I’m worried

I’m involved in a really interesting project that combines HR, engagement and communication for a customer. We’re all learning loads from it, we’re loving it and together we’re helping to make work better. And I’m worried.

Increasingly people are saying to me things like “if anyone can fix this, you can” or “you can sort this, you’ve got clout around here”. I leave here soon, and an over reliance on me could mean that the good work everyone has sponsored and been involved with goes to waste if people wrongly associate my departure with the end of this stuff. If the customer believes that staff engagement and employee communication are worthwhile I think it’s important that they act to formalise and resource this position quickly, and ideally before I go so that I might share my knowledge and findings with whoever wants to pick up the baton.

Perhaps the most difficult thing to sustain will be the sense of independence the board has lent me and the sense of ignorance I’ve brought with me. I’ve used these, and my natural curiosity to ask “dumb questions”, the kind of questions people forget to ask, or even worse, assume someone else is dealing with.

Becoming reliant on people like me sucks. I love putting myself out of one piece of work and on to the next one and I hate the dependency model many consultancy firms (particularly the larger ones in my experience), peddle. What do you think? How can companies benefit from the ignorance and independence of consultants and not become reliant on them? Or am I worrying about nothing?

Author: Doug Shaw

Artist and Consultant. Embracing uncertainty, sketching myself into existence. Helping people do things differently, through an artistic lens.

14 thoughts on “I’m worried”

  1. Doug – this reminds me of Little Chef using Heston Blumental to redesign their breakfasts. Don’t know if you saw the TV programmes – Big Chef takes on Little Chef – but there were two things that struck me. Firstly that Heston is a fantastic people person and secondly he knew that the good work he put in would only work if there was a ‘champion’ on the floor in the Little Chef where they trialled the new menu (Popham). It wasn’t all plain sailing and the champion nearly bottled out but Heston helped her see what a fantastic job she was doing so she stuck with it. Maybe there’s a parallel with your situation? Is there an influencer within your client’s offices – not someone at the top but someone that is connected to many of the staff – and who wants to see what you are doing continue. Just a thought!

    1. Sarah what a great story. Thanks. And now you come to mention it – there is someone who I think could do an interesting and useful job with this stuff…good thinking!

  2. Often, the root of the problem is, boringly, how the money gets managed and the perceived value of costs that many managers see as overheads. I have made this mistake in the pursuit of financial targets and have failed to create capacity through carefully chosen people charged with thinking and communicating freely so as to effect and sustain change.

    Managers, albeit grudgingly, accept that when you make an investment in an asset, there will be ongoing costs. That this type of cost is also necessary to sustain and refresh an organisation’s capability to do things well and continue to do so through its people is usually poorly understood by management teams, if at all.

    The result is a depressing corporate entropy and the tendency to go back to normal even after a refreshing change, or at best (yes, at best) a perceived dependency on consultants where at least the visible costs can be controlled. A dependency on consultants is often just the runny nose of the stressed and overstretched company.

    To be clear the overhead here isn’t the training budget, it’s the apparent overhead from people who do valuable things other than that which their narrow job descriptions define. This often involves a lot of walking about and talking to people.

    These days, I try to allow for a few rogues and when working out how many thinkers I need I add 20%. The impact on culture of having a few hard working mavericks roaming around (tagged, under supervision and with a firm emphasis on there being a very few) and of ensuring that those employed to think also get time to think about things other than what the project portfolio, the service improvement plan or whatever says can be significant. No one has ever taken me up on this but I have even offered to pay expenses for wear and tear to shoes.

    1. Anthony – thanks ever so much for sharing your story, it is very powerful. I need time to reflect on what you have written and I think it will be very helpful for my customers and for me. I really appreciate you taking the time to give this feedback.

  3. An excellent point Doug,
    The greatest skill of any consultant is to get things moving in the right direction without being part of the motion act. Showing different directions, alternative paths and get people involved by asking them where they see themselves. It is very much work of a shrink where you let people do the healing and fixing by listening and asking right questions. At the end, once you leave…..it should be how you made people feel about themselves and their work which should be remembered, not how you achieved the transition. You don’t want people to remember how you did this and that and how they could possibly copy your actions.
    There are two ways you can change culture of any organisation or department. You will either put new procedures and policies in place, where new rules will be applied immediately, risking great level of resistance and all problems related to it. People will eventually change their behaviour but in my opinion it is not worth of damage caused. Alternatively you get engaged with people and work on their behaviour first, involving them in forming their own procedures and policies while making sure that it makes a business sense. You will end up with culture where policies are owned by people themselves rather than by management.
    I have myself experienced on couple of occasions situations where I had doubts about certain concepts being followed the same way I’ve designed them once I am no longer around. I’ve learned about power of winning peoples trust by making them feel that it is them who changed these things, not me. They are than less likely to get back to old ways as they will only go against themselves.
    And what is my reward for it? Well seeing less stressed workforce with smile on their faces does the trick. Indeed little appreciation from top management makes always sense, as we all have to feed our kids and pay the mortgage. 😉

    1. Great stuff HRBeginner, I think you should change your name to HRExpert. Love this:

      “Alternatively you get engaged with people and work on their behaviour first, involving them in forming their own procedures and policies while making sure that it makes a business sense. You will end up with culture where policies are owned by people themselves rather than by management.”

      You rock!

      1. Thanks for these kind words Doug. You are not the first suggesting that I should change my name. Don’t know. I want to keep it, but change the focus of the “HRbeginner” from representing me to representing all beginners. Hopefully all HRbeginners will look for inspiration in my “corner shop”. 😉

        1. Peter yeah stick with it, it’s a cool name and the nice thing about it is the more people read your stuff the more they see your expertise. Keep it going.

  4. Doug, great post and wise reactions (HRBeginner does rock!). For me, you are thinking about exactly the right things and three personal reflections spring to my mind immediately…

    Firstly our role working with the client. Although we are mindful of reliance & dependency is this actually an issue for the client? Did they want to create temporary dependency &/or transition to business as usual? I think it’s right (ethical) for us to be mindful of what is expected as well as what we feel is appropriate. However, I feel we are not responsible for our client, we are responsible to our client as well as our own moral compass.

    Secondly, our relationship with the client. In coaching the process of starting and ending the relationship and dealing with ethical aspects throughout are fundamental. This includes dependency and collusion. I’ve found that my coaching & mentoring practices have informed and improved my consulting practice.

    Lastly, I think we can always reframe our language to take a slightly different perspective. Which feels more appropriate…. “I’m worried” OR “I care deeply”? “Dumb questions” OR “The right questions”? My experience has been that my clients would use more positive language about me than I would about myself!

    1. David, I do enjoy hearing from you very much. Your personal reflections are very useful for me and I’m sure for others too. Interesting how you learn different things from your different strings and allow the tune to hop from one to another (coaching & mentoring informing consulting). And though I love your closing sentence I kinda like the dumb questions angle – it’s gently…disarming?

  5. Hi Doug
    You could offer to “tail off” the contract, with the last bit purely as a mentoring role when you go. (It might be too late for this contract, in which case it’s just fingers crossed and the client knowing where your phone number is.)

    However, if you built this in to new contracts, then hopefully your work will be continued by whoever the client chooses to carry it on, using you as a safety net.

    1. Hello Karen – thanks for such a useful first contribution here, I appreciate the idea and I will see if it is appropriate to make something happen in this instance. If not it will be useful learning for next time. Hope to hear from you again soon. Cheers – Doug

  6. I’ve had a few occurrences where I’ve had a coaching discussion with someone, and later on, the person said that they had a voice in their head that would say, “What would Carl ask in this situation?”

    It’s both a little flattering and a little scary.

    But what’s important is that this person realized that the power was in the QUESTIONS rather than in the ANSWERS. Part of what I do with my clients is to call attention sometimes to how and why I’m asking the questions, in the hope that the person will learn how to ask those same questions themselves.

    So I’d recommend that you shift your focus more to the questions you ask, and be very open with people why you’re following a particular train of thought. What you’re doing is to teach the person to fish, rather than handing them a fish. Hope that makes sense.

    Carl

    1. Hi Carl – thank you for your visit and your comment. It’s very useful to me and hopefully to other readers too. I like the perspective you’ve offered, I hope I am open about why the particular train is being followed and I will think carefully about that, and the questions too.

      Cheers – Doug

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