• One of them asked how to say no to a client without damaging the relationship.

• Another wanted to know how to be honest when he could see the client was approaching a problem the wrong way.

• A third had a situation where something had gone wrong, it genuinely was not his fault, and the client was looking to him for an answer.

• A fourth could see a client heading confidently down the wrong path, but did not yet feel he had earned the right to say so.

Four challenges, but one fear underneath all of them: that the honest move, the one their judgment is telling them to make, will cost them the client’s trust.

This is a common worry for consultants. And it is almost exactly backwards.

Why the difficult moments matter most

It helps to be precise about what trust actually is. The trust equation, from The Trusted Advisor, is our go-to framework: your trustworthiness is a function of your credibility, your reliability, and your intimacy with the client, all divided by your self-orientation. The more you are seen to be in it for yourself, the lower the whole thing falls.

Now look again at those four dreaded conversations. Saying no, pushing back, admitting a mistake, flagging an uncomfortable truth: these are precisely the moments where intimacy can rise and self-orientation can fall. When you tell a client something they may not want to hear, and you do it for their benefit rather than your own comfort, you are demonstrating low self-orientation in the most visible way available to you. Handled well, the conversation you were afraid of is the one that moves the relationship forward.

Handled badly, of course, it does the opposite. So the question is not whether to have these conversations. It is how.

Here’s some ways you can approach it…

1. Speak from your own understanding

The single most useful tool is the ‘I statement’. Talk about what is true for you: your reading of the situation, your understanding, your concern. Rather than telling the client they are wrong, you say what you see.

“It seems to me that we are heading down the wrong path here, and the reason I think that is...”

“As I understand it, we agreed to...”

“I am a bit worried that we are missing something important.”

It sounds almost too simple, but it changes the temperature of the conversation completely. The moment you are offering your own view rather than passing judgment on theirs, it becomes much harder for anyone to take offence. You are also showing a little vulnerability, and vulnerability is one of the fastest routes to the intimacy the trust equation rewards.

A close cousin of this tool is ‘separating data, judgments and feelings’. When something has gone wrong and the temptation is to point a finger, anchor the conversation on the data: what actually happened. Someone sent an email, someone clicked a button, a release went out early. The data is neutral.

“This person did a poor job” is a judgment, and judgments are where conversations turn into arguments. Stay on what happened, and you aren’t attacking anyone. You are just describing the situation you are all standing in.

2. Signpost the hard part

There is a phrase I picked up years ago from a Bain partner I worked with - an Australian who had a knack for saying difficult things without causing offence. Before any message he thought might sting, he would simply say,

“Allow me to be provocative.”

Then he would say the hard thing.

That tiny preface does a lot of work. It warns people that a challenge is coming, so it does not blindside them. And, like an I statement, it adds a note of vulnerability: I know I am taking a risk here. My own preferred version is,

“I am going to take a risk and say what I think bluntly.”

The risk you are naming is a social one, and naming it openly signals that you care more about being useful than about being comfortable. That, again, is low self-orientation in action.

The aim throughout is to keep everyone feeling that you are on the same side, pulling in the same direction, rather than that you are avoiding responsibility or assigning blame.

3. How to say no, using ARTA

Consultants tend to find saying “no” very hard, partly because most of us don’t like disappointing people, and many of us are uncomfortable asking for money in return for our work.

It helps to reframe the request before you even respond to it.

A project with no change requests usually means one of two things: either you scoped it perfectly at the outset, anticipating every unknown, or, far more likely, you are following a plan that is no longer the best one and missing value sitting right next to the original brief. Change is not a threat to be managed down. It is often an opportunity worth exploring.

The foundation that makes the conversation easy is a clear agreement at the outset: scope and outputs agreed at the start, an explicit note of what is out of scope, and an outline of how changes get agreed. With that in place, I use a simple four-step process, ARTA:

• Acknowledge the request and its value. “That is a great thought, and I can see why it matters.”

• Remind the client of the original scope. “It sits outside what we agreed, so let’s look at the options.”

• Trade-off. This is where the time, cost and quality triangle earns its keep. Any project is a balance of those three, and the old rule holds: you can have any two. So the options are always a version of the same three: reprioritise something else, add resource and cost, or accept a longer timeline. “We can absolutely do this, but there will be a knock-on effect.”

• Agree, explicitly, what you will do and what you will not. “Here is what we’ll do.”

Notice that at no point do you actually say “no”. You acknowledge the value, you are honest about the constraints, and you hand the client a genuine choice. Often they decide the new request matters enough to fund it properly, and a piece of scope creep becomes a project expansion: a good outcome for everyone, provided you charge for it appropriately.

4. When you do not know the answer

The last variant is the one nobody escapes, least of all in fast-moving technical work: the client asks something and you do not know the answer.

The worst thing you can do is blag it. It feels like the right option in the moment, but it is the fastest way to destroy your credibility, and once a client suspects you will dress up a guess as an answer, they stop believing the answers you are sure of too.

There are really two situations.

1. If it is reasonable that you would not know, say so plainly: “this is outside my area, let me make sure I understand the question, and I will come back to you.” Flip it into a few good questions.

2. If it is something you feel you should know, take it on the chin. “I do not know exactly right now, let me take that away.” Or develop a hypothesis together, or, if the moment allows, research it there and then.

In every version, you are choosing honesty over the appearance of expertise. And honesty here is akin to reliability, and that helps build trust.

Actionable takeaway: Next time you feel the pull to soften a no, smooth over a problem, or talk your way past a question you cannot answer, treat that discomfort as a signal rather than a warning. It usually marks the exact moment where the relationship has the most to gain.

Lead with an I statement, stay on the data, name the trade-off, and tell the truth about what you do not know.

If you are working on lifting your technical people into genuine advisory roles, this is one of the harder shifts to make stick. Drop me a note or book a call using the link below, and I would be glad to talk through what we have seen work.

Subscribe now

Share

Thank you for reading The Skilled Consultant. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so to receive all our articles direct to your inbox.
There are several other ways you can interact with Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training….

1. Connect with Deri Hughes (Founder & MD) on LinkedIn

2. Connect with Colin Mann (MD) on LinkedIn

3. Book a 30 minute intro call with Deri Hughes

4. Book a 30 minute intro call with Colin Mann

5. Stay informed about our free workshops and webinars - follow Honeycomb on LinkedIn or visit our website.

Elevation. Building more senior relationships inside the client.

Elevation is usually the real accelerator. Sometimes it is simply about access to a larger budget. More often it is subtler.

As your firm starts to look like a strategic advisor, some clients will develop discomfort and ask whether they are becoming too reliant on one partner. And if senior people see the same consultancy engaged again and again but have no personal relationship with them, questions get asked. Was the market tested, or is this just lazy procurement? Without relationships at that level, you can find the brakes applied from above, just as the work is getting interesting.

All very well, but how do you elevate your interactions? You first need to get into the right conversations and, when you do, you need to be speaking the right language. Let’s think about what that takes.

1. Manufacturing the conversations

Any new conversation with a client is a good one. Ideally it is about a business issue, but if it is about a concert, parenting, or a sports match and it builds the relationship, that counts too. The breadth and depth of your conversations across an account is one of the better measures of whether it is really growing.

Getting into those conversations is the hard part. Start with who you want to speak to, and do not assume that only means the most senior names. It includes the management and operational roles you want to meet more regularly too. For each of them, build a picture: what are their goals, what problems do they perceive and how do they phrase them, how do your services help, and what kind of interaction or information do they actually value?

Then put hooks in place - these are legitimate reasons to make contact. There are several ways to approach this:

• Delivery-based hooks are built into your current engagement. Plan it carefully and you create reasons to meet people you would otherwise never see. Build in a quarterly step-back where you invite the executive team to review progress against strategic priorities, and you have normalised senior conversation as part of the work, rather than something out of the blue.

• Direct outreach is simply introducing yourself while you are on site, the walk across the floor and the follow-up LinkedIn connection. Not everyone is comfortable with it, but careers have been built on a deliberate ‘bump into someone at the coffee machine’.

• Introductions are better still. Strong relationships on your current project, asked at the right moment and framed the right way, can open doors to comparable teams elsewhere, often in a way that makes your current client look good for suggesting it.

• Macro hooks are marketing activity: webinars, newsletters, events. It’s easy to overlook these as tools for net-new business, but they are excellent account growth tools too. A webinar gives you a natural reason to reach out, and if the topic is pitched at an elevated level rather than the purely technical, you are far more likely to attract senior attendance.

2. Learn to speak the language

To earn senior relationships you need one skill in particular: building a narrative for a senior audience.

Technical consultants are often superb at describing what is happening operationally. But senior stakeholders need something different. They want to know what this means for the business, financially and strategically.

If a consultant has spent months reducing a client’s system downtime, or compressing the time it takes to complete a business process, that is a technical metric. This can be a comfortable place to stay. But what is the business outcome of that change? Faster time to market. Improved customer satisfaction. Risk mitigation. Revenue capture.
(extract from Can engineers make good consultative sellers?)

That move, up what we call the benefit or metrics ladder, is something most consultants have to build and practise deliberately. We have to train the mindset, knowledge, and authority gaps technical consultants must close as business development becomes part of their role. It rarely comes naturally.

A challenge to finish

Think about an account you want to grow and ask yourself two things:
1. Have you defined the people you need to meet and built a persona for each?
2. Do you have hooks in place to create those conversations, or, where you cannot create them alone, a clear ask of your marketing team to help?

Then here’s the challenge. Email a senior stakeholder at a current client who you have never met but would love to engage with, and use the hook that you identified to open a conversation.

If you hesitate, if part of you insists it is a terrible idea, write down the reasons why not. Some will be structural and sensible. Others will be more personal: I am not sure I am credible in their eyes; it feels presumptuous; I’ll be wasting their time. Those statements highlight the things for you to overcome if you want to be consistently strong at account growth.

Subscribe now

Share

Thank you for reading The Skilled Consultant. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so to receive all our articles direct to your inbox.
There are several other ways you can interact with Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training….

1. Connect with Deri Hughes (Founder & MD) on LinkedIn

2. Connect with Colin Mann (MD) on LinkedIn

3. Book a 30 minute intro call with Deri Hughes

4. Book a 30 minute intro call with Colin Mann

5. Stay informed about our free workshops and webinars - follow Honeycomb on LinkedIn or visit our website.

I say this having watched it happen many times, and having been guilty of it myself. It is a reminder of the phrase usually attributed to Eisenhower:

The point of account planning is not the artifact. It is the act of thinking, deliberately, about how you are going to grow a client relationship.

So before you reach for a template, two questions are worth answering:

1. What does growing an account actually take?

2. And which way is this account going to grow?

1. What does it take?

We can look at this through the lens of the Honeycomb hexagon for exceptional performance consistency, which sets out six critical factors.

Expectations: Account growth rarely happens unless leaders make it clear that consultants are there to look for opportunity, not just execute the work in front of them.

Skills: The ones that count most are relational rather than technical i.e. building relationships, running opportunity conversations, asking great questions, and listening actively.

Knowledge: Less your own firm’s service catalogue and more a real understanding of the client and their industry.

Discipline: To protect the time and headspace to plan, rather than be pulled into project detail every time. This one is most commonly underestimated by leaders.

Technology: AI is becoming a genuine thought partner for account planning, helping you hypothesise about where an account might go. And a good CRM keeps you on top of the individuals and relationships you are nurturing across the account.

Mindset: If you do not believe that making time for this is core to your role, you will not do it. Often the unlock is being willing to delegate more boldly, so ‘not having the time’ is no longer an excuse.

Take a moment to consider how you, or your consultants, fair against each of these measures. Where are you strong and where is there work to do?

2. The three ways an account grows

Then the question becomes how the account actually grows, and it almost always falls into one of three routes.

Progression is about doing the next logical phase. You delivered the strategy and the business case, so now you do the implementation planning. It looks like the obvious route, and it is the one most firms default to. It is also the riskiest. Projects lose funding, sponsors move, priorities shift. And even when they do not, there is a tendency to assume progression will simply happen, so we relax back from it.

Replication is solving the same problem for another team or function within the same client. In large organisations this works well, because you build a reputation in one corner and earn a referral across to another.

Expansion is taking a different problem to a client, sometimes one your firm has not tackled before. It is the most challenging of the three, because you are less credentialed in that space. But it keeps you innovative, broadens your footprint, and positions you as a genuine business advisor rather than a supplier stuck in one box.

When considering growth of an account, ask yourself which of progression, replication, or expansion you are intentionally pursuing, rather than assuming.

The accelerator to all three is Elevation: building more senior relationships inside the client. That’s the thing that most often unlocks growth and it is where consultants tend to get stuck - I will turn to this in part two next week.

Subscribe now

Share

Thank you for reading The Skilled Consultant. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so to receive all our articles direct to your inbox.
There are several other ways you can interact with Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training….

1. Connect with Deri Hughes (Founder & MD) on LinkedIn

2. Connect with Colin Mann (MD) on LinkedIn

3. Book a 30 minute intro call with Deri Hughes

4. Book a 30 minute intro call with Colin Mann

5. Stay informed about our free workshops and webinars - follow Honeycomb on LinkedIn or visit our website.

So let me tell you the story.

The original accountants…

We did not pick our original accountants carelessly. They came strongly recommended, including by some of our consulting firm partners. The conversations I had with their salesperson were excellent. He explained their model and the experience they promised, and it was good enough that we borrowed one or two ideas for our own sales process.

Then the service began, and the standards did not match the promises. There were mistakes, a lack of care, and numbers we could not rely on. Our feedback was listened to but nothing material changed. I was double-checking things, finding errors, and getting frustrated at the time it was taking me. I wanted to trust it was all in hand, but I couldn’t. And when you cannot trust the figures, you cannot trust the advice that sits on top of them.

Within a year, we gave notice.

A living Trust Equation example

In our training we lean heavily on The Trust Equation from The Trusted Advisor, by David Maister and colleagues. It holds that trust is built from four things, credibility, reliability, and intimacy, all divided by self-orientation. It is a simple model, and it diagnosed our old firm with uncomfortable precision.

They majored on intimacy, but not in the right way. They were warm, personable, and full of questions, but frankly it was far more ‘relationship’ than I wanted from an accountant. I do not need a friendly chat about my holidays. The intimacy I want from an accountant is challenge: the willingness to ask hard questions about my numbers and not be afraid of the answers.

On reliability they fell down badly. They missed deadlines so consistently that we had to move our accounting year end back three months so they could get our accounts ready in time.

On credibility they fell down too, because the numbers were just not right.

But the real lesson for me was self-orientation. Very early on we paid for a strategy meeting because they said they wanted to understand our business. We got nothing from it. What followed, in the first week of us working together, was a push to sell a range of additional services. Before they had proven they could do the basics, this didn’t land well.

Three ways firms grow, and the one that has to come first

When we talk about how advisory firms grow, I describe three models: delivery-led growth, relationship-led growth, and authority-led growth.

Our original firm had used authority well to win us in the first place. They talked a good game, and I believed them. Then they reached for relationship-led growth, but in a misguided way, trying to build closeness before they had earned it. What they missed is that neither authority nor relationship does any work for you with an existing client unless the delivery underneath is excellent.

World-class delivery is the foundation. It is what makes people want to work with you again, and it is the entire basis of retaining and expanding a client relationship, whether you work on retainers or on projects. You cannot grow an advisory firm you are not delivering for. Our old firm did not stall, it went backwards - because it tried to build closeness too fast and sell more before it had delivered.

What the new firm did differently

The firm we’ve moved to could not be more different. There is no slick sales process and no sales team. The sales conversation was simply the experienced accountant who now runs our accounts telling us what she personally would do. It was obvious she would be rolling her sleeves up and getting into the detail herself.

We’re a couple of months in and the difference is night and day. She’s friendly but appropriately professional. She has found software licences we were paying for and not using. She is rigorous on expenses and has saved us money on VAT reclaims. She is lower cost than the firm we left, and she has not tried to sell us a single extra thing.

What she is doing is early proof of value - another idea we train on. Within the first week or two she had identified savings, so we saw a return almost immediately, and she has continued finding value we did not expect. She is nailing delivery-led growth. I’m confident the relationship will deepen and the wider opportunities will come, but she has earned the right to them first.

The warning for firm leaders

If you are running a consulting firm and you are thinking you need to standardise your processes, increase spend per client, and optimise for your own delivery efficiency, be careful. Each of those instincts is reasonable, and each is easy to take too far.

The moment you lose sight of the fact that world-class delivery is the core of everything, you are in trouble. Growth runs in a sequence. Delivery-led growth comes first. Relationship-led and authority-led growth build on top of it. Delivery-led growth is underpinned by a relentless focus on trust, and trust (as the equation reminds us) rests on credibility, reliability, intimacy, and low self-orientation.

Credibility and low self-orientation are both strengthened enormously by delivering early proof of value when an engagement begins. Get that right and your new engagements start well, your long-standing ones grow organically, and you build the case studies, testimonials, and referrals that let you speak with authority and win new clients.

Shift too far towards a slick sales process, your own efficiency, and pushing your people to cross-sell and up-sell from day one, and you will be left wondering why growth has stalled.

Actionable takeaway: Before you optimise anything, ask one question of your firm. Are we earning the right to grow with each client by delivering exceptional value first, or are we reaching for the relationship and the cross-sell before we have proven ourselves? Deliver first, build trust, prove value, and the growth will follow.

Subscribe now

Share

Thank you for reading The Skilled Consultant. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so to receive all our articles direct to your inbox.
There are several other ways you can interact with Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training….

1. Connect with Deri Hughes (Founder & MD) on LinkedIn

2. Connect with Colin Mann (MD) on LinkedIn

3. Book a 30 minute intro call with Deri Hughes

4. Book a 30 minute intro call with Colin Mann

5. Stay informed about our free workshops and webinars - follow Honeycomb on LinkedIn or visit our website.

Honeycomb’s Colin Mann is joined here by Adrien Foucault, founder of Spaik and a former McKinsey consultant. He advises consulting, private equity, and investment banking firms on AI, and teaches at HEC Paris and Sciences Po.

What’s covered:

• The “scissor effect”: how AI is hitting consultancies on two fronts at once, opening new revenue from AI and tech work while reshaping the economics of delivery.

• Top-down versus bottom-up AI deployment, the trade-offs of each, and the hybrid “AI council” model that brings every level of the firm into the decision.

• What the global firms have actually built, from McKinsey’s Lilli to BCG’s slide and brainstorming assistants, Bain’s due-diligence bot, and EY’s payroll chatbot.

• The new business models AI is opening up: outcome-based fees, consulting as a service, asset-based consulting, and premium “handmade” human judgement.

• How the consultant’s role is changing, from the classic pyramid towards a flatter shape, the rise of the subject-matter expert and the agent “architect”, and the shift to prompt, validate, and write up.

• The biggest risks to manage: hallucinations and the real fallout when they reach clients (Deloitte Australia refunded work over incorrect quotes, names, and legal text), data confidentiality, and the temptation to cut the validate step, so output speeds up while judgement erodes.

The session closed with a wide-ranging audience Q&A, including:

– What happens to consulting demand as clients build their own AI capability?

– How do you set an AI strategy when the tooling changes every week?

– Where do the tools really stand on Excel and PowerPoint modelling today?

– How do firms keep the pace sustainable and protect space for reflection and creativity?

One to watch if you lead a consulting firm and want a practical, clear-eyed view of what good AI adoption looks like in practice.

Subscribe now

Share

Thank you for reading The Skilled Consultant. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so to receive all our articles direct to your inbox.
There are several other ways you can interact with Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training….

1. Connect with Deri Hughes (Founder & MD) on LinkedIn

2. Connect with Colin Mann (MD) on LinkedIn

3. Book a 30 minute intro call with Deri Hughes

4. Stay informed about our free workshops and webinars - follow Honeycomb on LinkedIn or visit our website.

The history of technology paradigm shifts tells a different story.

A more likely scenario is the rise of the Exponentialist Consultant – a junior able to create so much client value you will want to hire more of them, not fewer.

In this session, Honeycomb’s MD Deri Hughes sets out his thesis on why demand for junior consultants is about to climb, and what firm leaders should be doing now to develop the people who can meet it.

Watch or listen now to discover:

- Why “consulting is dead” reads the future wrong, and what The Jevons Paradox tells us about the more likely direction of the consulting industry.

- The three stages of the junior consultant role: legacy, accelerated, and exponentialist, and what separates them.

- The persistent ‘last-mile problem’ in AI-assisted consulting, and the validator role emerging now inside high-performing teams.

- Three concrete examples of how junior consultants could bring value that were not previously possible: hypothesis parallel processing, stakeholder hyper-personalisation, and the person in the platform.

- The junior skills that are ramping up, and the ones that no longer differentiate.

- A three-step action plan - audit, brainstorm, and define the future - that firm leaders can run with their senior team right now.

If you’re a consulting firm leader looking past the next quarter at how AI will reshape your talent model and your client value proposition, this is one you shouldn’t miss.

This thinking behind this session has been brought together in an eBook titled The Exponentialist Junior Consultant. Click here to get your copy now:

Download it now

Thank you for reading The Skilled Consultant. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so to receive all our articles direct to your inbox.

Subscribe now

There are several other ways you can interact with Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training….

1. Connect with Deri Hughes (Founder & MD) on LinkedIn

2. Connect with Colin Mann (MD) on LinkedIn

3. Book a 30 minute intro call with Deri Hughes

4. Stay informed about our free workshops and webinars - follow Honeycomb on LinkedIn or visit our website.

"To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers.
Nearly all of them are far too long.
This wastes time, while energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points."

Churchill was well known as a great orator. He also spent hours reading vast numbers of reports from his cabinet, his commanders, and his advisors. He wanted to be across all the detail, but the length and writing style of these reports were getting in the way.

He couldn't efficiently access the information he needed to know. He couldn't make informed decisions fast enough.

Churchill being Churchill, he cut to the chase. On 9th August 1940, he wrote a memo to the War Cabinet titled ‘BREVITY’:

To summarise Churchill's four requests:

1. Set-out the main points in a series of short, crisp paragraphs.

2. Place detailed analysis in an appendix.

3. Consider just an aide-mémoire of headings and expand on them orally.

4. Remove cumbersome prose and woolly phrases.

His goal was to save time, but he also nailed another critical benefit when he wrote:

How true that is. Writing a shorter note, to paraphrase Blaise Pascal, takes time. That is because it requires more thought to identify the key points and summarise them well.

What does this mean for consultants today?

Churchill wrote ‘BREVITY’ forty-five years before Barbara Minto published similar guidance on structured thinking in The Pyramid Principle, and neither of them had experienced the impact of the digital world.

In their day, the manual effort of producing hand-typed memos or hand-drawn acetate slides at least provided some restraint to volume, but PowerPoint, AI, and the rest have removed those guardrails. It has never been easier to assemble an impressive-looking document, with polished prose, tidy structure, and a confident tone, without doing the underlying work of deciding what truly matters.

The decisions made off the back of such documents will be the worse for it.

Consultants must continue to develop the ability to think well and communicate succinctly. More so than ever, as structured thinking and clear writing become increasingly under-developed skills in a generation willing to outsource the impression of them to AI.

Producing a report is very, very easy. Producing a well-written report that is crystal clear is rare…and valuable.

Exploring Data vs Explaining Data

I’ll leave you with a concept from an excellent book, ‘storytelling with data’ by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic. In it, she makes a distinction between Exploring data and Explaining data.

When you're in an Exploring mode, you talk about the journey. You share everything you've discovered. You are enjoying the data for the sake of the data. There is a place for that, often early in a project, when the answer is not yet clear.

When you're in a mindset of Explaining, you are helping others make a decision. You are focused on the questions they have and the actions they can take.

As a consultant communicating with clients you almost always want to be in the Explaining mode. That's how you can help them make decisions.

Pair Knaflic's distinction with Churchill's four rules and you have a useful working method for your communication:

1. Open with a clear summary that explains the key points they need to understand.

2. Expand on each with a series of short, crisp paragraphs or a single powerful chart.

3. Place detailed analysis in an appendix.

4. Reduce word count, remove padding, eliminate cumbersome prose.

It is not a complicated method, but its success relies on you deciding what matters before you start writing (or prompting!).

The acid test: Can a busy reader leave the first page with a clear understanding of the critical information they need to make a decision?

If yes, the thinking has been done. Get that right and brevity will follow.

Share

Subscribe now

Thank you for reading The Skilled Consultant. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so to receive all our articles direct to your inbox.

There are several other ways you can interact with Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training….

1. Connect with Deri Hughes (Founder & MD) on LinkedIn

2. Connect with Colin Mann (MD) on LinkedIn

3. Book a 30 minute intro call with Deri Hughes

4. Book a 30 minute intro call with Colin Mann

5. Stay informed about our free workshops and webinars - follow Honeycomb on LinkedIn or visit our website.

Their challenges are in different places, but they tend to arrive at the same point. And what I’ve found, more often than not, is their conclusion is misplaced. The operating model is not usually the problem.

What does ‘Operating Model’ actually mean?

When I ask a group of consulting leaders what they mean by operating model, I rarely get the same answer twice. For some, it means the org chart: who is responsible for which parts of the business, who reports to whom. For others, it means revenue flow: who is on the hook for generating which numbers, and how performance is measured and managed around that. For others still, it means decision ownership: who makes which calls, and at which level.

My preference is the decision ownership model. It tends to cut through a lot of the noise. But whichever version you use, the same principle applies: restructuring the model will not solve your problem if the root cause is something else entirely.

The foundation everything sits on

Working with consulting firms across different sizes and structures, I’ve developed a framework that draws on two established models: Richard Beckhard’s model of team effectiveness and Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team. What the framework makes clear is that at the centre of any effective operating model is something no org chart can create for you: working relationships and trust.

If your senior team is communicating clearly, making decisions collectively, and backing each other up, then a relatively light redesign can get you a long way. You might need to clarify a few roles, tighten up some decision rights, and you are done.

But if the word you would use to describe your senior team at the moment is ‘chaos’ or ‘conflict’ or ‘avoidance’, then the operating model is not your presenting problem. You have a leadership behaviour issue. And putting new boxes on a page will not fix it.

Diagnose first, design second

The most useful first step is a diagnostic question: is this a design problem or a behaviour problem?

If the team is working well together and the issue is that roles and responsibilities are unclear or misaligned, then a structural redesign may be exactly what you need.

If the team is not working well together, the sequence matters. You need to address the behaviours first, or the new structure will simply become a new arena for the same conflicts.

When you are ready to redesign, be specific about what you are asking of people. If you want your directors to take on P&L ownership, or your sector leads to drive sales, then be clear about what that means in practice: which decisions they will make, what support they will have, and what you will stop doing that currently blocks them* (more on that below!).

If your expectations are clear, people are bought in, and someone is still not delivering, then you have a different problem to diagnose. It might be capacity: they simply do not have the time. It might be a skill gap: they have not yet built the capability you are asking for. Or it might be an inner-game issue, a mindset that needs to shift before the behaviour can follow. Each of those calls for a different response.

*A common problem: founders who need to step back

Every firm owner and founder knows this truth: you need to be working more on the business, not in it. Meaning, step back from the day-to-day delivery, the sales process, the operational decisions. Spend your time on strategy, positioning, the medium and long-term direction of the firm. This shows up particularly sharply in founder-led businesses as they scale.

But what I find is that founders rarely ask themselves the question that makes it possible: if I want my senior team to step up and own more, what do I need to stop doing to create the space for them?

That is a hard question. It requires a clear-eyed look at your own behaviours, including the unconscious ones - the ones your colleagues can see more clearly than you can. Getting out of the way is not passive; it is an active and demanding behaviour change on the part of the person at the top.

Actionable takeaway: Before you draw any new boxes on a page, answer two questions candidly.

1. Does your senior team have the working relationships and mutual trust to make a redesigned operating model work?

2. Is there behaviour change required at the top of the firm, including your own, before you ask others to change?

If the answer to either is uncertain, start there.

If you are working through this kind of challenge at the moment, I would be glad to talk it through. Drop me a note or simply book a call using the link below.

Subscribe now

Share

Thank you for reading The Skilled Consultant. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so to receive all our articles direct to your inbox.
There are several other ways you can interact with Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training….

1. Connect with Deri Hughes (Founder & MD) on LinkedIn

2. Connect with Colin Mann (MD) on LinkedIn

3. Book a 30 minute intro call with Deri Hughes

4. Book a 30 minute intro call with Colin Mann

5. Stay informed about our free workshops and webinars - follow Honeycomb on LinkedIn or visit our website.

The interesting question is not whether they are capable of having that meeting. Most of them are. The question is what gets in the way.

In my last article, I explored whether engineers make good consultants. The short answer is yes, with the right support at the right moments. This one picks up where that left off. As technical consultants become more senior, business development becomes an increasing part of their role. And many find that transition genuinely difficult, in a way they did not expect.

There are three common gaps they need close:

1. The Mindset Gap

The starting point is not skill. It is mindset.

A software salesperson who has been selling for years has developed a relationship with rejection. They have heard no enough times that it stops carrying much weight. For a technical consultant who has built their reputation on delivery excellence, that relationship does not exist. Being turned down, being exposed, putting yourself forward and being rebuffed: these feel like much higher-stakes moments.

And so the easier path is to stay close to the work already in front of you. Focus on delivery. Let the results speak. Hope someone notices.

The problem: hope is not a good sales strategy (more on that, here.)

The good news is that mindset is workable. When we run business development programmes for technical consultants, shifting mindset is usually the first conversation. Creating the right framing and environment to achieve the shift isn’t easy, but we have to get people to a place where they are willing to at least give business development a genuine attempt.

2. The Knowledge Gap

If someone has good structured thinking, strong communication, and solid analytical capability (which the vast majority of engineers do), they have most of what they need to sell consultatively. The next gap is usually knowledge: specifically, the ability to talk at a business outcome level rather than a technical one.

Technical consultants think and talk in technical terms. That is their natural register. But conversations with a CFO or a COO require a different vocabulary. Business risk, strategic priorities, organisational impact. These are the terms that land at that level.

The bridge between the two can be thought of as a benefit or metrics ladder. If a consultant has spent months reducing a client’s system downtime, or compressing the time it takes to complete a business process, that is a technical metric. This can be a comfortable place to stay. But what is the business outcome of that change? Faster time to market. Improved customer satisfaction. Risk mitigation. Revenue capture.

Being able to move comfortably up the ladder is a skill that can be practised. It makes a significant difference to confidence going into senior conversations when you can use the executive-level framing and language they are likely to respond to.

3. The Authority and Relationships gap

Ultimately, there are three things that drive consistent sales performance: delivery, relationships, and authority.

Technical consultants almost always have delivery covered. They have typically won work through excellent execution, natural follow-on projects, and client retention. But relationships and authority tend to be underdeveloped.

Authority is a function of both what you know and how visible you make that knowledge. Most technical consultants have earned the credibility. The problem is they do not publicise it. They do not post, they do not speak, they do not write. They know more than enough to be seen as an authority in their field, but they are largely invisible outside the accounts they work on.

Building personal brand feels uncomfortable to a lot of people. It can feel like self-promotion, like blowing your own trumpet. But done well, it is simply making your expertise visible. And it does not have to start with a keynote or a polished article. It can start with one connection request to a contact who has gone quiet, or one post on a topic where you have something genuine to say.

The key is to start small and build momentum. In my experience, once a technical consultant starts to see results from these activities, even modest ones, it becomes easier to continue. The initial barrier is usually just beginning.

So yes, engineers can make excellent consultative sellers. The raw material is almost always there: strong analytical thinking, genuine domain expertise, and the credibility that comes from years of delivery. What tends to be missing is a willingness to be seen, the ability to speak at a business outcome level, and some deliberate effort to build relationships beyond the immediate engagement.

These are all learnable. They require a different kind of practice from what technical consultants are used to, and they benefit from structured support. But for consulting firms with strong technical talent, developing that talent into effective business developers is one of the higher-return investments available.

If this challenge is familiar in your firm, I would be glad to talk through what we have seen work. Do get in touch.

Subscribe now

Share

Thank you for reading The Skilled Consultant. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so to receive all our articles direct to your inbox.
There are several other ways you can interact with Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training….

1. Connect with Deri Hughes (Founder & MD) on LinkedIn

2. Connect with Colin Mann (MD) on LinkedIn

3. Book a 30 minute intro call with Deri Hughes

4. Book a 30 minute intro call with Colin Mann

5. Stay informed about our free workshops and webinars - follow Honeycomb on LinkedIn or visit our website.

That distinction matters more than it might first appear. A consultant displaced by AI knows they have been displaced. A consultant who has stopped thinking, but remains in post and continues producing work, is a much more dangerous situation: for the firm, for the client, and for the individual’s own development.

The workflow that should be non-negotiable

Colin Mann (MD at Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training), hosted a webinar recently with Adrien Foucault, founder of Spaik and former McKinsey consultant, on how AI is reshaping consulting (you can watch it here).

Adrien described the necessary AI workflow for consultants in simple terms: prompt, validate, write up. You use AI to generate a first pass. You then apply judgment to what it produces, checking it against primary sources, testing the logic, catching errors. Then you write up and present.

It is obvious when you say it. It is clearly right. And it is not consistently what is happening.

Adrien described seeing - in his advisory work across consulting, private equity, and investment banking - the validate step being compressed or cut entirely.

The sequence in practice is becoming: prompt, write up.

Why the validate step is missed

Some of this is pace pressure. Consulting has always operated at pace, and AI compounds this rather than relieving it. When a client expects faster turnaround because AI can produce faster outputs, the temptation is to deliver it. The consultant who generates in twenty minutes what previously took two hours does not spend the remaining time on careful validation. They move to the next deliverable.

Some of it is the nature of the technology itself. Large language models generate outputs with a fluency and apparent authority that makes them read as correct even when they are not. Every major model carries a disclaimer that it can and does make mistakes. The problem is that AI-generated content does not read like mistakes. It reads like polished, confident work. That is a specific cognitive trap, and it is a harder one to avoid than it sounds.

I’m reminded of some advice I got years ago from Richard Webster, a Bain Partner I worked closely with. We were talking about writing a good ‘answer-first’ (Bain jargon for a strong hypothesis, which we used to guide the work we did for clients). He cautioned that when you get very good at writing an answer-first, you can start to believe it, and when you believe it, you can fall into the trap of not actually doing the work as well as you should to test it. AI tools are giving everyone a near-instant and convincing answer-first.

And some of it is a culture problem. If a firm has not built explicit expectations around validation, then cutting the validate step is not experienced as a failure of rigour. It is experienced as efficiency.

The costs are bigger than they first seem

The consequences are becoming visible. Deloitte Australia had to refund clients on projects where AI-generated content contained incorrect quotes, incorrect names, and incorrect legal text1. This is not a marginal or theoretical risk. It is a reputational and commercial one with real financial consequences, and it is a direct result of AI-generated output moving to client without sufficient review in between.

A recently published research study, AI makes you smarter but none the wiser (Fernandes et al., 2026)2, puts hard numbers on the mechanism. In two large-scale studies, participants using ChatGPT to complete logical reasoning tasks performed better than those working unaided. But they also significantly overestimated how well they had done, by around four points on a twenty-question test. AI improved their output and impaired their ability to judge it, simultaneously.

There is a detail in the findings that consulting leaders should note. Participants with higher technical knowledge of AI were more confident in their self-assessments, and less accurate. More AI-savvy did not mean better or more self-aware. The people in your firm who are most capable with the tools may also be the least likely to catch their own errors. Training your team to use AI well is necessary. It is not, on its own, sufficient.

Then, beyond immediate error risk, there is a slower and more structural cost that concerns me. Junior consultants develop judgment by doing analysis, not by supervising AI doing it. The research, the synthesis, the model-building: these are not just tasks to be completed. They are the mechanism by which people learn to think like consultants. When those tasks are routinely delegated to AI without meaningful engagement with the output, the development pipeline is going to produce people who can operate the tools proficiently but who have not built the expertise, judgement, and critical thinking capacity that consulting rests on.

What does that mean for your firm in five, ten, fifteen years’ time? The quality problem will not stay at the junior level.

The conversation firms are not yet having

Most of the current debate about AI in consulting centres on adoption: which tools to use, which workflows to automate, whether to build or buy, how to manage the change. These are important questions. But the quality conversation is lagging behind the adoption conversation, and that gap has consequences.

What does the QA process look like in an AI-augmented team? Who is accountable for validating AI-generated outputs, and how is that accountability made explicit rather than assumed? What does it mean for a senior consultant or partner to sign off on work when the methodology behind it is less visible than it used to be?

These are not questions for the future. They are operational questions for now. The firms that are answering them clearly are building a meaningful and durable advantage over the ones treating adoption rate as the primary metric of progress.

What a real commitment looks like

In the webinar, Adrien described ‘leadership commitment’ as one of the key unlocks for AI adoption, but not in the way firms usually frame it. The commitment he described is not, “we encourage you to use AI.” It is, “this is how I use AI in my own work, and here is what I expect from our outputs as a result.”

The second version is significantly harder than the first. It requires senior team members to have developed a view on what rigorous validation looks like in their context, and to model it consistently, not just mandate it from a distance.

That is the conversation worth having. Not whether to adopt AI, but what quality means in an AI-augmented firm, and how you protect it as pace and volume increase.

This will be an interesting time to look back on. The race is underway, and I’d wager the winners will be those who approach it like the tortoise, not the hare. A firm that produces more, faster, while eroding the rigour that made its work worth commissioning, is making a very poor trade.

Subscribe now

Share

Join our AI Masterclasses in May

Honeycomb and Spaik are collaborating to run two open AI Masterclasses in central London this May.

Thursday 7th May — AI Applications in Consulting
A hands-on day for junior to mid-level consultants focused on practical AI skills: how to use AI effectively and responsibly across everyday consulting workflows.

Friday 8th May — Creating Value with AI in Consulting
A strategic session for senior consultants and leaders on business value, implementation, and what AI means for the future of consulting.

FIND OUT MORE AND BOOK YOUR PLACE HERE

Useful resources

The Consulting People Report 2026, by Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training and New Minds. A people playbook for consulting leaders which includes 5 concrete moves you can deploy now to emerge from 2026 with clarity, momentum, and a consulting team fit for the future. DOWNLOAD HERE.

The State of AI in Consulting 2025, by Spaik. Explores how leading firms are navigating AI’s twin impact: generating 20-40% revenue from AI projects while transforming internal operations. DOWNLOAD HERE.

Thank you for reading The Skilled Consultant. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so to receive all our articles direct to your inbox.

Subscribe now

There are several other ways you can interact with Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training….

1. Connect with Deri Hughes (Founder & MD) on LinkedIn

2. Connect with Colin Mann (MD) on LinkedIn

3. Book a 30 minute intro call with Deri Hughes

4. Book a 30 minute intro call with Colin Mann

5. Stay informed about our free workshops and webinars - follow Honeycomb on LinkedIn or visit our website.

But there’s a pattern I see often. The engineer joins a consultancy, gets promoted quickly through the junior grades, is clearly one of the team’s strongest performers, and then, somewhere around Director level, something stops working. Not for everyone. But for enough people that it is worth understanding why.

So, the short answer to the title question is: yes, and no. Brilliant junior consultants, often. Natural senior leaders and business developers, not always.

Why engineers thrive in the early years

The skills at the core of consulting - framing a problem, breaking it into logical components, building structured analysis, working to tight deadlines in complex multi-stakeholder environments - are things that engineers are trained in from day one.

A structural engineer working on a major infrastructure programme learns to use product breakdown structures the way consultants use issue trees. They understand, from the ground up, how to move things forward in organisations with complicated governance, multiple stakeholders, and competing priorities. Anyone who has worked on a programme like HS2 will recognise that environment. You learn to use formal structures and informal relationships in equal measure, because neither alone is enough.

Our analytical capabilities are often exceptional. I have worked alongside engineers whose backgrounds transferred directly into consulting work in ways that surprised even them. The mathematics, the structured thinking, the comfort with complexity: it turns out to be the same.

Add a generally strong work ethic, an allergy to missing deadlines, and the ability to explain complicated things clearly to non-specialists, and you have someone who can do a lot of what consulting requires from the moment they walk in.

Where the plateau starts

The problem is not about introversion or about people skills in general. That is a caricature, and an unhelpful one.

The problem is more specific. As a consultant becomes more senior, the expectation shifts, from technical delivery towards client impact, influence, and relationship development.

Two things that came naturally as a junior consultant start to feel less comfortable.

The first is elevating the conversation. We are trained to go deep. When we are in a room with a client, we can provide enormous value by engaging on a technical level. But our more senior clients often care less about the technical outcome and more about the strategic or commercial one. Making that shift requires a different kind of curiosity, and a willingness to leave the territory where you feel most confident.

The second is building genuine human connection. Not rapport, not professional courtesy, but the kind of intimacy that underlies trusted advisor relationships. We want to help by solving a problem. I recognise that impulse in myself. The difficulty is that being a trusted advisor sometimes requires the opposite. It requires the ability to hold space, to resist the urge to provide an answer, to let someone talk without steering them toward a logical conclusion. Some situations do not lend themselves well to someone who wants to solve a problem, provide an answer, and apply logic. In fact, those three things taken together describe an engineer fairly well and, for much of my career, they described me. In those moments, what the situation actually requires is something more intangible.

Getting comfortable with ‘failure’

As seniority increases, so does the expectation around sales and business development. Everything above applies here, but now there is an additional factor.

We are not used to failing.

That is not a criticism; it is the point. If you are designing a bridge, failure is not an acceptable outcome. Engineering education, professional standards, and the nature of the work itself all create people with high standards, high accuracy, and a deep discomfort with getting it wrong.

Business development does not work like that. You will not win every bid. The ratio of effort to outcome in sales can be humbling, even when you have done everything right. Learning to sit with that, to reframe a missed opportunity as simply not yet being successful with a particular client, is a real psychological adjustment. It held me back too, for longer than I would like to admit. A fear of failure, I think, is what holds a lot of technically talented engineers back from fully stepping into senior commercial roles.

What consulting firms can do

First, anticipate the plateau. Engineers often move through junior and mid-level grades at pace, which can mask the development needs that will matter at Director level and above. If someone with an engineering background is clearly talented, it is worth having the conversation early about what seniority will require - before the plateau, not after.

Second, train, coach, and role model the human side. Many senior consulting leaders do this naturally, but are less deliberate about passing it on. Feedback in the moment, noticing when someone has jumped to a solution rather than letting a conversation breathe, can do a lot of work.

Third, introduce business development awareness early. Not necessarily the mechanics of proposals and pitches, but the culture of building relationships with commercial intent, and the normalisation of not winning every time.

The engineers who become outstanding trusted advisors do exist. I like to think I’ve made a lot of progress along that road. But I had specific experiences and specific support that made the difference. The goal is to make that development more deliberate, and to give more of your talented technical people the chance of getting there.

Subscribe now

Share

Thank you for reading The Skilled Consultant. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so to receive all our articles direct to your inbox.
There are several other ways you can interact with Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training….

1. Connect with Deri Hughes (Founder & MD) on LinkedIn

2. Connect with Colin Mann (MD) on LinkedIn

3. Book a 30 minute intro call with Deri Hughes

4. Book a 30 minute intro call with Colin Mann

5. Stay informed about our free workshops and webinars - follow Honeycomb on LinkedIn or visit our website.

It’s the industry’s challenge du jour. If AI agents are doing the research and analysis, and workflows become more streamlined, consulting firms may well conclude they don’t need a bottom-heavy resourcing model. Where then do our industry’s future Managers and Partners come from?

Let’s start by bringing in a dose of reality.

Very few firms have actually moved to a diamond model yet. Very few are systematically using AI to redesign workflows end-to-end. Most firms are still in the realm of individual consultants using individual tools for individual tasks. Someone chucks something into ChatGPT, or Claude, or Copilot to help them do a task a bit faster.

This is not yet a structural problem.

So, the question we should ask today isn’t, “How do we adapt to fewer juniors?”
It’s, “How do we design the role of juniors deliberately before the structure shifts under our feet?”

The role of juniors is evolving, not disappearing

The classic pyramid model has been around since consulting began. Partner at the top, senior manager beneath, then consultants and junior consultants at the base. The size varies, the leverage changes, but the logic has endured.

Now we’re starting to see experimentation with something closer to a diamond.

Under the Partner you have subject matter experts (SMEs). You have people building and operating AI agents. And the junior role shifts from:

Research. Analyse. Write up.

to:

Prompt. Validate. Write up.

That is a new skillset. Prompting and validation are techniques to be learned and they require judgement. But in many ways, the fundamentals haven’t changed at all.

Juniors still need to sort the wheat from the chaff. They still need to pull up to the key insight. They still need to persuade clients to share information. They still need to work extremely fast to solve extremely complicated problems.

The mistake is to look at this shift and only see productivity and cost efficiency.

Because you miss two critical roles that juniors will play in the ‘2026 and beyond’ consulting firm.

1. Replication: the AI skill nobody talks about

People talk a lot about validation when it comes to AI. Very few talk about replication – and replication is critical.

AI models hallucinate. They generate inconsistent outputs from consistent inputs. They can produce something that looks convincing but is fundamentally flawed.

So part of the QA process must involve replication. A second person rerunning the logic. Rechecking the prompts. Reproducing the analysis independently.

If you design your future team assuming one junior does ‘Prompt. Validate. Write up.’, you may miss the fact that you also need ‘Replicate. Finalise.’

By a different person.

If you don’t factor replication into your QA process and your resourcing model, two things happen:

• You become under-resourced at the junior level.

• You introduce client risk into your system.

Ironically, the firms that take AI most seriously may find they need more junior capacity, not less.

2. The two-way apprenticeship model

The second shift is cultural. The classic apprenticeship model is simple: juniors learn from seniors. They shadow. They receive feedback. They develop judgement through exposure.

But in the current environment, seniors also need to learn from juniors. That’s not a comfortable idea for everyone, but it’s increasingly necessary.

In The Consulting People Report 2026, we highlighted that AI, hybrid working, and generational shifts are likely to hit the senior team harder than the junior team. Seniors must unlearn and relearn long-entrenched behaviours. They must build capabilities they haven’t needed before.

Your juniors can be a secret superpower in that transition.

There are two dimensions to this.

• Technology fluency

  Many senior leaders - particularly those in their late 40s and above - are not digital natives. Many millennials are not AI-native either. Gen Z are further ahead, and Gen Alpha will be further still.

  If you view your juniors as a source of expertise on tools, workflows and digital habits, there is real value there. This requires explicit design. Structured moments where seniors are learning from juniors about AI use cases, digital behaviours, emerging norms.

• Generational understanding

  Repeatedly in conversations with consulting leaders, we see the mismatch between Gen X and Millennial leaders and Gen Z or Gen Alpha juniors. Expectations around work-life balance, flexibility, hybrid working and what is “reasonable” at work have shifted.

  It takes a curious, self-aware leader to lean into that gap rather than dismiss it. But if you see your junior team as a source of insight into how these generations think and operate, there is enormous value. Not just internally but also in how you advise clients who are grappling with the same generational shifts.

You may need more juniors than you think

If you look at juniors purely through the lens of productivity, you might assume the base of the pyramid shrinks. If you factor in replication and two-way apprenticeship, you may conclude something different:

• You still need junior capacity for robust QA.

• You need junior expertise to support senior capability shifts.

• You need to invest in juniors deliberately for medium and long-term leadership development.

The model will shift - that seems inevitable. But the apprenticeship model is not disappearing. It is becoming more reciprocal, more deliberate, and more complex.

What do you see happening in your firm?

Subscribe now

Share

Thank you for reading The Skilled Consultant. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so to receive all our articles direct to your inbox.
There are several other ways you can interact with Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training….

1. Connect with Deri Hughes (Founder & MD) on LinkedIn

2. Connect with Colin Mann (MD) on LinkedIn

3. Book a 30 minute intro call with Deri Hughes

4. Stay informed about our free workshops and webinars - follow Honeycomb on LinkedIn or visit our website.

If you are yet to download your copy of the report, you can do so here:
The Consulting People Report 2026

In this session Caroline shares the four major themes from CPR26, grounded in original research with consulting leaders:

1. The Senior Team Tipping Point
   AI is changing consulting fast – but it’s senior leaders, not juniors, who will be most exposed.

2. The Changing Shape of the Firm
   While AI plays a role, shifting talent tenure and client demands are also reshaping firms. Many are moving from traditional pyramid structures to diamonds or pods, with greater focus on experienced consultants and hybrid teams.

3. Hybrid by Design
   Hybrid working is now the default. But it brings risks to culture, learning, and wellbeing. Firms must deliberately design for connection, not assume it will happen.

4. The Future is Human
   In an AI-enhanced world, it’s the human skills – empathy, communication, judgment – that will define great consultants and trusted advisors.

Deri then introduces the five-part Playbook – practical guidance for consulting firm leaders navigating the year ahead:

1. Stay client and strategy-led

2. Operationalise culture deliberately

3. Lead on expertise and quality

4. Upgrade human skills

5. Automate and experiment (especially with AI)

He shares practical examples, including how some firms are experimenting with pod structures that blend consulting and technical roles, and how junior consultants can still add critical value in an AI-enabled model.

Finally, they respond to many insightful questions from the live audience, including:

- How can we replicate “learning by doing” if AI is now doing the doing?

- How do we maintain quality when AI-generated outputs aren’t always consistent?

- What support do mid-level managers need as they lead hybrid teams and navigate new delivery models?

- Where will our future managers come from if the traditional junior pipeline is shrinking?

- How can firms stay agile in people planning when AI is changing the shape of work so quickly?

DOWNLOAD CPR26 NOW

Thank you for reading The Skilled Consultant. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so to receive all our articles direct to your inbox.
There are several other ways you can interact with Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training….

1. Connect with Deri Hughes (Founder & MD) on LinkedIn

2. Connect with Colin Mann (MD) on LinkedIn

3. Book a 30 minute intro call with Deri Hughes

4. Stay informed about our free workshops and webinars - follow Honeycomb on LinkedIn or visit our website.

It shows up time and again in our consulting training - starkly in business development and sales work, but it’s equally essential in delivery, internal leadership, and firm-building. We consider it one of the six factors that underpin performance at every stage of a consulting career.

This article explores what discipline really means in consulting, why it’s so hard to maintain, and what mechanisms can help.

Excellent delivery is underpinned by discipline

Let’s begin with the delivery space. There’s the obvious stuff: being rigorous in analysis, ensuring our insights are based on reliable data, and applying proper QA processes.

But there’s also discipline in the basics, like preparing well for client meetings. Most consultants know they should set a clear purpose, outcome, structure, and timing (POST) for every meeting. But when you look at your calendar and ask how many of your own meetings have this, discipline is often found wanting.

Delegation is another key area. As pressure mounts, we can slip in two ways:

• Under-delegating, because it feels faster to do it ourselves (even though it isn’t in the long run).

• Over-delegating, because we don’t have time to give proper direction or support we default to a hands-off, overly empowering style, and hope for the best.

Similarly, most leaders know they should create stretch opportunities for their team and follow up with coaching and feedback. But do we do this consistently? And when feedback is required in the moment, are we disciplined enough to offer it?

In business development, discipline often beats skill

In BD and sales, discipline often matters more than skill. The real challenge isn’t knowing what to do. It’s doing it. Repeatedly.

Take network nurturing: many consultants know they should build and maintain relationships over time. But it requires consistent, often unglamorous, effort. The “3-2-1” model we sometimes share is a good example. After a networking event:

• Within 3 hours: make initial contact (ideally on LinkedIn).

• Within 2 days: send a follow-up (e.g. an article you discussed).

• Within 1 week: send something more substantial (e.g. a proposal to meet).

This process isn’t complicated. But it requires discipline. Too often, we return from a great event and dive straight back into delivery. The moment is lost.

The same applies to visibility. Having a consistent digital presence builds credibility. But posting regularly, with a cadence that reinforces your brand, takes discipline.

Without discipline, the internal work never gets done

Then there’s the work we do for the firm: internal initiatives, compliance, proposition development, content management. These almost always come third.

• First priority: client delivery

• Second: BD and sales

• Third: everything else

Consequently, the initiatives most critical to firm-wide resilience sit in the “important but not urgent” quadrant. They languish.

It takes discipline (and often good leadership) to carve out time, drive momentum, and engage others to care about it too.

Why discipline breaks down

Some of the reasons are obvious: being busy, competing priorities, lack of time.

But others are more subtle:

• The payoff is too far away
  Many of these actions don’t offer immediate results. That makes them easier to deprioritise.

• Our inner game slips
  When our energy, motivation or confidence is low - whether due to life outside work, sleep, or just the long winter - our self-talk changes. We rationalise, “It can wait.” “It’s not that important.”

• Fear
  Delegating, posting on LinkedIn, or nudging a senior contact all carry perceived risk. Fear leads to avoidance. Avoidance erodes discipline.

So what helps?

We need to think about systems and support. Here are some practical mechanisms that help consultants stay disciplined:

1. Rhythm and routine

   Just like regular gym-goers, many consultants succeed because they operate on rhythm. Setting times in the week for key BD or internal activities helps build that routine.

2. Prompted structure

   E.g. syncing CRM reminders with diary holds can make a big difference. A prompt in Slack + 15 minutes in your diary = higher follow-through.

3. Executive support

   A great EA doesn’t just manage your inbox. They know your internal tasks and prompts, and help nudge you when things are slipping.

4. Mutual accountability

   A peer who holds you to account (and vice versa) is hugely powerful. No one wants to be the one who let the team down. This is your gym buddy effect at work.

5. (Emerging) AI assistance

   We’re starting to explore how AI tools can help. Imagine systems that spot when your LinkedIn cadence drops, or detect CRM tasks going cold before you do. There’s promise here and we’ll share more as we test.

One final thought

Discipline isn’t just about personal willpower. It’s about designing environments, routines, and relationships that make the right thing easier to do than the easy thing.

That’s what we need more of in consulting: not heroic individual effort, but shared systems of discipline. It can seem like more effort to put those in place, but once they are, you reap the benefits for a long time to come.

Subscribe now

Share

Thank you for reading The Skilled Consultant. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so to receive all our articles direct to your inbox.
There are several other ways you can interact with Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training….

1. Connect with Deri Hughes (Founder & MD) on LinkedIn

2. Connect with Colin Mann (MD) on LinkedIn

3. Book a 30 minute intro call with Deri Hughes

4. Stay informed about our free workshops and webinars - follow Honeycomb on LinkedIn or visit our website.

We brought in a leading expert to help unpack the challenge: David A. Fields, author of The Irresistible Consultant’s Guide to Winning Clients. In this session, he explores why rainmakers are so rare and what it really takes to grow them from within.

David started with some home truths:

1. Rainmaker dependency is a real risk…and a growth cap

David kicked off with some sobering data: in most firms under $50M, 90% of revenue is driven by just three people. The risks are clear - losing one of them can halve your income. But beyond that, the reliance on a few individuals sharply limits a firm’s growth, valuation, and resilience.

2. Most attempts to ‘buy’ business development don’t work

Hiring in external salespeople with a “golden Rolodex” rarely delivers, especially for boutique and mid-sized firms. The sale of consulting is relational, expert-led, and trust-based. Unless you’re in a commoditised, low-fee market, external BD hires are unlikely to succeed.

This perspective aligns with Prof. Daniel Muzio’s research on hiring rainmakers. We were fortunate to host a webinar with him in October 2025 called Why Your Superstar Senior Hire is Likely to Fail. Click here to watch that one.

3. Consultants are not coin-operated

Incentives and targets alone won’t shift behaviour. As David put it: “The incentives piece doesn’t work…consultants get into the business to solve problems, to help clients, not just to make more money.” If your strategy relies on dangling bigger bonuses, you’ll likely be disappointed.

4. Skills training is essential, but not sufficient

Standalone skills training, delivered in isolation, won’t make someone a rainmaker. Colin Mann, MD Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training agreed: “You’re going to have a fun day together and people will…go back to their desk and do whatever they were doing before. We have evidence of a broader programme (working), which seeks to develop the mindset component, motivation, inner game, self-understanding of where they’re trying to get to career-wise…then combining it with skills training, expectation setting and incentives.”

5. You can’t just tell people to “do what I do”

Many founders try to mentor others into rainmaking. But the traits that made them successful - entrepreneurial drive, risk tolerance, appetite for rejection - are rarely shared by the broader consulting team. In short, people who join consulting firms are not like people who found consulting firms.

So what does work?

David offered a proven 10-step roadmap for building internal rainmakers:

1–7: Foundation building (for the firm)

• Committing to a 3-year investment (yes, really)

• Ensuring delivery confidence so BD doesn’t feel risky

• Clarifying positioning and messaging

• Modelling the right mindset from leadership

• Selecting and supporting the right people

• Assigning responsibilities

• Rebalancing expectations (lower utilisation, higher BD time)

8–10: Skill-building (for the individual)

• Relationship development skills (Year 1)

• Pursuit and opportunity management skills (Year 2)

• Leading BD and coaching others (Year 3)

During the webinar David explores each of these in more depth, and responds to a number of interesting questions from the live audience.

If you’re serious about creating a scalable, resilient business development engine inside your firm, the message is clear: you can’t shortcut it, but it is possible.

If you want some help to figure out what that might mean for your firm, please get in touch. We are always happy to chat.

Subscribe now

Share

Thank you for reading The Skilled Consultant. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so to receive all our articles direct to your inbox.
There are several other ways you can interact with Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training….

1. Connect with Deri Hughes (Founder & MD) on LinkedIn

2. Connect with Colin Mann (MD) on LinkedIn

3. Book a 30 minute intro call with Deri Hughes

4. Stay informed about our free workshops and webinars - follow Honeycomb on LinkedIn or visit our website.

Let’s say you’ve got a revenue target of £1 million and your typical consulting project sells for £100,000. Simple maths suggests you need to sell 10 projects. But that’s only part of the story. You also need to factor in:

• Conversion rates at each stage of your sales process

• Timing - when work needs to be sold and delivered i.e. if you win 10 projects in September, you likely won’t deliver them all by year end.

This short guide gives you a practical model to plan backwards from your number, step by step.

Reverse engineer your sales behaviours

Most consulting projects start with a proposal. So the first step is understanding:

• How many proposals you need to send

• At what average value

• And with what expected conversion rate

If your proposal-to-project conversion rate is around 50%*, then to win 10 projects, you’ll need to send 20 proposals over the year.

*50% is a sweet-spot conversion rate. If you’re achieving 75–80%, you may be pricing too low. If you are only getting 20–30%, your proposition may be unclear, or perhaps you’re sending cold/underprepared proposals.

But you can’t send a proposal until you’ve had a conversation about an opportunity. We call these opportunity calls - and we define them as any conversation related to a new piece of work not currently in your pipeline. These can be with a new prospect or a new person inside an existing client.

Not every opportunity call leads to a proposal. We typically find that about 60% of opportunity calls result in a proposal being sent.

Upstream from that, you need to look at enquiries or early-stage potential opportunities. Not all enquiries lead to an opportunity call. We typically see about 80% convert into a real conversation.

So, in this example, for every 10 projects you want to win:

• You may need to send 20 proposals

• Which means having ~35 opportunity calls

• Which requires ~45 inbound enquiries

Timing is everything

Of course, you then need to consider when each of those steps must happen and the phasing through the year. We find a good rule of thumb to be:

• A proposal should go in at least two months before you expect to recognise revenue

• An opportunity call should happen a month before that i.e. at least three months before revenue is booked

Your experience may be different, but it’s valuable to know the typical lag for your sector and cliental. Once you understand this, you can phase not only your revenue targets for the year, but your enquiries, opportunity calls, and proposals targets too.

Then track them.

If your enquiries are lagging now, you are building up a problem for yourself in Q2, so get focused on some ‘top-of-funnel’ activity that will move you back on track.

If you’re not planning at this level of detail, you’re trying to hit a sales target with a strategy of hope. And hope is not a good strategy.

“Failing to plan is planning to fail”

If you haven’t got a 2026 plan yet, take an hour and write down your best guess at:

• Your project volume and average value

• Your proposals target

• Your opportunity calls target

• Your enquiries target

• Your top-of-funnel activity plan

• How this all should be phased by month

If you want to pressure test your numbers with us, just drop a note in the comments.

Subscribe now

Share

Thank you for reading The Skilled Consultant. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so to receive all our articles direct to your inbox.
There are several other ways you can interact with Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training….

1. Connect with Deri Hughes (Founder & MD) on LinkedIn

2. Connect with Colin Mann (MD) on LinkedIn

3. Book a 30 minute intro call with Deri Hughes

4. Stay informed about our free workshops and webinars - follow Honeycomb on LinkedIn or visit our website.

Their verdict? Despite a tough few years, consulting is entering a new phase. But the rules are changing, and firms that can’t adapt quickly enough may struggle to keep up.

This session drew on their conversations with hundreds of firms over the past year. Here are the key insights, especially relevant to firm leaders, proposition owners, and anyone thinking hard about talent, AI, or growth strategy for 2026.

The double… triple… quadruple squeeze

Luk described 2025 as the year of the “AI double squeeze”, with many firms caught between falling revenue from smaller projects (as clients use AI to self-serve) and rising costs (as those projects are pushed up to seniors). Rob added a third pressure: clients expecting AI to be baked into larger projects, with lower fees or faster delivery as a result. And Deri pointed out a fourth: pressure to innovate service offerings using AI internally.

That makes four simultaneous pressures:

1. Revenue loss from smaller “order-take” projects

2. Increased delivery costs as seniors absorb work

3. Client price pressure on larger projects with AI expectations

4. Innovation pressure to develop AI-led services

The result? Many firms are seeing their traditional margin engines erode. And while this was visible in early signs before 2025, it became acute last year.

AI maturity come in three waves

Deri shared a simple frame for understanding how firms are starting to apply AI internally:

1. Efficiency – using AI to automate internal workflows and reduce delivery costs

2. Expertise – enabling faster knowledge access and onboarding through internal knowledge systems

3. New propositions – building new, AI-enabled client offerings (still rare)

Rob and Luk agreed that most firms are still early in this journey. Many consulting firms have advised clients on AI without yet transforming their own internal models.

Specialism wins in 2026

Asked how they’d build a new consulting business in 2026, Rob and Luk were clear: specialism wins.

“Twenty years ago, we set our business up on a four by four matrix - four sectors, four services. We thought that was quite tight. (Now), if you’re a single sector, single service…you’re certainly on the right tracks as far as I would be concerned”

That means:

• Go deeper than you’re comfortable with

• Lead with a high-stakes client issue

• Codify, repeat, and refine until you can predict outcomes

Luk also argued that new firms need to behave more like SaaS startups: hire senior people early, pre-invest in building credibility, and test quickly. Both he and Deri stressed that codification is key to unlocking AI’s potential — without repeatable data, AI offers little leverage.

The changing talent model

A shift from pyramid to diamond-shaped teams is changing the role of juniors and the way firms invest in them.

• Juniors are still vital, but AI skills will increasingly be their differentiator

• The old model (bringing them along and billing for learning) no longer holds

• Firms will need to invest directly in development, not expect clients to subsidise it

• The future is a two-way apprenticeship: juniors help seniors stay tech-current, while learning judgment and delivery

“It’s the senior folks who are going to have to adapt way more than they’ve realised yet to everything related to AI: AI delivery, AI quality assurance, managing Gen Z and then Gen Alpha people entering the workforce and all of the differences there.”

What matters in 2026: A final checklist

Here’s what the panel agreed will define successful firms this year:

• A narrow, high-stakes proposition in a growing niche

• Clear sector specialism — and language to match

• Outcome-based pricing, but only where results are repeatable and proven

• Internal AI use: not just talking the talk

• Investment in human capability: especially trust, empathy, and resilience under pressure

Subscribe now

Share

Thank you for engaging with The Skilled Consultant. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so to receive all our articles direct to your inbox.
There are several other ways you can interact with Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training….

1. Connect with Deri Hughes (Founder & MD) on LinkedIn

2. Connect with Colin Mann (MD) on LinkedIn

3. Book a 30 minute intro call with Deri Hughes

4. Stay informed about our free workshops and webinars - follow Honeycomb on LinkedIn or visit our website.

It sounds like a natural evolution. But in reality, it’s often where good consultants start to feel overstretched, unclear, and on the back foot. Delivery still needs to happen. The quality still has to hold. And yet, time spent on project work is time not spent growing the business or building client relationships.

I’ve been there myself. You go from being the person who does the thing, to the person who has to make sure other people are doing the thing — and doing it well across multiple teams, clients, and workstreams. If you’re not careful, you end up back in the weeds, just with less time and more pressure.

So how do you lead across multiple projects, protect quality, and still create space to step up into your new role?

“I can’t step back - I’m accountable”

This is one of the most common phrases I hear from people.

I get it. Most of us have spent years building our reputations by delivering. Letting go of that core activity feels risky. But your role is shifting. It’s no longer about what you can personally deliver but what your team can deliver, with your support.

That means you have to manage differently. Oversight has to replace ownership. Support replaces control. You’re still accountable, but the way you carry that responsibility has to evolve.

There are two critical enablers that make this work:

1. Delegating well

2. Establishing layered oversight

1. Delegate well: look for low-risk, not low-effort

When people start delegating, they often focus on low-effort tasks: admin, formatting, quick bits of work. But the real unlock comes from delegating low-risk, high-effort work; things that don’t need your expert judgement, but take up a lot of your time.

Then, how you delegate matters as much as what. You have to give your team the authority to own their work. That includes decisions. If you hold on to every decision, you have to stay across every detail. You’ll inevitably become a bottleneck (and exhausted!).

If the idea of relinquishing control is giving you the jitters, it may help to follow a delegation checklist such as this:

There’s a mindset shift here, too. Someone doing the task differently from how you would isn’t necessarily a problem. In fact, they might do it better (this happens more often than we like to admit!). And, even if it’s only 80% of what you’d have done, the time and development/growth gains (for you and your team) are usually worth it.

2. Establish layered oversight: a system for confidence

Delegation only works if there’s a system that keeps you confident in what’s going on, without dragging you into everything.

In my first career, I worked in aircraft engineering. Junior technicians were often trusted with critical inspection tasks. There was no blind trust or abdication of responsibility - people’s lives were on the line. But it worked, thanks to the layered assurance system.

First, we had strong systems: checklists, training, and clear documentation. Then, spot checks: experienced engineers would drop in, check a few tasks, and catch issues early. And finally (most importantly), the culture supported it. You were expected to own your work, ask for help, and flag problems early.

That mindset maps surprisingly well into consulting. You don’t need to inspect every deliverable, but you do need to:

• Have a plan that’s visible and actively used, a basic risk register, or a simple reporting system.

• Build in review moments that don’t rely on memory or goodwill e.g. spot checks, reviewing a sample of reports weekly.

• Create a team culture where quality, honesty, and trust sit side by side and people feel confident to surface concerns and questions.

All three layers matter. Together, they create the conditions for you to lead across multiple projects without being constantly pulled back into detail.

Build a rhythm that works for you and your team

Oversight doesn’t have to mean lots of heavy meetings. I’ve seen people run this well using a simple weekly rhythm:

• A light-touch check-in on Monday: “What’s on this week? What’s got you worried?”

• A midweek review of something in progress: “Let’s glance at the draft now, not at the final hour.”

• Friday reflection: “What worked? What do we need to tune for next week?”

This rhythm gives you good visibility without micromanaging. It also gives your team clarity about when and how you’ll be involved, which means fewer ad hoc interruptions, and more focused support.

Other tools I’ve seen work:

• A short escalation matrix: what needs to come to you, and when

• A shared quality checklist: what “good” looks like for key deliverables or meetings

• A rolling delivery tracker: just enough to spot drift before it becomes a problem

These don’t need to be heavyweight processes. Think of them as scaffolding — enough structure for people to do their best work without you hovering over them.

Can you handle the white space in your diary?

When we get deeper into this stuff in training programmes, it often becomes clear that the real barrier to progress isn’t practical, but emotional.

Creating space in your diary can feel uncomfortable. If you’re not fixing things, chasing deliverables, or solving client problems, what are you doing? If your value has always come from being dependable in delivery, stepping back can feel like a loss of identity.

And then it’s harder to avoid the lurking internal voice that says, “You should be using that space for business development.”

The majority of consultants experience resistance stepping into sales and BD. It feels unfamiliar, it’s less structured and more relational, and you don’t get the same direct feedback. All in all, it can feel ambiguous and exposing.

“I don’t really want to create time because it means I’m then a bit exposed to having to demonstrate success in BD.”

Tackling that fear - recognising that (quietly, perhaps subconsciously) you are holding yourself back by keeping busy with what you know - can often be the biggest unlock.

We have lots of resources which dive further into sales processes and psychology. If you’re interested in learning more, our webinar Consulting Sales Demystified could be a good place to start - CLICK HERE to watch on demand.

Subscribe now

Share

Thank you for reading The Skilled Consultant. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so to receive all our articles direct to your inbox.
There are several other ways you can interact with Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training….

1. Connect with Deri Hughes (Founder & MD) on LinkedIn

2. Connect with Colin Mann (MD) on LinkedIn

3. Book a 30 minute intro call with Deri Hughes

4. Stay informed about our free workshops and webinars - follow Honeycomb on LinkedIn or visit our website.

So what’s the ambition the leaders of these teams have?

They want to change the way these experts engage with clients. To shift from ‘expert’ to ‘consultant’ and then to ‘trusted advisor’. Typically that means getting their heads up from the detail, understanding the commercial context clients operate in, and building relationships that go beyond the technical. It means making more strategic recommendations to more senior people. Ultimately, it means influencing the direction of bigger programmes of work and being trusted with earlier stage conversations and longer-term planning.

And some of these team leaders have even loftier ambitions. They want their technical folks to go further than just ‘trusted advisor’, to get to…

(whisper it quietly or you’ll scare them off)

…‘sales person’

How can we tell this is a scary topic? Because “Sales” frequently gets rebranded to “BD”. In fact, the very word can provoke a reaction like saying someone saying “Voldemort” at the Leaky Cauldron pub.

It’s a perfectly understandable goal. These are high-performing experts doing exceptional technical work who have deep trust from their clients. Clients who often come back wanting more, even without the consultant proactively driving sales. Their leaders see the potential to do even more, even bigger, even better work with those clients - if only these technical folks would start shifting more towards being sales people.

But, that ambition often runs into resistance. And for good reason.

What gets in the way?

I asked the question below in a LinkedIn poll recently. The majority felt that this transition was entirely possible, particularly for someone whose personality is naturally suited to sales.

The reality is, however, that personality can be a blocker for some technical consultants when it comes to seeing themselves as effective salespeople. Many deeply technical people aren’t especially drawn to human interaction.

I say that without judgement. It’s an observation, but it makes sense. These are people who’ve spent their careers building deep expertise in a specific domain. They often identify much more strongly with the work itself than with the people around it. Their interests tend to be system- or topic-centred, rather than relational. They’re more drawn to things than people, broadly speaking. But, as we all know, people buy from people.

When they’re suddenly asked to become more ‘consulting-capable’, it can feel like an identity mismatch. And when that shift is stretched further to include sales conversations, it often results in wholesale rejection. The transplant doesn’t take.

My advice: Don’t leap straight to sales

Trying to take someone from deep technical expert to salesperson in one step rarely works. Unless someone already has a natural interest in commercial conversations, that kind of leap tends to get people defensive and reluctant rather than enthusiastic.

The language doesn’t resonate. The behaviours feel performative. The whole thing lands as inauthentic. Resistance is often the result.

Behind that resistance can be deeper stuff. Insecurity about how others might perceive them. Concern they’ll be exposed if the conversation moves outside their domain of expertise.

Fear of rejection.

Even a shift into a ‘trusted advisor’ space, which may feel like the middle ground, can be a stretch. It asks people to open up, to move from content into conversation, to initiate meetings without an immediate deliverable, or to engage clients beyond the boundaries of the work itself.

For some, those are deeply uncomfortable behaviours.

If you’d love your team to go on this journey, first ask yourself, “What is it reasonable to expect in terms of a shift on the axis from ‘deep technical delivery expert’ to ‘broad client relationship expert’ to ‘salesperson’?”

Start with motivation

Before you begin any kind of skills development or capability programme, you need to get underneath the behavioural ask and solve for desire.

Why would someone want to change? What might motivate them to try?

If you skip this step and go straight into capability-building, there’s a significant risk that people show up to training disengaged. I’ve seen it many times. They sit in the room, but because they haven’t chosen to be there they are cynical, suspicious, and searching for reasons why it won’t work. It really is an uphill struggle.

Simply, you won’t get meaningful change until the people in the room are choosing it for themselves, and that requires you to get deep into their motivations.

One of the most effective tools we’ve found to unlock this is the use of mindset statements.

This means creating the space for people to talk honestly about:

• What they believe their role is

• What they want their role to be

• And what kind of mindset it will take to thrive in that role

With those statements documented we ask the participants to make a commitment. Are they bought into trying to operate from that mindset? And to shifting their behaviours where needed?

The tone of this session matters. It has to be open, transparent and safe - a place where people can share what feels uncomfortable or uncertain. Where debate can happen over what is or isn’t a reasonable expectation for that role. Where people can say “I don’t want to do that” without fear.

The outcome isn’t a slide deck or a framework. It’s a shared commitment: This is the job I’m signed up to, and I know what that will take.

The easiest way to get started with mindset statements is to brainstorm with the team and aim to get to 10 - 12 statements that cover a given role. These will typically be “I statements” (phrases that start with “I”). This is important as each person is owning these things for themselves. It drives commitment.

We find a set of sentence stems is a useful way to get into this brainstorm. Get people to write down as many phrases as they can think of, starting with these words.

It can help to organise those against the sections of your competency framework, giving you 4 or 5 groups of phrases. Synthesise them down to an initial set and then discuss each one in turn.

The trick is to finetune the expectations. Say you’re talking to some Senior Managers and aiming to pin down exactly what they are - and aren’t - responsible for. In the domain of Sales the group may have written down things like:

• It’s my job to deliver great work so clients come back for more

• I’m responsible for staying in touch with my clients after a project ends

• I drive new leads for the firm by regularly publishing new insights

• I don’t need to create new opportunities yet

You can then debate which of those are true and which aren’t. Refine them. Iterate to a version everyone round the room is prepared to buy in to.

Ultimately you’ll end up with something like this:

That process is super powerful. Your technical experts will start to see themselves differently, and be more accepting of help. Those people who might have shown up to training cynical, suspicious, and searching for reasons why it won’t work? Now they want to be there as they are bought into the ‘What’ and keen to learn the ‘How’.

If you want to get your technical experts on that journey from world-class at delivery to trusted advisors and revenue generators - even identifying as salespeople - you must get the mindset right first. Mindset statements are a simple and powerful tool to drive that.

Subscribe now

Share

Thank you for reading The Skilled Consultant. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so to receive all our articles direct to your inbox.
There are several other ways you can interact with Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training….

1. Connect with Deri Hughes (Founder & MD) on LinkedIn

2. Connect with Colin Mann (MD) on LinkedIn

3. Book a 30 minute intro call with Deri Hughes

4. Stay informed about our free workshops and webinars - follow Honeycomb on LinkedIn or visit our website.

We were delighted to welcome Maurizio Cuna (), Partner at Infosys Consulting and 20+ year consulting veteran, for a wide-ranging discussion inspired by his new book, Beyond Slides. As his title suggests, Maurizio argues that great consultants succeed not just through sharp analysis and communication, but through attitude, relationships, influencing, and professionalism.

All are things typically described as ‘soft skills’, but Maurizio highlights the misnomer:

This is a valuable listen for technically-strong consultants looking to grow their influence. Also, for managers and L&D leads supporting transitions into leadership, client ownership or business development roles.

Expect to discover:

• Why being technically brilliant is rarely enough
  At some point, someone else will have the same technical skills as you — plus something more. That “something” often decides who gets promoted, who gets invited back, and who builds lasting client relationships.

• The habits that compound into long-term impact
  Writing, reading widely, and developing a strong point of view aren’t just nice-to-haves. Done consistently, they help consultants clarify their thinking, grow their visibility, and contribute more effectively.

• Why trust is built through behaviour, not just competence
  Maurizio shares how he starts with trust, leads with generosity, and adapts to cultural context. The result: client relationships that last decades and teams that stay connected across continents.

• How to build connections as an introvert
  Many consultants are analytical introverts. The key is understanding your style and finding ways to connect that feel authentic, intentional, and grounded in real value.

Subscribe now

Share

There aren’t many consulting Partners sharing their experience of twenty years in the industry. Maurizio does so on LinkedIn, X, and through his own newsletter on Substack - - with wit and intellect. I encourage you to add him to your feed. And here’s a link to his #1 Amazon best seller - Beyond Slides.

Thank you for engaging with The Skilled Consultant. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please do so to receive all our articles direct to your inbox.
There are several other ways you can interact with Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training….

1. Connect with Deri Hughes (Founder & MD) on LinkedIn

2. Connect with Colin Mann (MD) on LinkedIn

3. Book a 30 minute intro call with Deri Hughes

4. Stay informed about our free workshops and webinars - follow Honeycomb on LinkedIn or visit our website.