Within any consulting framework, the boundaries between senior consultants and clients have always been blurred. However, this has become more so in recent years as more experts choose to work within an interim or fractional system. Having experience on both sides, Rick Limentani, a senior consultant in Freshminds’ network, looks at the five core generalist skills a client will recognise and seek out when choosing a consultant.
The consulting market has been slow lately, both for freelance contractors and for big consultancies. There are signs that it is starting to pick up again, as it always does, but in the meantime, a quiet spell leads to greater competition for any available projects.
This means that clients who are looking for support on a particular issue find themselves blessed with a greater choice than they might normally have.
One of the consequences of this greater choice is that potential clients can be more demanding in the level and specificity of experience that they seek from contractors. Despite this, however, looking at the opportunities available on the Freshminds website for instance, almost every role specification I read is built around the same set of key skills. These skills are what define the role of ‘consultant’ and have certainly underpinned my own freelance success for two decades.
These days, as a senior consultant, I often need to pull together a small team for the projects that I land. As a result, I spend as much time on the client side of the recruitment equation. This has highlighted that these are also the skills that matter to me as a client.
Having demonstrable examples of these five key consulting skills on your CV, and at the front of your mind when interviewed, is now something I actively look for in a candidate.
1. Insight through analysis
Data analysis is a skill that never goes away. As you progress in your career you will likely find yourself building fewer spreadsheets, but even at partner level I still see experienced hands digging into the base data for themselves to satisfy concerns and answer questions.
Laying out an analysis in a clear, logical structure that can be dynamically adjusted, with space for growth and adaptation, is an essential habit that comes from practice, and is immediately apparent to anyone looking at your work.
Analysis tools have developed a lot in recent years, and keeping up with the new advances in Excel, Tableau, Power BI and beyond may feel like a Sisyphean task sometimes, but the truth is that doing the analysis is not where we show our worth. Most problems can be solved using simple formulae and basic analysis techniques, and where they can’t there is a wealth of online guidance on how to do the tricky bits.
The key is to know which analyses to do, and how to turn the outputs of such analyses into actionable insights. This is where a consultant can then really show their value.
2. Written communication
Clear, consistent, concise and compelling. That’s my mantra for written communications. I’ve worked at a range of consultancies with very different styles over the years, from vertical word reports to Keynote documents built by an on-site graphic designer, but that mantra has always held true.
Personally, I find it hard to move far from my early consulting training on this and think there’s something inherently beautiful about a perfectly pyramid-structured PowerPoint presentation. I have seen individual slides go through dozens of refinements and honing to meet these goals, but the mantra is equally valid for writing emails.
"Clear, consistent, concise and compelling. That’s my mantra for written communications."
In general, laying out a clear structure, sticking to that structure, focusing on a single message at a time, and ensuring you include a summary for the people who inevitably won’t have time to read the rest, are the most valuable things you can do in any written communication. No matter what brilliance you come up with for your client’s benefit, if they don’t understand your ideas or don’t believe in them, then they won’t implement them.
3. Project Management
On the face of it this ought to be the most straightforward element of any job: making sure the work gets done on time.
In practice, it’s a valuable skill in its own right, with any number of different strategies and approaches that are worth learning, but which all boil down to essentially the same thing: making as robust a plan as possible, getting everyone involved to sign up to it, then tracking against it.
The variation comes in deciding how and when to adapt a plan, how to drive things forward if they’re sticking, or how to overcome a particular obstacle. Regardless of the method, the goal is the same: delivering work on time and on budget are key skills that we should all aspire to, and that are still being written into role descriptions for that reason.
4. Stakeholder management
The softest of soft skills can be one of the hardest to learn. There are many different aspects to stakeholder management, from tactfully pushing back on scope creep to carefully leveraging the internal politics of your client’s C-suite. I personally avoid the Machiavellian approach and focus on ensuring that I’m including everyone who should be included, at every stage. I often have an open conversation with my key stakeholders at the start, about who else I should be including. I find that affable openness has served me well, even when that includes openly explaining that I’m not able to tell some people some elements of my work (e.g. when working with defence suppliers).
Different people like to be communicated with in different ways. Recognising which stakeholder enjoys frequent chats over coffee, versus another who only requires emails with a clear action request at the top, is essential to effectively building those working relationships.
5. Leadership
This is a skill that obviously becomes more important the more senior you become, but even if you’re just starting out, the ability to motivate, support and mentor your colleagues are skills that stand out. As a contractor, this has been one of the harder skills to develop, as it’s rare to have the chance to manage the same team for a sustained period of time.
Leadership is a multifaceted skill, requiring strategic vision, modelling of good behaviour (e.g. ethics, inclusivity) and a lot of emotional intelligence. It’s a complex, nuanced role: building a team, motivating those around you, empowering and delegating while at the same time supporting and challenging. Few leaders have received any formal training, and everyone is just doing their best, so good leadership skills always stand out.
Conclusion
Of course, there are many other skills that consultants bring to their clients, along with a broad hinterland of experience from other sectors and projects that can cross-pollinate to form transformative strategies.
Despite that, these five skills remain the universal cornerstones of any good career as a business consultant. Alongside the sector and role specifics for a particular project, these are the demonstrable skills that clients are looking for.
About the Author
Rick Limentani is an experienced freelance strategy consultant. He started at McKinsey, before setting up his own consultancy, and has worked alongside Freshminds for over 20 years. In his spare time, he is also an award-winning writer and a magistrate.
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