Consulting Skills in Action
The New Role for Human Resource Staff
continued...
Staff professionals concerned with an
organization’s human resources want to partner with managers as equals,
collaborating to discover solutions to the challenges facing their
organizations. They want to help solve problems and make a difference to
the bottom line.
PLAYING
A CONSULTING ROLE
Organizations need human resource
professionals to become consultants who can be liaisons between
departments or divisions, retaining their status as experts in their
field and acting as a channel or broker for the human resources
function.
In his book, Flawless Consulting, A
Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used, Peter Block describes a consultant
as someone who has some influence over an individual, a group, or an
organization, but who lacks direct power to make changes or implement
programs. Often consultants are thought of as a pair of hands to
implement a predetermined solution to an existing problem. At other
times, they are asked to fix something with their expertise.
Consultants often appear as solutions in
search of problems. If the solution works, the line person who chose the
solution is a hero. If the implementation fails, the staff consultant
becomes the scapegoat.
FRAME OF REFERENCE CHANGES
The idea of partnership requires a new frame
of reference for both managers and human resources staff. Managers need
to work with human resources consultants to solve problems while
continuing to take responsibility for their problems. For human
resources staff, the new perspective is more complex. The task is to
maintain the position of technical expert while keeping line manager
clients involved and responsible for solutions to their own problems.
Consultants are changing the way they begin
to work on assignments. Human resources professionals are
characteristically people who want to serve. They commonly delve into
assignments with good will, expecting management support for their
recommendations. If support is not forthcoming, problems will follow.
Consultants must know how to establish quickly a foundation of
commitment and responsibility
BEING MORE THAN HELPFUL
Most human resources practitioners come from
an earnest perspective: “I only want to be helpful.” They are reluctant
to articulate their own wants and needs. Client managers usually express
clearly their wants and needs; staff people often find it difficult to
do the same, even when what they want is rarely selfish or
idiosyncratic. They simply want to enhance the organization’s
effectiveness. Their advice is provided to make the organization’s work
more effective and productive.
Jeff Delanoy of Michigan Consolidated Gas
works hand-in-hand with his internal clients, recognizing that his needs
and theirs have a common foundation. “Expressing my needs is a new tool
I never used in the past. Before I attended these workshops, I thought I
had to do whatever they want. Now I know they have as much
responsibility for meeting my needs as I have to meet theirs. Instead of
causing problems, this attitude wins respect”.
Similarly, Althea Duggins, a department
trainer for Hewlett Packard has learned to say, “Here is what I want so
I can make the project successful. I want it! It’s not just what the
project needs to be successful.”
CONSULTING SKILLS
Designed
Learning’s Flawless Consulting Workshops
teaches consulting skills that enable staff resource professionals to
keep clients focused on their problems. A clear process is established
for human resources professionals to manage relationships with clients:
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Contracting for the work.
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Making an independent diagnosis of the
problems.
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Giving feedback about personal and
organizational data to facilitate decision making.
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Carrying out the plan.
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Evaluating the main events.
Successful consulting projects — whether
they last ten minutes or ten months — follow these five phases in
sequence. Skipping one (or assuming it has been taken care of) can
invite trouble. Skillful consultants are competent in the execution of
each step. Successfully completing the business of each phase is the
consultant's challenge.
CONTRACTING IS ESSENTIAL
A contract, written or not, is an explicit
agreement of what the human resources consultant and the client expect
from each other and how they will work together.
“Every project I’ve had that has gone south,
when I analyze it now, has failed because the contracting work was not
done well,” says Arnie Winkler, a senior human resources development
consultant for Pacificorp Electric Operations. "Now, I get agreement
every time on the boundaries and objectives of the project. We agree on
the kind of information we are going to get. We define my role and the
client’s. We agree on the product I will deliver and what support and
involvement the client will give me. And we set a time frame.”
In Designed Learning Flawless
Consulting Workshops, consultants learn how to contract. They
practice asking for what they need to serve the project. They discover
how to hold back from offering solutions, instead concentrating on
making sure their clients retain ownership of the problem. They learn to
identify their clients’ concerns about exposure and loss of control. And
they learn to identify all the players: In addition to the primary
client (typically a manager) and the people working in the project or
area of operations, there are workers in other areas who provide
assistance or information. Higher levels of management — for the
consultant and the client — are often forces to contend with, as are
people affected by changes that might occur. All need to be considered
and addressed during the contracting phase.
“I volunteered for an experimental
assignment to coach first line foremen to be better leaders,” recalls
Michael Cristiani, a former consultant staff manager with McDonnell
Douglas Electronic Systems and now a Designed Learning Affiliate. “I had
an agreement with the manager who made the assignment, but I soon
realized I did not have the cooperation of the foremen themselves. When
I began to discuss a contract with them, I realized I also needed to
contract with the general foreman and even the superintendent. I finally
decided to start at the top, with the program manager of an entire
aircraft operation, and work back down to the foremen. Specifying what
they and I needed at every level yielded the cooperation that made the
project successful.”
GIVING FEEDBACK
A consultant often must reduce a large
amount of data into a manageable set of issues to feed back to the
client. Conveying this information effectively requires consulting
skills that include providing all relevant data, even when this
information is not a part of the assignment. Consultants need to be able
to give descriptive rather than evaluative feedback. This can include
data about the client’s personal behavior in handling the problem with
the targets of change.
One personnel specialist in the systems
division of a high-tech conglomerate was empowered to play a consulting
role rather than merely offering technical expertise. The manager she
was supporting complained of excessive turnover because of inadequate
pay and proposed a plan to increase pay to about 40 people. The
personnel specialist recognized that the manager thought compensation
would be the simple solution. She interviewed several former employees
and concluded that pay was not the problem. Instead, she found another
major dissatisfaction to address. The company solved the problem
effectively and with considerably less expense.
To manage the business of the feedback
phase, consultants must learn to structure and control feedback meetings
that elicit client reactions and involve them in the choice of next
steps.
DEALING WITH RESISTANCE
No matter how reasonably data and
recommendations are presented, clients resist. A reaction that can be
puzzling and frustrating. Consultants must learn to avoid viewing the
resisting client as stubborn and irrational. This can deteriorate into
confrontation. Skilled consultants understand that clients need to
express resistance directly in order to learn how to handle a difficult
problem. Unless resistance is expressed and addressed, there is little
chance the client will genuinely accept and use what the consultant has
to offer.
The skills to deal with resistance include
being able to identify when it is occurring and supporting the client to
directly express the resistance. Consultants learn to understand that an
expression of resistance is not a personal attack on their competence.
WORKING ON PARTNERSHIP
In effective organizations, line and staff
work together to solve problems and take advantage of opportunities.
This requires everyone to work in a partnership that is mutually
responsible for successful change. While the line manager remains the
client in such a partnership, the human resources staff partner takes on
a consulting role, working with the manager toward an outcome beneficial
to the entire organization.
Consultants must learn to manage
relationships as well as the human resource issues associated with
projects. Effective consulting increases the potential for a human
resources professional to have a strong and positive impact on the
bottom line. In this way the human resources consultant becomes a
business partner, committed to organizational success, instead of
someone relegated to “mere” people problems.
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