8 ms·

The secret on how to become a great consultant: Take all the blame, distribute all the praise. Here is the thing, being a consultant is a thankless job, and i

by franze 5y ago

The secret on how to become a great consultant: Take all the blame, distribute all the praise. Here is the thing, being a consultant is a thankless job, and it needs to be. If a project does not go as planned, the success does not happen. Take the blame. You are an external, it does not matter. They got you into the company to improve the state of the client, to improve them. If it does not happen, you are to blame. And they need someone to blame, so just take it. If you succeed, spread the praise. You worked with them, it was the right decision that they hired you, so they did great. And you just humble helped them to unlock the potential they already had. Thing is, in scenario 1, if you deflect blame, they will not hire you again. And they will badmouth you if somebody asks. You you take the blame, they might not hire you again, but they will respect you when somebody asks about you. In scenario 2, if you take all the praise, they will not feel good about themselves, and will not WOM (word of mouth) you. If you spread the praise, they will feel good about themselves, talk about their success and will so WOM you. A thankless job. I love it.

stuckkeys 5y ago
Damn. This was very poetic. Great response. True diplomat.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
stingraycharles 5y ago
Would you say that this approach to management, blame-culture, is unavoidable as a consultant? I’ve had a previous engagement for about 1.5y with this type of culture, and it made me miserable.
- jrumbut 5y ago
  It's not unavoidable, a lot of people don't do it. I would say they are making a mistake though. The thing is that people on the other side should either recognize what you're doing or appreciate you relieving the tension in their internal politics enough that your emotional labor is rewarded with a positive atmosphere. If that doesn't happen then you can only hope they're paying well. Doing this comes naturally to me though and I struggle in environments where you need to be a self-promoter so maybe it's a "horses for courses" situation.
- scrollaway 5y ago
  It's not unavoidable no, but it certainly makes you a better consultant. I found this out only a few years ago and franze is right on the money. I'd say it goes beyond consulting, too, and that knowing how to "take the blame and distribute the praise" is a superpower. Especially that first part. Knowing to take responsibility for things, sometimes even things that are outside your control, puts you on a different level to many people who will simply try to dodge it as much as possible. As a consultants, clients aren't (generally) stupid and can smell the bullshit. What they'll see, if you do this right, is someone who is effective and professional. This inspires trust and gets you re-hired. If this sort of thing makes you miserable, IMO then yeah it's not for you. Personally, I'd advise introspection: Why does it make you miserable, exactly?
  - adwn 5y ago
    > take responsibility for things, sometimes even things that are outside your control Although this might sometimes be a good idea for diplomatic reasons, it feels just as wrong and "bullshitty" as accepting praise for things that are outside your control. And it might lead to a loss of respect by people who see through this fake humility.
    - scrollaway 5y ago
      You're not wrong, but there's two situations that can call for it. 1. You are indeed sometimes (more often than not) responsible for things that happen under "your watch" even if they're none of your doing, because you're responsible for calculating things that can go wrong. For a recent news comparison, the JWST is a great example of this mindset: If something goes wrong, NASA was responsible for predicting the chances of it happening and ultimately, having a plan for it. 2. As a consultant, you're sometimes hired so bigger clients can externalize blame. It makes no difference to you, doesn't matter, it's not like they're hampering your career opportunities or something. They love that they have someone to blame for shit instead of blaming the actual people responsible. Yes, it's entirely bullshitty in this case. But it gets you re-hired :)
      - adwn 5y ago
punnerud 5y ago
Can we say that public praise is often inverse proportional with money earned in the long run? You often can't have both.
IggleSniggle 5y ago
Wow, you might have just convinced me to consider consulting. This is my natural personality/upbringing and I’ve always hated the internal rah-rah needed to do well for business units in an org, but at the same time am comfortable with self-promotion as needed.
- throw1234651234 5y ago
  Just keep in mind that a lot of the time even if you start off right, new management comes in, thinks that consultants are for "busy work", tries to relegate you to that, then has you putting out little fires they create. And if you are clearly doing better work compared to what the new CTO is capable of? Well, it goes two ways - you are valued and praised or you are pushed out because you are perceived as a threat to their authority. And guess which way it goes a lot of the time when a CTO asks you for a "deploy document, showing which file will be moved, by whom, to which machine, and who will send out a notification email" and you tell them it's all automated in a yaml file and you just push a button.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
heavenlyblue 5y ago
For the sake of numbers, how much do you earn?
- dsaadas 5y ago
  200-250 on average, bigger when working fulltime (average around 28-30h a week)
mrtksn 5y ago
I agree and I think it's true because of the way how working communities(i.e. a team, a company etc) are structured. Just think about how a hiring decision is made in first place. Someone in a company needs something get done and they are going to do it with someone else's money. Their interests are structured in a way to produce KPI specific to their job and their risks are loss of reputation. It's extremely profitable(in a sense of career KPI) to get someone from outside get things done with the money of the company as long as the outsider transfers the success to you and assumes any blame for any failure. The only catch is, the consultant needs to have a track record that makes the successful outcome plausible at least on surface because the person who hired the consultant must be able to defend the hiring decision. You know the “Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM”? It's the same idea. With a plausible hire, the success is owned by the person who managed the process and the failure is on the person or company that executed the task.
Cederfjard 5y ago
Is your experience that this is universal, though? I could easily envision organizations (based on my own experience, albeit not as a consultant in that sense) that would take your representation at face value - if things go south and you take the blame, they will blacklist and badmouth you, and vice versa they will love you if you can somehow hoard all the credit for a success. Perhaps it rarely plays out that way, but I’m skeptical that it never happens.
- andi999 5y ago
  Exactly what I was thinking. Even worse, doesnt taking the blame mean they can ask/sue for damages? Not sure why this is controversial, but I saw agency funded projects if they fail the companies have to repay the funding. Employees are usually protected but if a consultant was on board who would take the responsibility for that failure, I would expect at least some of the companies with legal departments to try to get the money from that consultant.
- jonahbenton 5y ago
  In my experience there is very little actual blacklisting/badmouthing in this way. Such behavior reflects poorly only on the badmouther. In consulting there are always functional and non-functional criteria for a relationship- on both sides. Sometimes/often invented after the fact, after parties have gotten to know one another. Engagements will be described to others against that criteria. The listener can glean and infer what they are able to. And sometimes for the careful listener, there will be some barely detectable tepidity in an endorsement.
- jrumbut 5y ago
  This is something like an added benefit. If an organization has a good culture they'll like what you're doing and keep you working for then, if not then they'll get rid of you and free up your time something better. As far as hoarding credit for a success, certainly a lot of people make that work for them but I'd like to think the other way is more sustainable. Maybe I'm fooling myself though?
leeter 5y ago
This 100%, I've literally been hired onto a client to basically tell management something their internal team had been saying for ages. The challenge wasn't telling management that; but rather getting them to (politically very carefully) open their eyes to the fact they had the solution (and the people to implement) right in front of them the entire time. That was a very tricky situation as the management didn't trust their team at all. So most of our time was spent untangling that and doing a little implementation.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  Yeah, this is pretty universally the job of a management consultancy: interview the staff, and report what they're saying.
  - mc32 5y ago
    The interview has to be scoped right. Sometimes they get scoped too broadly and people will offer opinions about processes of which they don’t have a complete understanding and can lead them to saying things that are not germane and sidetrack other teams.
  - AitchEmArsey 5y ago
    Interviewing staff ("stakeholders") at a customer is always fascinating. I've seen the full range from sincere gratitude at being listened to, through to open hostility and suspicion. The latter was much worse when I was younger and worried about impressions I was making on older-but-not-very-senior people. At some point you just stop giving a shit and let them hate you if they feel threatened.
    - leeter 5y ago
      This too, we're a technical consultancy (DevOps) so we get the gamut of reactions from "You're on my turf" to "Finally someone that my boss will listen to". Getting the former early on severely hurts your chances of success sadly. Edited for spelling
wink 5y ago
This is sound advice in general but it depends a little on your exact role. If you're the sole "important consultant" then this is true, but if you're sent there as part of a team doing a mix of consulting/bodyleasing/developing stuff for the customer it seems to happen quite often that someone at the customer will pretend (or not) to listen to your advice, do the exact opposite, and in the end blame you that the project didn't finish on time/on budget/whatever. And I think the problem is that you might be invested a little more as a temporary cog in the machine than when being strictly on your supposed high consultant horse.
hungryforcodes 5y ago
I thought the secret to being a consultant was to get a client to feed you a number, you do an analysis, and then feed that number back to them in a report :) Seriously though, what you wrote is a great operating principle.
Ostrogodsky 5y ago
Maybe in tech,but that is not the case in other businesses, I would argue that big consulting firms, like McKinsey, do exactly the opposite. It seems a winning strategy.
yobbo 5y ago
Partly true. If your job is to create or be a "politically acceptable" pretext for an unavoidable decision, then you will have adversaries who will want to discredit you. This means that in order to be effective you have to engage in debates and conflicts.

by franze 5y ago

stuckkeys 5y ago

Damn. This was very poetic. Great response. True diplomat.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

stingraycharles 5y ago

Would you say that this approach to management, blame-culture, is unavoidable as a consultant? I’ve had a previous engagement for about 1.5y with this type of culture, and it made me miserable.

jrumbut 5y ago
It's not unavoidable, a lot of people don't do it. I would say they are making a mistake though. The thing is that people on the other side should either recognize what you're doing or appreciate you relieving the tension in their internal politics enough that your emotional labor is rewarded with a positive atmosphere. If that doesn't happen then you can only hope they're paying well. Doing this comes naturally to me though and I struggle in environments where you need to be a self-promoter so maybe it's a "horses for courses" situation.
scrollaway 5y ago
It's not unavoidable no, but it certainly makes you a better consultant. I found this out only a few years ago and franze is right on the money. I'd say it goes beyond consulting, too, and that knowing how to "take the blame and distribute the praise" is a superpower. Especially that first part. Knowing to take responsibility for things, sometimes even things that are outside your control, puts you on a different level to many people who will simply try to dodge it as much as possible. As a consultants, clients aren't (generally) stupid and can smell the bullshit. What they'll see, if you do this right, is someone who is effective and professional. This inspires trust and gets you re-hired. If this sort of thing makes you miserable, IMO then yeah it's not for you. Personally, I'd advise introspection: Why does it make you miserable, exactly?
- adwn 5y ago
  > take responsibility for things, sometimes even things that are outside your control Although this might sometimes be a good idea for diplomatic reasons, it feels just as wrong and "bullshitty" as accepting praise for things that are outside your control. And it might lead to a loss of respect by people who see through this fake humility.
  - scrollaway 5y ago
    You're not wrong, but there's two situations that can call for it. 1. You are indeed sometimes (more often than not) responsible for things that happen under "your watch" even if they're none of your doing, because you're responsible for calculating things that can go wrong. For a recent news comparison, the JWST is a great example of this mindset: If something goes wrong, NASA was responsible for predicting the chances of it happening and ultimately, having a plan for it. 2. As a consultant, you're sometimes hired so bigger clients can externalize blame. It makes no difference to you, doesn't matter, it's not like they're hampering your career opportunities or something. They love that they have someone to blame for shit instead of blaming the actual people responsible. Yes, it's entirely bullshitty in this case. But it gets you re-hired :)
    - adwn 5y ago

punnerud 5y ago

Can we say that public praise is often inverse proportional with money earned in the long run? You often can't have both.

IggleSniggle 5y ago

Wow, you might have just convinced me to consider consulting. This is my natural personality/upbringing and I’ve always hated the internal rah-rah needed to do well for business units in an org, but at the same time am comfortable with self-promotion as needed.

throw1234651234 5y ago
Just keep in mind that a lot of the time even if you start off right, new management comes in, thinks that consultants are for "busy work", tries to relegate you to that, then has you putting out little fires they create. And if you are clearly doing better work compared to what the new CTO is capable of? Well, it goes two ways - you are valued and praised or you are pushed out because you are perceived as a threat to their authority. And guess which way it goes a lot of the time when a CTO asks you for a "deploy document, showing which file will be moved, by whom, to which machine, and who will send out a notification email" and you tell them it's all automated in a yaml file and you just push a button.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

heavenlyblue 5y ago

For the sake of numbers, how much do you earn?

dsaadas 5y ago
200-250 on average, bigger when working fulltime (average around 28-30h a week)

mrtksn 5y ago

I agree and I think it's true because of the way how working communities(i.e. a team, a company etc) are structured. Just think about how a hiring decision is made in first place. Someone in a company needs something get done and they are going to do it with someone else's money. Their interests are structured in a way to produce KPI specific to their job and their risks are loss of reputation. It's extremely profitable(in a sense of career KPI) to get someone from outside get things done with the money of the company as long as the outsider transfers the success to you and assumes any blame for any failure. The only catch is, the consultant needs to have a track record that makes the successful outcome plausible at least on surface because the person who hired the consultant must be able to defend the hiring decision. You know the “Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM”? It's the same idea. With a plausible hire, the success is owned by the person who managed the process and the failure is on the person or company that executed the task.

Cederfjard 5y ago

Is your experience that this is universal, though? I could easily envision organizations (based on my own experience, albeit not as a consultant in that sense) that would take your representation at face value - if things go south and you take the blame, they will blacklist and badmouth you, and vice versa they will love you if you can somehow hoard all the credit for a success. Perhaps it rarely plays out that way, but I’m skeptical that it never happens.

andi999 5y ago
Exactly what I was thinking. Even worse, doesnt taking the blame mean they can ask/sue for damages? Not sure why this is controversial, but I saw agency funded projects if they fail the companies have to repay the funding. Employees are usually protected but if a consultant was on board who would take the responsibility for that failure, I would expect at least some of the companies with legal departments to try to get the money from that consultant.
jonahbenton 5y ago
In my experience there is very little actual blacklisting/badmouthing in this way. Such behavior reflects poorly only on the badmouther. In consulting there are always functional and non-functional criteria for a relationship- on both sides. Sometimes/often invented after the fact, after parties have gotten to know one another. Engagements will be described to others against that criteria. The listener can glean and infer what they are able to. And sometimes for the careful listener, there will be some barely detectable tepidity in an endorsement.
jrumbut 5y ago
This is something like an added benefit. If an organization has a good culture they'll like what you're doing and keep you working for then, if not then they'll get rid of you and free up your time something better. As far as hoarding credit for a success, certainly a lot of people make that work for them but I'd like to think the other way is more sustainable. Maybe I'm fooling myself though?

leeter 5y ago

This 100%, I've literally been hired onto a client to basically tell management something their internal team had been saying for ages. The challenge wasn't telling management that; but rather getting them to (politically very carefully) open their eyes to the fact they had the solution (and the people to implement) right in front of them the entire time. That was a very tricky situation as the management didn't trust their team at all. So most of our time was spent untangling that and doing a little implementation.

mjburgess 5y ago
Yeah, this is pretty universally the job of a management consultancy: interview the staff, and report what they're saying.
- mc32 5y ago
  The interview has to be scoped right. Sometimes they get scoped too broadly and people will offer opinions about processes of which they don’t have a complete understanding and can lead them to saying things that are not germane and sidetrack other teams.
- AitchEmArsey 5y ago
  Interviewing staff ("stakeholders") at a customer is always fascinating. I've seen the full range from sincere gratitude at being listened to, through to open hostility and suspicion. The latter was much worse when I was younger and worried about impressions I was making on older-but-not-very-senior people. At some point you just stop giving a shit and let them hate you if they feel threatened.
  - leeter 5y ago
    This too, we're a technical consultancy (DevOps) so we get the gamut of reactions from "You're on my turf" to "Finally someone that my boss will listen to". Getting the former early on severely hurts your chances of success sadly. Edited for spelling

wink 5y ago

This is sound advice in general but it depends a little on your exact role. If you're the sole "important consultant" then this is true, but if you're sent there as part of a team doing a mix of consulting/bodyleasing/developing stuff for the customer it seems to happen quite often that someone at the customer will pretend (or not) to listen to your advice, do the exact opposite, and in the end blame you that the project didn't finish on time/on budget/whatever. And I think the problem is that you might be invested a little more as a temporary cog in the machine than when being strictly on your supposed high consultant horse.

hungryforcodes 5y ago

I thought the secret to being a consultant was to get a client to feed you a number, you do an analysis, and then feed that number back to them in a report :) Seriously though, what you wrote is a great operating principle.

Ostrogodsky 5y ago

Maybe in tech,but that is not the case in other businesses, I would argue that big consulting firms, like McKinsey, do exactly the opposite. It seems a winning strategy.

yobbo 5y ago

Partly true. If your job is to create or be a "politically acceptable" pretext for an unavoidable decision, then you will have adversaries who will want to discredit you. This means that in order to be effective you have to engage in debates and conflicts.