For example, demonstrating an appropriate technique or recommending a relevant book often accomplishes more than quietly performing a needed analysis. However, some members of management may need to acquire complex skills that they can learn only through guided experience over time.
With strong client involvement in the entire process, there will be many opportunities to help members identify learning needs. Often a consultant can suggest or help design opportunities for learning about work-planning methods, task force assignments, goal-setting processes, and so on.
Though the effective professional is concerned with executive learning throughout the engagement, it may be wise not to cite this as an explicit goal. Learning during projects is a two-way street.
In every engagement, consultants should learn how to be more effective in designing and conducting projects. In the best relationships, each party explores the experience with the other in order to learn more from it. Sometimes successful implementation requires not only new management concepts and techniques but also different attitudes regarding management functions and prerogatives or even changes in how the basic purpose of the organization is defined and carried out.
This may seem too vast a goal for many engagements. But just as a physician who tries to improve the functioning of one organ may contribute to the health of the whole organism, the professional is concerned with the company as a whole even when the immediate assignment is limited. If lower-level employees in one department assume new responsibilities, friction may result in another department. Or a new marketing strategy that makes great sense because of changes in the environment might flounder because of its unforeseen impact on production and scheduling.
Because such repercussions are likely, clients should recognize that unless recommendations take into account the entire picture, they may be impossible to implement or may create future difficulties elsewhere in the company.
Promoting overall effectiveness is part of each step. While working on current issues, he or she should also think about future needs. In these ways, the professional contributes to overall effectiveness by addressing immediate issues with sensitivity to their larger contexts. And clients should not automatically assume that consultants who raise broader questions are only trying to snare more work for themselves. Important change in utilization of human resources seldom happens just because an adviser recommends it.
Professionals can have more influence through the methods they demonstrate in conducting the consulting process itself. The best professionals encourage clients to improve organizational effectiveness not by writing reports or recommending books on the subject but by modeling methods of motivation that work well. Consultants are not crusaders bent on reforming management styles and assumptions. But a professional diagnosis should include assessment of overall organizational effectiveness, and the consulting process should help lower whatever barriers to improvement are discovered.
Good advisers are practitioners, not preachers, but their practices are consistent with their beliefs. When the consulting process stimulates experiments with more effective ways of managing, it can make its most valuable contribution to management practice. Increasing consensus, commitment, learning, and future effectiveness are not proposed as substitutes for the more customary purposes of management consulting but as desirable outcomes of any really effective consulting process.
The extent to which they can be built into methods of achieving more traditional goals depends on the understanding and skill with which the whole consulting relationship is managed. Such purposes have received more attention in organization development literature and in the writings of behavioral consultants than in the field of management consulting.
Chris Argyris and Donald A. David Kolb and Alan L. John P. Edgar H. Larry E. Greiner and Robert O. Allan A. Jeremiah J. Irwin, Inc. Robert H. Advanced Management Journal, Autumn , p. As managers understand the broader range of purposes that excellent consulting can help achieve, they will select consultants more wisely and expect more of value from them.
And as clients learn how to express new needs, good consultants learn how to address them. James H. Kennedy, ed. You have 1 free article s left this month. You are reading your last free article for this month. Subscribe for unlimited access. Create an account to read 2 more. They need to ask more from such advisers, who in turn must […] by Arthur N.
Exhibit A hierarchy of consulting purposes. Works by management consultants or about management consulting: Larry E. Robert E. The strategy that they pursue— To give advice instead of do— Keeps their fingers on the pulses Without recourse to stomach ulcers, And brings them monetary gain, Without a modicum of pain. Meanwhile the analysts have gone Back to client number one, Who desperately needs their aid To tidy up the mess they made.
Until the merciful reliever Invokes the company receiver. No one really seems to know The rate at which consultants grow, By some amoeba-like division? Or chemo-biologic fission? Contact us. Cookies We use cookies to help us provide you with the best experience, improve and tailor our services, and carry out our marketing activities. Community-made content which you can improve Case study from our community. This page is free to all. How to ensure effective communication with employees and volunteers.
Communication methods When your message is really important, deliver it using more than one method. Communicating through staff meetings If you decide to hold a meeting individual or collective , be clear about what you want to achieve from each agenda item. The goal could be to: exchange information report, update, inform or find out solve a problem or find a solution make a decision plan evaluate supervise consult review performance.
If you undertake a self review, questions you might ask yourself could include: Did I get my message across effectively? How well did I listen to what was being said? How could the meeting have gone better? What do I need to do now? What will I do next time? Appraisal meetings One of the building blocks of communication and consultation with staff is the annual or biannual employee appraisal or development review — providing it is set in the context of regular supervision meetings.
Any mistake or struggle in performance will make the leader look bad, so every employee is seen as a threat. This drives selfish, bad behavior and creates an unsafe place for the team. Trust only happens in a fear-free environment. Every leader needs to work on their own fear issues, so they can focus on building the team instead of their ego. You can demonstrate you are trustworthy as a leader by keeping your word with your employees. Let them see your integrity. Say what you'll do, and then do what you say.
Show them you are leading in alignment with the values of the organization. Reward others who act with integrity. Give trust and ask for their trust in return. Be trustworthy and honorable, and communicate that you expect the same. Offer freedom by no longer micromanaging them.
Provide the opportunity to manage their own activities. Allow them to lead the end of month performance review sessions, and ask them to evaluate themselves and modify their KPIs. This behavior creates leaders within your organization organically and develops a sense of personal accountability, which results in a relationship of trust.
Your team members' personal lives matter, and bad times at home can often affect performance at work. Effective managers prioritize taking a genuine interest in their employees and providing support during rough patches. In the same way, when times are good, managers should celebrate victories with the whole team.
Whom do you trust? Typically, it's someone who allows you to be you and who encourages you to continuously grow, learn — usually by making mistakes — and develop.
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