The 6 things that will accelerate your skill development
If you are an ambitious consultant, answer these 6 questions
I recently ran a webinar on my Consulting Skills Accelerator model. I was speaking to ~35 leaders of boutique consulting firms who had an interest in helping their teams develop faster (the recording is here if that's you).
During the conversation I realised something was missing. Several times I've written down how I believe firms can best develop their people, and why that's important. I've recorded three videos on the topic. And had countless conversations with founders and talent teams at boutique consulting firms.
But, I haven't ever flipped that to talk about how individual consultants can help accelerate their own development.
In this month's newsletter I want to start that conversation by laying out my top tips for developing your own skills as a consultant.
How to develop consulting skills
In my Consulting Skills Accelerator process I ask six foundational questions:
1. Vision: What is your firm trying to achieve?
2. Strategy: How will you make that Vision a reality?
3. Capabilities: What capabilities are critical?
4. Career Paths: What paths can your team choose?
5. Skill Practice: How will your team develop their skills?
6. Decisions: How are Talent decisions made?
To make this mindset work for you as an individual consultant you can consider the same six questions. This applies whether you're an independent consultant or working in a consulting firm.
Let's take each in turn.
Vision: What are you trying to achieve as a consultant?
No matter what job you do it's a valuable exercise to be clear on WHY you're doing that job. This is especially true for demanding jobs like consulting.
There are sacrifices associated with being a consultant. The hours tend to be long, there is often travel and time away from family, and the job is intellectually challenging. It can be tiring, even stressful at times.
Having a sense of purpose helps you stay on track, and make better decisions.
At a minimum this should include an awareness of the vision for your consulting firm, or for the project you're working on as an independent, and a sense of how motivating that is for you. But there is opportunity to go deeper with this.
One tool that helps with this is to define your Personal Mission. This is a short statement that articulates the person you want to be in the world, and reminds you to keep pushing towards it.
I recommend developing your own Personal Mission. As part of that process you can reflect on how being a consultant is helping you to achieve it.
Jamie, Graham and I talk more about this in the Show Up! podcast, episode 5 - take a listen if you want to learn more about the concept of mission, and how to use it as a practical tool that drives your decision making.
Strategy: How will you achieve your Vision as a consultant?
Getting clarity on your Visions - your 'Why' - is only step one. You also need to figure out the 'How'. What do you need to do to make your Vision become a reality? These choices are the basis of strategy.
Simply put, this boils down to asking yourself 'Where to Play' and 'How to Win' questions. To make your Vision a reality, what type of consulting is most appropriate for you?
Should you be working in a large firm, a boutique or independently? Who are your ideal clients? What problems do you solve for them? How do you solve those problems?
When you work at a major firm, like Bain & Company where I spent six years, these "How" questions are answered for you. My first two weeks on the job, as a fresh-faced Associate Consultant nearly 20 years ago, were spent learning the Bain Toolkit.
After that I was allocated to a project team, working with a major insurer, which answered any questions I had about my client and what we were doing for them.
When you're in a consulting firm, particularly early in your career, you may not have much direct influence over the "How" of being a consultant. There are two ways to swing the balance in your favour though: build a strong reputation, and build strong relationships with internal decision makers. More on that later.
While large firms like Bain have well established approaches, boutique firms and independents vary in how developed & documented their strategic choices are. If this isn't clear where you are, ask the question - or document it yourself.
I was speaking to a client last week, a ~30 person consulting firm who were putting in place a new competency framework. The MD asked her Talent Manager if she was clear on the strategy for the business. The Talent Manager answered, honestly, that she wasn't.
That was a lightbulb moment for the MD - she realised she needed to do more to ensure that everyone in the business was clear on their strategy.
As an independent, focused strategic choices help you become known for something and build deep expertise. That in turn makes winning new projects easier, supports higher prices, and gives you a platform to build a team around if you want to.
With your 'Why' and your 'How' clear, it's time to think about the capabilities you need to develop. This is the step where you move from thinking about outcomes to getting clear on the inputs - the behaviours and skills you need to be showing every day in order to execute your Strategy and realise your Vision.
Capabilities: What do you need to be great at?
The skills you need to be a great consultant will vary depending on how you are defining consulting for you. Your 'Why' and 'How'.
Within that, there are some core consulting skills that are important for most consultants. These are what we focus on in our training courses.
I think of these core skills in 5 buckets:
Problem-Solving
Workplanning
Building Trust
Communicating Recommendations
Visuals
Within each of those are more specific sub-skills. For example, when Building Trust, you need to demonstrate reliability (e.g., by agreeing specific actions and getting them done), and you also need to connect on an emotional level (e.g., by using active listening techniques).
The problem-solving skills you need will always include getting clear on the question you're addressing but there may be very specific skills you also need, depending on the type of consultant you are. For me, problem-solving skills include developing a hypothesis to test, gathering & validating data in different ways, analysis (Excel skills), facilitation and options structuring.
Other consultants focus other ways of solving problems - from coding to cost hunting to co-creation, and much more besides.
To nail down a manageable set of capabilities that are important to you, I recommend thinking through two questions:
What are the strengths I have that, when fully developed, will be true sources of differentiation?
What capabilities do I need to keep the promises I make? (these could include weaknesses you need to work on)
The target output from those is a set of ~15 skills that are important for you to develop to realise your personal vision as a consultant.
Career Path: What path will you choose?
Consulting is a fantastic springboard career. It can lead you in all kinds of directions, and I recommend considering those options thoughtfully and consciously on a regular basis - at least every couple of years.
For some of you, staying in consulting won't be the right option for the life you want to lead. Others may decide (as I did) that the job is what they want to do but working independently is right for them. And some of you may choose to stick with one firm your whole careers, realising you made the right choice first time.
The key thing to remember is that these are personal choices. The foundation for those choices is clarity on your Vision, Strategy, and Capabilities - what are you trying to achieve, what skills do you need to achieve that, and therefore what career path makes sense for you?
It may well be that your current firm doesn't offer the career path that you need. That's actually pretty common.
When I was CFOO at Credo Business Consulting we had a booming Healthcare practice, doing lots of private and public sector healthcare work. We were growing so fast that we needed to hire externally at the Manager level - never an easy thing to do.
After going through a process we were impressed with a candidate from Bain. Now, it's not common for a (good) Bain consultant to jump ship and move to a small 60 person boutique. We weren't confident we'd be able to persuade him.
This individual had done the work to know what kind of consultant he wanted to be, and his strategic choices centred around doing healthcare work - an opportunity he wasn't getting where he was.
For him, the career path choice to move from Bain to a boutique made perfect sense. And it worked out very well for us as he had immediate positive impact.
Skill Practice: How will you develop your skills?
Consulting is an apprenticeship business. There is simply no substitute for learning on the job, but there are important ways to maximise your learning from those case experiences.
To enable your chosen career path and realise your strategy, you need a systematic approach to developing those critical capabilities you've identified.
There are three main ways to do this:
Project work
Coaching and feedback
Training
The 70:20:10 model of skill development fits pretty well here I find. The percentages are indicative, but roughly 70% of your development comes from Project Work, 20% from Coaching & Feedback, and 10% from Training.
Given that, a few things are important to your skill development.
Firstly: Get on the right projects. Figure out what you need to experience and figure out a way to get on it.
Within a firm, this is often about internal networking - building relationships with those selling and staffing projects.
As an independent, or at smaller firms, the best way is to get involved in selling project work as early as possible.
By the way - selling is a critical skill for all consultants, and best thought of as advising and helping someone, who may then ask to pay you for ongoing help. That framing is less scary that the idea of cold-calling someone to sell them a pen they don't need.
Secondly: Find someone to hold up a mirror. Coaching and feedback can come from many sources but it only works if you're committed to looking in the mirror with honesty, and getting better (like the legendary Jim Telfer said to the 1997 British & Irish Lions, if you'll forgive me a moment of rugby nostalgia).
Here's some ways to get feedback:
Immediately after a client meeting, ask a colleague for feedback
Each week, write down 3 things you've learnt
Ask your clients for feedback - how could you be more helpful to them?
At the start of a project, tell your team 2-3 specific skills you're working on
Ask for regular structured performance reviews against the capabilities you've identified as critical for you
Find an informal mentor and ask them for honest feedback
Engage a coach for a block of work or on an ongoing basis
Thirdly: Invest in formal training. When I say invest, I'm not talking about money. I mean something much more precious - time.
It can be hard to make training a priority, and even harder to put what you've learnt into practice afterwards. I run a consulting skills training business so have a LOT of thoughts on training, which I'll save for another time.
For now, a couple of tips:
Find self-serve training (could be internal content, LinkedIn Learning, YouTube etc.) and commit to 30 minutes a week on a specific topic you've identified as critical
Engage with the formal training offered by your firm with curiosity and a desire to learn
After each session, write down a SMART action to embed something you've learnt (SMART = Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timebound)
Find an accountability partner, and make a commitment to check in with them after you've completed your SMART action
Those 4 things alone will supercharge your skill development.
Decisions: How are the decisions made that affect your development?
The final area I discuss with consulting firms as part of the Consulting Skills Accelerator approach is decision making.
There are four main areas of decisions relating to skill development within firms:
Project Allocations - who works on what?
Performance Reviews - what feedback will help each person?
Promotions & Pay - who is ready for the next level / salary increase / bonus?
Performance Management - are there specific areas of support anyone needs?
When it comes to managing your own skill development it's important to be aware of how these types of decisions influence you, and who is making those decisions. If it isn't clear who makes these decisions and how they are made - which it often isn't - then push to get clarity.
Most firms, at least most boutiques, haven't clearly defined those decisions processes or principles. Often there aren't single decision-makers. Senior players in the business have undue influence and objectivity is lost.
If that's the case where you are you can add a ton of value by helping to get clear on all of that. And once you have that clarity you can decide how best to influence those decisions for your skill development.
It's important to cultivate a long-term mindset on these decisions. Early in your career a few months can feel like forever. I get it - that was me as an AC at Bain, desperate to get promoted every six months. The reality is those few months make no difference in the grand scheme of things.
Rather than pushing for fast decisions in your favour, try to think about high quality decisions. The right decision for you.
What's the right decision for you? That depends on your Vision, your Strategy, the Capabilities you know you need, the Career Path you're following, and your Skill Practice priorities.
Take your time. Know where you're going. Develop your skills. Work consistently towards your Vision. Everything will fall into place.
My hope is that this post will help you write that story.
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