With strong customer participation throughout the process, there will be plenty of opportunities to help members identify learning needs. Often, a consultant can suggest or help design opportunities to learn about work planning methods, work group assignments, goal-setting processes, etc. While the effective professional is concerned with executive learning throughout the hiring process, it would be wise not to cite it as an explicit objective. Managers may not like the idea of being “taught to manage.” Talking too much about customer learning seems presumptuous and it is.
A look at what companies are looking for consultants to do and what are the 10 most in demand consulting services today. Consultants facilitate learning by including members of the organization in task processes. For example, if consultants believe that the parts of an organization need to communicate better, they can constantly request the opinion of other people about what is being discussed or suggest working groups for projects composed of people from different levels or departments. While a consultant's fees are generally higher than an employee's salary, in the long run it makes economic sense to hire a consultant.
In addition to seeing problems from a different perspective from that of internal staff, a good consultant provides a new and objective point of view, and then obtains the results without worrying about what the organization's workers might think about the results and how they were achieved. Therefore, while a consultant's fees are generally higher than an employee's salary, in the long run, a consultant tends to be a less expensive option. An advantage for the company is that the consultant can do things without worrying about corporate culture, employee morale, or other issues that get in the way when an organization tries to introduce change. As managers understand the wider range of purposes that excellent consulting can help achieve, they will select consultants more intelligently and expect more value from them.
As you can see, consultants really support companies in a lot of ways, and as a consultant, you can delve into a lot of difficult situations. In this edited extract, the authors analyze what skills companies are looking for when hiring a consultant and what consulting jobs are trending in today's market. The increase in consensus, commitment, learning and future effectiveness are not intended as a substitute for the most common purposes of management consulting, but as desirable results of any truly effective consulting process. By hiring a consulting firm, you have access to a group of professionals with skills ranging from Lean Six Sigma process design to financial organizational structures.
It is also due to my experience supervising beginning consultants and to the many conversations and partnerships I have had with consultants and clients in the United States and abroad. On the other hand, a consultant who too quickly rejects this way of describing the problem will end a potentially useful consulting process before it begins. In addition to increasing engagement through customer participation during each phase, the consultant can arouse enthusiasm with the help of an organizational ally (not necessarily the person most responsible for hiring). Like other consulting roles, financial consultants provide advice to individuals and businesses to help them meet a variety of financial objectives.
