How to choose a consultant

© 2004, Coert Visser & René Butter

Nowadays many organizations find it important to go about hiring consultants critically and consciously. Hiring them too easily or uncritically can lead to too high costs and possibly to becoming too dependent on consultants. Furthermore, carelessly choosing a consultant can lead to disappointment about his approach and its results. This article offers you a few ideas to help you determine whether a consultant fits well or not with your organization. The article first outlines our view on successful consultancy projects. Next, you will find a checklist to help you select a consultant on the basis of an intake conversation. And finally, we offer some practical tips about how to evaluate the effectiveness of running or finished consultancy projects.

Successful consultancy

Roughly three factors cause the effectiveness of consultancy. Those are – in decreasing importance -:

1. Client-specific factors: the most important category of factors has to do with the strengths, the goal-orientedness, the motivation and the faith that the change can be accomplished of clients. It’s clients, not consultants (however useful they may be) that in the majority of cases are the most important causers of successful change, also when consultants are involved.
2. Relationship factors: a second category of factors important for successful consultancy involves the quality of the working relationship between clients and consultants. A good working relationship enables clients to work pleasurable and well with consultants and ensures that the relationship will not stand in the way but, instead, will be a boost to successful change.
3. Consultant methods: The third category refers to the models, methods and tools of consultants, like diagnostic tools, project management approaches, questionnaires, and specific intervention approaches. Of course these tools can also contribute importantly to the success of consultancy projects but according to us are of lesser importance than client-specific factors and relationship factors. The danger exists that the method chosen will be made so important that it will almost overshadow the goals of the client. It is important to constantly keep in mind that means must not become more important than goals. For a method to be effective it has to be tailored to the situation of the client and changed whenever clients expect it.

In sum, this means that while using consultants two things are critical: ‘goal-orientedness’ and ‘client directedness’. Goal-orientedness means that the consultancy is focus on achieving the client goals. Client directedness means that the client is and remains in charge of the process and will not become dependent on the consultant.

Checklist for choosing new consultants

The checklist below is based directly on the abovementioned view on consultancy and can be used by a client after a first meeting with a consultant.

Every ‘Yes’ you have chosen contributes to the probability of a successful project. If you have mainly chose ‘yes’ answers but also a few times ‘No’ or ‘?’ then you may want to talk about these with the consultant. Perhaps there are some good and acceptable reasons for these non-yes answers or perhaps you may change them into ‘Yes’ answers after all. If you have chosen many ‘no’ answers however, we are less optimistic about the chances of success. If our view on consultancy is correct, many ‘No’ answers are a negative predictor of success. You’d better not continue with this consultant.

Evaluating running or finished consultancy projects

Just as useful as consciously choosing a new consultant may be to evaluate your current consultants. Of course, from this you may learn useful things for any new consultancy assignments. An important author on evaluating consultancy projects is Jack Phillips. In his book ‘The Consultants Scorecard’ he discussed six important performance indicators, which are helpful for evaluating consultancy projects. Freely translated these are:

1. Overall satisfaction of clients
2. The extent to which clients have learnt
3. The extent to which the advise is actually implemented / has led to actual change
4. The advantages that are actually experienced due to the consultancy
5. The pay back time of the investment
6. Other immaterial gains of the advise

Thinking in terms of these separate levels can help a lot for demonstrating unequivocally the utility of the use of the consultant. Perhaps level 5 requires a further comment. It will not always be possible to determine the pay back time of a consultancy projects exactly. We acknowledge that exactly quantifying the utility will often be impossible but addressing the question of the financial utility will often be very useful in itself.

Conclusion

How ever sad it may be in some respects for consultants, the tendency of clients to deal more consciously and critical with hiring consultants is a good one. We hope to offer a practical contribution to a justified use of consultants.

References

1. Duncan, B.L. & Miller, S.D (2000). The Heroic Client. Jossey-Bass
2. Phillips, J. (2000). The consultants scorecard. McGraw-Hill.

Review of The Heroic Client

Barry Duncan and Scott Miller are with Marc Hubble directors of The Institute for the Study of Therapeutic Change (...). These people play an important role in improving and renewing therapy. In this book, the authors explain how therapy has for too long been been neglecting, ignoring, and depersonalizing clients, by its over-emphasis on methods and techniques, by following the medical model, by its emphasis on pathology, by hegemony of biological approaches, and so on.

The authors first debunk the myths of:

1. PSYCHIATRIC DIAGNOSIS: a) it lacks reliability, b) it lacks validity, c) it puts the blame on the client, and d) it is often motivated by self-interest, fueled by greed, and blows with the winds of fashion,
2. DRUG TREATMENT OF MENTAL PROBLEMS: a) they work no better than therapy in the short term, b) changes brought about by medication are less likely to persist over time, c) there often are severe adverse effects, d) drug studies often look better than they are because they rate improvement by looking to clinicians' perceptions, not clients'e) the relationship between drug companies and psychiatry is an unholy alliance, making most of the drug-effectiveness research very suspect
3. THE MAGIC APPROACH: a) there is no special magic silver bullet approach which is much better than another approach, b) the role of the competence and experience of the therapist is rather unimportant.

According to the authors, four decades of outcome research have shown that there are four main factors of change, being:

1. Client factors (percentage contribution to positive outcome: 40%).
2. Relationship factors (percentage contribution: 30%).
3. Hope and expectancy (percentage contribution: 15%).
4. Model and technique (percentage contribution: 15%).

Some conclusions:

1. Thoughts, ideas, actions, initiatives, traits of clients are the most important predictor of therapy success!
2. Next to what the client brings to therapy, the client's perception of the therapeutic relationship is responsible for most of the gains resulting from the therapy.
3. Models and techniques are much less important than generally thought.

The authors advocate a new and refreshing approach characterised by:

1. Client-directedness. Clients' beliefs, values, theories and goals are repected, close attention is being paid to clients' initiatives, interventions and perceptions. Much attention is given to establishing the quality of the relationship, and to monitoring the clients' perception of the quality of the relationship.
2. Outcome informedness. Progress is measured from session to session using paper and pencil questionnaires. By the way: the client's experience of meaningful change in the first few visits is emerging as one of the best predictors of eventual treatment outcome.

Two thoughts come up after having read this book. First, this book is refreshing indeed and a shock to the therapy system. Second, the ideas ventilated in this book might be relevant for work outside the therapy field as well. Consider for instance what management consultancy and managing coaching could learn from this......