Blank Sheet Ready: The Transition to Senior Consultant
It's a sweet spot for learning — don't miss the opportunity
Not long ago, I spent time with a group of consultants who’d just received their first promotion. For many, this is the move from entry-level analyst into a senior consultant role, and it’s the first step where expectations noticeably lift.
At this stage, consultants are not usually running whole projects but starting to take responsibility for discrete work streams and, crucially, for the outputs of small teams. It’s a fascinating point in a consultant’s journey — and a moment when the right support can make all the difference.
Too many firms delay management training until people are leading whole engagements. But, when people first run a work stream, they’re in a sweet spot. They’re just starting to get things done through others — but the stakes are lower than when they’re managing full projects. It’s the ideal moment to build confidence and capability before they carry the full weight of delivery.
So, what should we actually be teaching at this stage to accelerate performance and enable them to step up well?
1. Practical Project Management: Planning, Risk and Delegation Challenge
Managing a work stream is smaller in scale but no less real than a full project. The essentials still matter: planning, understanding dependencies, and knowing how to front-load work to build in contingency.
Equally important is risk management. Too many new managers learn about risk by firefighting. A better approach is to help them anticipate what might go wrong and have a plan B, so they can spot early warning signs and act fast.
Finally, the delegation challenge can really trip people up. A senior project manager might pass tasks down to an experienced manager or senior consultant. But work stream leads are more likely to be delegating to fresh grads with no consulting background. That means they need to be far more deliberate — spelling out what’s required, why it matters, and what ‘good’ looks like. And they must resist the urge to just do the work themselves because it feels safer.
Actionable takeaway: Provide project management training for new senior consultants. Learning the basics of planning, risk management, and practical delegation now will help them fly, not just in this role, but in the bigger ones to come.
2. Structuring Skills: Ready for the Blank Sheet
A client of mine once described the test for senior consultants as being ‘blank sheet of paper ready’. It’s stuck with me because it cuts to the heart of this transition. Can your newly promoted consultants look at a problem and find a way in, rather than freezing?
Structuring complex problems and sharpening critical thinking are core consulting skills. But they need revisiting now, at a deeper level. Senior consultants need to be able to tackle an ambiguous problem with no obvious starting point. They can’t afford to get paralysed by the blank page.
In practice, this means having frameworks to unpack the big question into smaller, answerable ones. Knowing how to form a hypothesis so they can test assumptions and quickly see what evidence is needed. Using option trees and decision trees when a client wants choices and trade-offs rather than one ‘answer’. And knowing when a standard approach — like a cost-benefit grid or SWOT — is a wise choice which can help them move faster.
Actionable takeaway: Don’t assume they’ve ‘done structuring’. Revisit it, build on it, and make sure they can approach messy problems with confidence.
3. Communication: Upward and Outward
Communication gets talked about at every level, and rightly so. But what’s critical now?
Many newly promoted consultants assume managing upwards just means providing a status update. But, there’s more to it. They need to get good at:
Reporting progress: Providing clear, timely updates that are structured, factual, and solution-oriented. Nobody wants to hear a laundry list of problems — they want clarity on the issue, what’s been done, and what’s needed.
Making demands: This can get uncomfortable. Workstream leads often don’t have decision rights, so they need to be clear about what’s blocking them, what input they need from their manager or client, and by when. It’s not always natural for people at this level to push for clarity, but it’s vital.
Staying connected to the bigger picture: A risk is becoming so focused on their slice that they miss upstream or downstream impacts. Good upward management includes checking alignment and ensuring you’re still solving the right problem.
Senior consultants also start to interact with more senior clients. Gravitas and credibility count here. They need to practise forming a simple point of view — backed by evidence and framed in the client’s language — and learn to be composed and thoughtful under questioning. Consultants at this level can undermine credibility by offering recommendations that ignore real-world constraints, like the client’s culture, budget or internal politics. A bit of industry context and organisational awareness helps guard against this.
Actionable takeaway: Focus training on upward management and credible client communication. Teach them how to ask for what they need and give them a toolkit that enables them to act credibly with more senior clients.
4. Resilience: Staying the Course
The first step into management brings a very different kind of pressure. Many new seniors suddenly realise that good work isn’t enough anymore: they’re responsible for others’ work too, often without full control over all the variables. It can be stressful, and that stress can leak into how they lead and provide more opportunities to burn out if they don’t learn to manage their energy.
In practice, this involves:
Understanding your own pressure points: Everyone has different stress triggers — tight deadlines, unpredictable clients, ambiguous tasks. Help people name theirs so they can plan around them.
Building small habits that protect energy: Planning work realistically, taking proper breaks, and being clear on when they’re not available, so they don’t burn out trying to prove themselves.
Learning to bounce back quickly: When mistakes happen — and they will — the real skill is how fast they recover and refocus. New managers can spiral if they take slip-ups personally. Support them to separate ‘who I am’ from ‘what went wrong’.
Role-modelling it to juniors: If senior consultants are stressed and disorganised, so is the workstream. Their team will watch them for cues, so their resilience has a wider cultural impact.
Actionable takeaway: Resilience training can be overlooked, but this is a great time to provide it. Help people recognise stress signals and create simple strategies to recharge. Early resilience habits stick.
5. The Ownership Mindset Shift: The Mark of Success
Finally, the mindset shift. For me, the real mark of a successful step up is ownership. Not just managing tasks but owning the work stream end to end.
Ownership means delivering outcomes, anticipating obstacles, and doing what it takes to create the conditions for success. That might mean clarifying expectations, calling out resource gaps, or pushing for decisions. It’s this attitude that gives senior leaders confidence that the work stream is in safe hands.
Actionable takeaway: Encourage people to see themselves as owners, not just managers. It changes how they show up and how they’re perceived.
A first promotion is more than a new title. It’s the point when people start to build the skills that will define their next decade: clear planning, thoughtful delegation, confident structuring, credible communication, genuine resilience, and true ownership.
If you want your new senior consultants to thrive, the key message is: support them early. Invest now to accelerate their development, and the benefits will compound over time.
If you want to chat through what this might mean for your firm, feel free to drop me an email at colin.mann@honeycombps.co.uk.
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