What Can Project Managers Learn From Consultants?

Consultants charge hefty premiums for their services, and must use strong communication skills to justify their high salaries. They hop between projects lasting about 3 months, and their corporate culture teaches them a set of tactics allowing them to identify areas for improvement.

Since they specialize in generic cost-cutting, increasing sales, and supply line numbers crunching, they’re well suited to present these costs and opportunities to improve framed in this way. Also important to recognize is that consultant communication is standardized and works as the dominant or “most effective available tactics” style of approach. In this sense, consultants are ultimately generic and interchangeable.

Whether it’s their communication style, their workaholic tendencies, or their demeanor, every piece of them is cultivated towards the narrow idea of what’s smart or effective now.

Ultimately, these same strengths are why consultants in many ways are useless to most organizations. Because, executives typically are kept abreast of the various efforts under their jurisdiction and have to be political about who to remove/part ways with, they often hire consultants to pretend as if they have a strong generative insight. I as the executive win if my intuition pays off. You as a company lose if the consultants aren’t able to deliver on what you need.

The first thing a project manager should look to understand about consultants is their communication style and whether it’s suited for longer-term engagements. For instance, “when you do this, it makes me feel” is a tactic that short circuits defensiveness in the short term, but people can catch on pretty quickly. The more you work with consultants, the more you can trap them as they don’t understand the broader chessboard or goals of a given company. Recognizing effective communication can be helpful, and creates a sort of prestige.

A second thing project managers should take from consulting is dressing nice, allowing your image to augment your authority. Take care of yourself and your opinions are taken more seriously regardless of merit.

Combine that with structured communication and copious footnotes, you stand out. Take advantage of the tools that are presently working. If PowerPoints with appendixes and validated assumptions are important, try to bring that into your work.

A final thing that consultants do is take credit copiously. Do this. People don’t take enough credit, and it’s a winning strategy to do more of this.