Consultants Saying Things

Consultants are required to have multiple sets of skills. One of those involves bringing people together in workshops to address problems or work out complex tasks. Many consultants are terrible at it...

In a recent thread in Reddit's r/consulting community, a junior consultant posted that they were running their first workshop and wanted the community's input on how to effectively run this session. I thought this would make a great topic for... more seasoned (old) consultants to reflect on.

I asked my friends to join me in a conversation on must-haves for running workshops.

In this episode:

If you are a consultant and haven't already joined the r/consulting community on Reddit, you probably should.

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Clients don't hire consultants to learn about our unique frameworks or totally novel perspectives or listen to our thought projects on topics like AI, data strategy or new product development. They hire us to help drive outcomes.

Sometimes these are outcomes that the client has already defined, other times they need some help divining what should actually result from a particular strategy or project.

Naturally there is a tension between the design of something and the realization of the thing. For consultants, there is a struggle between the abstract, ambiguous, hand-waving strategic things and the super technical, hyper focused lost in the weeds things.

Oftentimes we lose sight of the actual reason for working a problem with a client. We become so involved and invested with the details of HOW that we forget WHY.

The outcome is what matters. Keeping focus on that is not always easy.

In a recent conference hosted by IASAGlobal.org dealing with Business, Innovation, Leadership & Technology (BIL-T) and focused on driving real world outcomes, my friends and I were asked to host a live session of our podcast. With a dose of editing legerdemain and a degree of intrepidity, we managed to craft an episode from the live talk.

In this episode:

Add your thoughts to the conversation on ⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn ⁠⁠⁠or ⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠.⁠

Vacation is a great time to contemplate life, work, and life and work. The two can frequently be at odds for most people.

When we can relax our brains for minute, there's an opportunity to check-in and assess whether the work that we do and the life that we lead support one another. We hear all about work life 'balance' but that concept suggests compromises and doing neither work nor life well, but each in mediocrity.

What we should be after is figuring out if our life and our work are coherent. Does the one support and sustain the other. Do they move us in the same direction toward our goals or are they moving in different directions, tearing us apart.

My friend Phil joined me to talk about this. To be honest, we didn't start out intending to discuss it or make it an episode. We were just having a chat and captured some interesting conversation that has so many 'legs' to it. I suspect we will discuss this more in the near future.

In this episode:

Which is worst? Too much ego in the workplace, not ENOUGH ego in the workplace, an inability to read the room and tune to the right level of ego needed for the moment? The answer is Yes.

Ego can lead to self-deception and self-sabotage. Where humility is required, we often find exactly the opposite. We so often encounter (or embody) a total lack of awareness of how actions and behavior are perceived.

In the workplace, especially as consultants, this is amplified by clients, context and environment. Getting it right is just not an easy thing to do.

I asked my good friends to join me for a discussion the topic of ego. Watch as Phil Yanov, Whynde Kuehn, and Oliver Cronk help me sort it out.

Please do indulge us and our egos. For this, our 60th episode and the end of Season 5, we have a record-setting 5 minutes of cold open... It definitely is worth it. Well, at least partially.

In this episode:

Company culture is important, but not as important as profitability. Layoffs are necessary. Business is business... But you don't have to treat your people like garbage. They're your most valuable asset after all.

There are a number of examples we’ve seen over the past few years of company culture that doesn’t seem to get the balance quite right between the commercial needs of the business and respect for the individuals of the company. On the one hand, the business exists to make money and tough decisions are often called for that impact people’s lives. On the other, the humans that make up the company deserve to be treated fairly and with some dignity.

We recently sat down with Stephen Foreshew-Cain, CEO of Scott Logic, a UK tech consultancy. He has staked out a slightly different approach to leadership of his company by putting the employees first in recognition that happy, motivated employees makes for better business. Importantly, they have matched words with actions.

In this episode:

Check out ScottLogic's website and be sure to read about their People Promise.

Also, read some of Stephen's blog posts around the topic of leadership and respect:

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There appear to be economic headwinds as we move into 2023. Tools like LinkedIn can be one of the most powerful weapons in your branding, sales, or employment arsenal. That is, if you know how to use it effectively...

In a recent discussion on using Social Media on the podcast, we acknowledged the fact that while all 4 of us have years of expertise in using social tools, none of us are world-renowned experts who train other people how to use them. Luckily we're friends with a person who is.

Richard Bliss is 8th on LinkedIn's list of top global social selling experts. He's an author who's latest book is called DigitalFirst Leadership, and heads up BlissPoint Consulting which enables leaders to leverage the language of social media to extend their voice, vision and message. And don't forget that he publishes an annual research report on the LinkedIn Algorithm...

So yeah. He knows what he's talking about when it comes to using LinkedIn for success.

We asked him to sit down with us and talk through some of our observations and point out a few of his strategies for maximizing your effectiveness on LinkedIn.

For all the cats out there who are interested in upping their game on the socials, you'll want to grab a pen and a notebook...

In this episode:

Check out BlissPoint's website at https://www.blisspointconsult.com/ and request a copy of the 2022 LinkedIn Algorithm Report.

Also check out Richard's latest book on Amazon: "DigitalFirst Leadership: Master Social Media | Build Online Presence | Lead Your Tribe" https://www.amazon.com/DigitalFirst-Leadership-Master-Social-Presence-ebook/dp/B091MD5DL7?ref_=ast_sto_dp

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With the year ending, and folks in various stages of vacation and merrymaking, the Consultants Saying Things team wanted to get together for our annual Christmas Special.   

This year we issue awards in various categories (e.g. Best LinkedIn Appearance by a Member of the Cast), talk about significant events of 2022 and turn to our expectations in 2023.   

In this episode: 

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Social media is a wonderful, terrible thing. It is a cosmos of tools that allow us to be our best or, perhaps more often, our worst. If we're a knucklehead in real life, Facebook can make us a louder knucklehead...

For consulting professionals, the use of social media is typically career related or career-adjacent. Given there are so many ways to engage, given the sheer amount of noise, given our own proclivities to react emotionally to things we read, how does a professional get their message out while avoiding the combative social trap?

I asked my friends Phil Yanov, Oliver Cronk and Whynde Kuehn what they thought. What are the right ways for professionals to leverage social media to connect, build a brand, share ideas, communicate and learn?

In this episode:

There's some extra goodness in the outro. Hope you enjoy.

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According to various polls, public speaking ranks as peoples' top fear... ahead of snakes, heights, clowns and, in fact, death itself. Let that sink in. People would rather be DEAD than speak in front of a group of other humans.

So, first... why? And second, what can be done about it?

Naturally we can't solve EVERYONE'S fear of public speaking, so we decided to tackle this issue from the perspective of consulting.

Good consultants need to be able to do a variety of tasks well. Yes there's the need for technical or domain knowledge and skills, the ability to model and analyze, the skill of collecting information and processing it, the requirement of logical thinking, etc. But without the ability to communicate effectively to other people (i.e. the CLIENT), all of that good consultant stuff is less useful or perhaps even useless.

In this episode:

There is a longish cold open and some extra goodness as an outro. Why? Well as you'll see, our discussions range over a wide, wide territory. Most of that content never sees the light of day. I thought I'd include a bit of off-topic stuff to give you a sense of the kind of people that get MY intellectual juices going. Being around these types of folks and having these kinds of conversations and being comfortable with it is what has enabled ME to face and conquer public speaking fears over time. Maybe it'll work for you...

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