re you prepared to work with consultants?

Today's massive restructuring of economic activity in the CIS has raised the issue of how to use outside consulting and training to help enterprises through the transition. The purpose of the article is to help CIS businesses orient themselves to this possibility, and to offer some suggestions about what can be done before hiring a consultant.

1. WHEN CONSULTANTS ARE USUALLY HIRED.

The use of management consultants is a widespread practice all over the world. Companies work with outside management consultants when they want:

- an outside, impartial view from a competent professional;

- to solve problems they have not been able to solve on their own;

- to make a major change or begin a new activity;

- access to certain expertise which they don't need on staff permanently;

- to learn about new trends in management that a company offers.

In addition, executives who are under pressure to produce a result, correct a problem, or are establishing themselves in a company at times hire consultants on a personal basis.

Because of the potential impact a consultant may have on your company, it is advisable to take enough time to find out exactly what is being offered.
Index

2. CHOOSING THE LEVEL OF SERVICES OFFERED.

Because of the potential impact a consultant may have on your company, it is advisable to take enough time to find out exactly what is being offered. The most effective way is to have several wide-range conversations about your company in which you can "tune in" to the level at which the consulting will take place. The most obvious and usual way of choosing consultants is by area of expertise. For example, a car manufacturer might pick experts in car manufacturing. A less usual way is to look at what level do you want to be on at the end of your work with a consultant. Below are some possible ways of examining these levels.
Index

2 a. The level of instruction - doing.

The most basic level of consulting is done through passing on instructions and formulas. The consultant tells you exactly what to do. To get a quick idea of this level, think of learning to ride a bicycle. Your consultant might say: "Step 1, put your right leg on the right pedal, Step 2, swing your left leg over the bike, Step 3, sit on the seat and hold on to the handle bars, Step 4, pump your legs". Your consultant spends some time in your company and then gives you advice about what to do and a series of steps to take. You are left at the level of following instructions.
Index

2 b. The level of information - knowing about.

At this level, the consultant might give you information in the form of a theory about riding bicycles. "Success in riding a bicycle is based on your ability to keep it balanced." Or, "bicycles were invented in the 19th century and the first models had a very large front wheels". You are left at the level of theory, or of being able to explain things.
Index

2 c. The level of design - being.

At this level, the consultant works with you in such a way that you get the feeling of balance, you are able to BE a bicycle rider, rather than KNOWING ABOUT bicycle riding. You have access to BEING better executives and managers, rather than being, for example, engineers who KNOW ABOUT or HAVE INFORMATION ABOUT management. While they may nor express themselves in the words described above, the greatest consultants can function on three levels, depending on what is necessary at the time. It is worth noting that the first two levels, you as the client may experience a dependence on the constant. At the third level you quickly become independent of the consultant.

How can you know when you may have found a consultant who can work on all three levels? Just as the examination of these levels is a non-standard way of considering a consultant we locate the consultant through asking non-standard questions. In addition to considering the consultant's track record with other companies, experience, expertise, notice your state of being after you have spoken with the consultant. Are you inspired about your work, about your life? Are you suddenly experiencing a flow of new ideas which, on the surface, appear to have no connection with what the consultant said? Do you feel more energetic and able to take on the next task? Of course, these are unusual questions to ask yourself in a business context, where we are much more comfortable with information or "knowing about", rather than with "being". However, the most important, impactful aspects of consulting take place in this background.
Index

3. ARE YOU A GOOD CLIENT FOR A CONSULTANT?

If you are hiring a consultant in order to try something new, logic tells us that you will also need to give up something old. In my experience however, clients tend to be focused on what they will be acquiring - new methods, new information - and don't want to look at what they have to give up - they think that they can stay the same, but do something differently. An organization that is not willing to give up a few of its "sacred cows" will get little value from consulting. It is important that you get clear about this rather painful aspect of consulting, and ask yourself, are you really ready to risk giving up some of your hard-won, well-deserved wisdom in exchange for a new possibility, or are you sacred cows going to have scratches on their sides from your fingernails before you give them up?
Index

4. KEY ISSUES ON WHICH YOU CAN BEGIN TO WORK.

The most common problems I run across in my consulting and training practice in Russia have nothing to do with "hard" issues such as technology, production processes, or even financial and legal problems. The major problems are associated with areas that managers tend to dismiss as "soft" - having to do with human beings and with communication. They feel they can put off dealing with these areas until after the "hard" problems are solved. As a result, a great deal of money is wasted, until they begin to deal with these more elusive areas effectively. If you can begin to work on these "soft" issues in your company, you will save money on consulting, and you will be competitive sooner than other companies.
Index

4 a. The existence of a "visa" regime between different departments.

This means that members of departments are discouraged from discussing their work with members of another department and need a "visa" to visit each other. In one client company, departments were instructed to consider their own work as a "commercial secret" vis-a-vis other departments. Yet the truth is that there are many issues for which companies are hiring consultants which they could figure out for themselves if they could speak freely with each other across departmental lines and use each other as consultants. Because of these barriers, there are cases when individuals in a company are intelligent and capable, but the company as a whole is (pardon the expression) an idiot. People function in an intellectual vacuum, circumscribed by rules and routine in which the whole is weaker than the sum of its parts. It is impossible to be competitive in a world which demands the creativity of each staff member against a background of suspicion and territoriality. Companies that hire expensive consultants over the top of this system are wasting resources, unless they hiring a consultant to help them change the system.
Index

4 b. Being stuck in a "pyramid".

Rigid hierarchies, which appear to be taken very seriously in the CIS, act as wall which keeps potential innovations and breakthroughs from circulating freely. Hierarchies also feed the illusion that as you rise "up" through the levels of the hierarchy, each layer "knows" more and more and can therefore make increasingly effective decisions. However, in modern work life, line managers and workers frequently know much more than the upper levels of the hierarchy about what is going on, yet decisions are made at the higher levels. Companies like this will be much less competitive than those without a rigid hierarchy.

I have heard top managers in the CIS justify this system of concentrating decision making at the top by using a distorted version of Western psychology which states that there is a "hierarchy of needs". At the base of the pyramid, they say, people are only concerned about their physical well being, and therefore workers are not concerned about participating at the more creative level of decision-making. If they do participate, there will be "democratic" chaos, as when workers elected the management. These top echelons miss the real point, which is that they simple don't have the necessary information to make all decisions. They also don't notice that, within this logic, the next layer up, the person who is much richer that THEY, or much have the necessary information to make all more powerful than THEY, thinks this way about THEM. I once had occasion to be in a meeting with the editor-in-chief of a news-paper that was one of the biggest newspapers of the Soviet Union. He was supposedly a pro-perestroika person, appointed by President Gorbachev. When we discussed the general issue of people having an opportunity or to be involved in decision-making at work and in life, he said, "The people can now go to church on Sunday. That's really all they need. "They don't need to think about their lives." This breathtaking arrogance is sometimes reflected in the management of enterprises. In companies like this, eventually the best people leave, because they care less about salaries and privileges than about having the power to participate in creating the future of the company.

If you are in the top echelons of a company like this, you have only two choices: are you going to share power by freely giving it up (and therefore staying in control of the process of sharing power) or are you going to share power by having it forcibly taken away? Top management might consider this as a productive area for change and for consulting. If a company can successfully breakthrough this kind of thinking, perhaps with the help of consulting, and make a serious commitment to finding effective ways to push responsibility "down," it is likely to be much ahead of the competition.

A corollary to this issue is that top management sometimes buys training and consulting for their staff in which they themselves don't participate (because they feel they already know everything, or they are so busy making all the decisions that their people should be making that they don't have the time). That means that in the end, no change is possible. The top echelons become a bottleneck to change, and they are blind to being a bottleneck.
Index

4 c. An addition to "stability".

Another common problem is a concern for a return to something people call "stability". Sometimes companies hire consultants in order to discover the rules that will help them return to this state. This means people think that in the past, things were a certain stable unchanging way, and now everything is breaking up, falling apart, in a state of flux. They think that their job is to change everything into a new form, which will then become stable, unchanging and predictable. Some are waiting for things to become stable again, before making major moves. However, in the world of today, both in and out of the CIS, constant change is the daily reality. Rather than working on creating stability, by trying to make the "boat" stop rolling, it might be more productive to work on acquiring "sealegs," like sailors who are able to stay standing on a rolling deck. (Companies whose strategic objective is to get the deck to stop rolling should stay in their neighborhood pond and not venture out on the high seas.) The days of "stability" are over forever. The companies that will be the most competitive are the ones that are able to generate a sense of excitement about all the movement, rather than being paralyzed by fear. The question is, will the company have the creative leadership ability, the power and the intellect to interpret both external and internal circumstances (including instability and a risky environment) as an opportunity rather than as a threat? This is also a very productive area for which to hire good consultants.
Index

4 d. No privatization of "self".

Much is being done to privatize enterprizes, and there are hundreds of consultants and training schools working to help enterprises with the technical aspects of running a private business. The problem is that a number of people have not privatized THEMSELVES. Many people are looking for their new owner and are not aware that they are doing this. It would be very helpful to a company to create an environment, perhaps with the help of a consultant, in which people are given an opportunity to notice the degree to which they are placing the locus of responsibility for their lives outside themselves, and to notice the system of thoughts and beliefs that hold this view in place and justifies it. Until they can make a choice for themselves about who they are, about being both free and fully responsible, they are not going to be very good partners within a company whose competitiveness depends on each person's creativity and inspiration. This, more than anything else, will provide a company with power and competitiveness in a risky and very exciting environment.
Index