He came home bursting in tears. “They hate my guts, I swear they do! I did exactly what they hired me for: the analysis, the advice, the implementation. And yet they keep picking at me and even threaten not to pay the invoice. Think I better quit this bloody job!”
“He” is not an exception. Every day consultants are suffering from so-called unreasonable customers. They work hard and somehow they don’t seem to deliver what the customer wants. But hang on – and hang in there – because we may be jumping to conclusions.
The fundamental mistake that this person has made is assuming that he is an actor on stage. He is not. Consulting is about directing the play. But as long as you keep thinking that you are an actor you will suffer. The one thing you need to keep in mind is that it is not about you. As a consultant your job is to make the customer perform. This will require your ego to adopt a different approach to performing and winning.
For starters, you will be managing different expectations. When you see yourself as the actor on stage, you will focus the attention on standards and measurements of your own stage-work. A stepping plan of meetings and workshops to get YOUR job done; agreement on KPI’s of YOUR assignment. However, once the project kicks off, you will note that the customer – and NOT YOU – will be going through a roller-coaster of emotions. But when the project setup has been 100% about your own indicators, the customer has no other choice than to direct his missiles in that direction.
So how will you receive the feedback? Receiving feedback is different when you are an actor on stage than when you are the director sitting next to the stage. When you are on-stage you have no other choice but to take it all very personal. Every applause and every remark; it’s all yours. This is fun for key-note presenters, but on a consulting assignment it’s a drag.
If you are doing your job well, your customer will go through some emotions sooner or later. Your job is to make sense of all the feedback that is generated during that journey: feedback from the audience and feedback from the real actor on stage. You need to make sure the actor does not get killed and make sure the actor doesn’t lose focus, confidence and self-respect.
As a consultant the feedback isn’t yours because it’s not about you in the first place. The messages are not for you. Nevertheless you should open them, read them and keep your distance, because your job is to make sense of the feedback and to pass it on in a fashion that it adds value to the customer. Then – and only then – will you take the suffering out of your performance.
This goes to show that consultants burn themselves out by thinking that they are the actor on stage. Thinking of yourself as the director instead of the actor on stage will improve the management of expectations, the interpretation of feedback and the actions you take as a result.
