultant, you would be working with the client and making useful
observations on their current processes, challenges and issues. It is important
to note that organizations prefer people with industry experience for
consulting roles for a simple reason.
Would it adequate if it make an observation as a consultant?
It would adequate if you do not wish to win the
consulting deal. But if you really do wish to get engaged yourself in a
consulting assignment, mere observations would not help. Monitoring could
potentially be considered as a viable tool having interest to the client in
your expertise. It includes understanding the environment in which area the
client operates, the industry challenges, understanding critical issues of the
client, understanding how these issues impact the ability of the client to satisfy
to the customer, understanding the impact of these issues on the overall
strategic objective and plan of the organization and so on.
A simple and very effective tool to better
understand client issues is "Diagnosis".
In general we would have often heard this keyword in a hospital or a medical
facility but the term is applicable across the industries though the process.
Diagnosis in a management consulting set up involves multi phase process of
performing GAP analysis ( it may be functional
or system), identifying issues of the client, prioritizing issues of the client
on importance and it’s impact, arriving at a hypothesis (in some cases, the
facts stare right at us on our face not warranting the need for hypothesis),
performing analysis and arriving at prospective conclusions (based on the
hypothesis or facts).
Now we need to identify issues. We need to
communicate this to the client without which you may not get paid.
So what attributes should a consultant have to follow
through the first phase?
a) Problem Solving abilities:-
While you may be expertise at
identifying issues, the client needs to get the confidence that you can solve their
business problem. This does not mean you jump the gun and propose a solution
ahead of time. It merely includes developing problem solving mind-set to
deliver consulting capabilities.
b) Active listening and innovative skills:-
You would note that being a
great listener is imperative to being a god consultant. Listening and
researching are keys factors to ensuring you on top of your game and
understanding exactly what the client needs.
c) Ability, Judgement and take ownership:-
While you are working on
understanding your client's problems you would be put in a position to make
assumptions and form hypothesis. Based on these, you would need to come up with
conclusions. If you afraid with wrong or lack the ability to make considerable quick
judgement, it is possible that the consulting deal would slip through your
butter fingers. So it is important to develop the ability to make sensible decisions.
It is always wise to ask for more information prior to making a decision.
Ethics always drive action and decision-making, and
also define how organizational sector are perceived by their employees, their
customers, and the public. A successful and sustainable business must have a strategic
culture that promotes good behavior and ethical practices.
We have seen in several real life examples, there
are numbers of cases of businesses losing clients as well as money, and peoples
losing their jobs and facing criminal consequences, because of unethical
behavior. Acting as unethically status does not lead to success in the long time.
Businesses that succeed in long term are those who act with honesty, integrity
and in a solid manner.
So keep in mind the fact and work to develop the attributes which could be successful in consulting.
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