Perspective 1 – Core Capability

In your professional capacity you will need to develop a range of skills and specialist knowledge that allows you to share this expertise effectively and efficiently. Broadly speaking, your career will take you down one of two core capability paths: Expert Consultancy or Process Consultancy.

• Expert Consultants. Consultants are experts and must be perceived as such. As an expert in your field, you trade on your expertise achieved through gathering more and more experience performing similar activities across multiple engagements. This allows you to generate consultant-led solutions, taking the client along with you to an outcome that delivers value and a return on investment for your time.
• Process Consultants. Consultants have another core capability and potential career path. As a process consultant, rather than delivery of expertise, you use a range of process and facilitation techniques to extract data and knowledge from a client, leading them towards their own options and solution. These client-led solutions contrast with the consultant-led solutions of expert consultancy.

Process consulting can be the method used for an entire engagement, or it can be one technique used by expert consultants. The appropriateness of this depend on client culture, client expectations, and the amount of time available to deliver value.

Perspective 2 – Consultant Position

While most consultants are external to the organisation they work in, this is not always the case. As a consultant, you can be external or internal. Whether you are an external consultant bringing technical expertise, or internal bringing company knowledge, you still aim to deliver independent advice for the benefit of your client.

• External consultants You are external to the organisation in which you deliver services and typically take defined, short-term roles with a defined target outcome. You bring skills and experience that are not internally available to the client, and it is these credentials that make you attractive. The engagement process can be quite lengthy and complex, with the full consultant lifecycle from the start of the sales activities to the end of the delivery engagement, all wrapped up with what could be extensive commercial and legal activities.
• Internal consultants In this situation, you are directly employed by the organisation in which you work, to advise and consult, usually on a specific and focused area. You may be part of a small team of internal consultants, and unless your team has budget to expand, your resources are finite because of this size. You will likely have a deeper understanding of the internal organisation and its strategy and culture than an external consultant will. However, you are not truly independent and are potentially more vulnerable to the internal politics and pressures that exist.

Perspective 3 – The Roles that are Played

At different times and in different environments, the same consultant needs to perform different roles for the good of their client. Sometimes this is several roles at once. The most successful consultants can adapt their behaviour to what the situation demands at that precise time.

• Supporter. A consultant can act as a supporter, providing encouragement, confidence, and a sense of validation to the client.
• Coach. As a coach, through questioning and challenging, the consultant takes a more active role to help the client create and subsequently deliver their own solutions.
• Expert. As an expert, the consultant starts to become more prominent and has the chance to start influencing and persuading to achieve organisational change.
• Change Seed. As a change seed, the role becomes more explicit, and the client will sponsor or direct the consultant to perform activities that are designed to accelerate change.
• Pair of Hands. As a pair of hands, the consultant takes an active role in creating the solution and is a fully integrated part of the project or change team.
• Leader. As a leader, the consultant becomes as close to acting as a client manager as is possible, taking responsibility from the client for the delivery and successful outcomes. It is, however, unusual for a consultant to take this role and consideration is required before assuming such responsibility.

Perspective 4 – Employment Structure

There are several different organisational structures that you might work under. Each differs in terms of the responsibility, range of assignments, and the opportunity for growth they may afford you as a consultant. At any given time, you may decide that one structure is better than another for your career, and over time, you may experience employment under each of the various structures.

• Sole Consultant. Freedom to take what work you want, and to work how you want, are the major upsides of a solo consultancy. This is what drives many people to become an independent entity.
• Partner/Co-owner. If you are one of a small number of partners (co-owners) in an organisation, you will benefit from a larger and more flexible structure to sell, support, and deliver work.
• Small (Boutique) Consultancy. This organisation will provide support and possibly a more effective sales operation. In addition, if the consultancy has a niche that matches your specialism, then this may be a perfect fit.
• Research and Advisory. Included in this category are organisations such as Gartner, Nielsen, and Ovum. These organisations focus on knowledge acquisition and distillation, and often specialise in a certain domain, such as technology or marketing.
• Expert Networks. Expert networks pair corporate clients, or investment funds, with individuals in the market who may have access to on-the-ground knowledge about certain industries or geographies.
• Large (Tier 1 or Tier 2) Consultancy Large consultancies include McKinsey & Company, Bain & Company, and Boston Consulting Group, each with well over 10,000 employees. Working in these types of large organisation may be significantly different from a smaller consultancy, with significantly more support and more opportunity for variety though perhaps little ability or opportunity to make any internal impact.
• Service Providers. Organisations in this category include global giants, such as Infosys, Capgemini, and Accenture, and the Big Four companies: KPMG, PWC, Deloitte, and Ernst & Young. Here, consulting is one of many services provided.

Perspective 5 – Leverage

The fundamental strategy behind consultancy is the sale of your expertise, knowledge, or skills in the form of services. The price charged is set by calculating the value to the individuals of the time spent, plus an additional amount to cover the costs of running the business of the consultancy, and a further amount to ensure an acceptable amount of profit is achieved.

If you are a single, individual consultant, there are natural limits to how much time and effort you can spend on work, and therefore there are limits to how much the business can grow, and how much profit can be made. However, if you do wish to grow a business beyond these limits, then you have to work with others to magnify your skills. A small amount of personal effort in the form of direction, can be turned into a large amount of team effort when other individuals are used as “levers” to magnify the output. Within consultancy, this is the concept of leverage.

According to Jack Gabarro (who built on the ideas of former Harvard Business School professor David Maister), consultancies fall on a spectrum that includes four types – rocket science, grey hair, procedure, and commodity. The amount of leverage you require or can apply, depends on which of these four consultancy types you favour and aim to provide.

• Rocket Science. A rocket science practice addresses idiosyncratic, bet-the-company problems that require deep expertise and creative problem-solving. This requires large amounts of your time and the least amount of leverage.
• Grey Hair. A grey-hair practice provides seasoned counsel based on experience. It is possible to leverage this type of consultancy but only carefully and with lots of collaboration.
• Procedure. A procedure practice offers a systematic approach to large, complicated problems that may not be cutting-edge but require attention to a plethora of considerations. More leverage can be applied to this type of consulting, focusing on the repeatable elements performed by more junior consultants.
• Commodity. A commodity practice helps clients with relatively simple, routine problems by providing economical, expedient, and error-free service. Large amounts of repeatability mean the least senior oversight and the most leverage possibilities.