As consulting has expanded and morphed into so many different types of services being delivered under the same banner, it begins to dilute any meaning in the banner. What is consulting? To some it’s providing expertise or facilitating some process. For others it’s providing extra workers to staff a project or taking over a certain organizational function. Still for others, it could be training the employees in a compliance matter or helping an individual change dysfunctional behaviors. Today, it’s almost any “help†that can be bought. While each of these services can be quite helpful to an organization and can generally be “bought†in the marketplace, should that make them all consulting?
Perhaps we could reserve consulting for a class of services that add something new, change or improve functioning or re-create some aspect of an organization. And consider the other ways of helping as contracted services, part of professional services or other helping roles? Consulting would then have a generic focus on change or improvement by doing it for them or developing their capacity to do it. Something is getting fixed, changed, removed or created. Consulting has an end game of improving performance against some mission, not just continuing what exists.
Larger firms often diversify in order to even out economic cycles or develop more stable sources of revenue. These moves are for the purpose of improving their business returns. In fact in could be said that these are moving away from strict consulting services because of their economic dynamics. So when firms add outsourcing, venture capital, and other alternative revenue streams for their own business purposes, let’s not confuse those with another form of consulting.
If we could bound consulting in this way, it helps to see the client-consultant relationship as an important factor in how value gets added. Consultants have rarely had any authority and long relied on influence as their primary medium. Our effectiveness is often dependent on how well we can affect what clients think and do. This becomes particularly critical when something needs to be created, changed or fixed, requiring people in the organization to operate differently. If we are to influence, we have to develop a relationship with the client that allows for change, including such characteristics as credibility, trust, openness and goal alignment.
David Jamieson
Dr. Jamieson is President of the Jamieson Consulting Group, Inc., an Adjunct Professor in the Master of Science in Organization Development Programs at Pepperdine University and American University/NTL and a Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Benedictine’s Ph. D. in OD Program. He has over 38 years of experience consulting to organizations on leadership, change, strategy, design and human resource issues. He is a Past National President of the American Society for Training and Development (1984) and Past Chair of the Management Consultation Division and Practice Theme Committee of the Academy of Management. Dave is co-author of Managing Workforce 2000: Gaining the Diversity Advantage (Jossey-Bass, 1991) and co-author of The Facilitator’s Fieldbook, 2nd Edition (AMACOM, 2006). He serves as Editor of Practicing OD, an OD Netwok on-line journal; Editor, Reflections on Experience Section of the Journal of Management Inquiry and on the Editorial Boards for the Journal of Organization Change Management and The Organization Development Practitioner. Contact information: david.jamieson@pepperdine.edu; 2355 Westwood Blvd., Ste 420, LA, CA. 90064; (310)-397-8502.
