What really happens in consulting
ANALYSIS — The dark side of consulting politics.
Consultants are often hired to avoid inter-necine conflicts between staff members who are all vying for promotion or to keep their job in today’s hyper competitive world.
In many govt cases consultants are hired so there is someone independent of the vested interests. Sometimes (rightly so) it is due-diligence.
Good consultants are polite, intelligent, politically savvy, but stay out of the fights.
That’s how you survive. But it also extremely difficult.
If you can’t stop getting down in the mud, you will probably be offered to be an employee… So this might work well for you. (I have seen it happen many times…!)
What tires me out is all the politics, the worst being the ‘hurry-up and wait’.
But the number one issue is the point of this post.
The environment of new staff expecting a promotion inside 3 months, or hyper-quick promotions.
“I am just working here to get a start, and if they don’t promote me in 3 months I’ll leave.”
- Iris*, 21 year old, Diploma graduate, office secretary in major company
whose primary job was making cups of coffee and escorting people to meetings. All of which she was bad, bad, bad at.Politics she was good, good, good at.
And Iris was having an affair with a client.
I have news for most firms, some staff jockeying for position are often try to make managers above them look bad to get the bosses job.
Consultants get stuck in this, despite being hired sometimes to avoid it. This is why consultants get conflicting directions.
This is increasingly common, and is very difficult to work with, requiring charm, grace, savvy and occasional tactful force to counter. For staff of hyper-quick promotion, getting their bosses projects done is not always a priority.
To go further: in rare cases, I have been amazed at how wilfully destructive many staff have been, in one organization 5 years ago I say a staff member sabotage other staff’s bank payments to get their boss in trouble.
Of course, this was complicated by inter-office sleeping arrangements, and the whole affair read like a Jackie Collins novel.
Believe it or not, this is rare, but I have seen wilful sabotage increasingly often as bosses promote staff ever quicker (in Australia and UK at least this is common.)
One workplace change I would like to see the end of is hyper-quick promotions.
In all the organizations I have worked for this has led to unstable working environments.
Think about it before you promote staff too quickly. It may not be a positive change, leading to positive outcomes.
Take care,
Christopher
Speaker. Author. Editor-In-Chief. Executive Director of Innovation, 2thinknow.
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