Consulting is Psychology

Look at my prior topics like empathy, humility, listening, you see that being a successful consultant requires various approaches to interacting with others.

Transcript

Welcome back to my podcast, Scaling Out!

Someone on my team said recently, “you know consulting is like psychology” and boy are they right! Just check out my podcast topics over the last 7mo, and you will find a number of psychological topics like caring, curiosity, listening, authenticity, and humility. These are what someone else rebranded from ‘soft skills’ to ‘essential skills’. In order to be successful as a consultant, yeah sure you need to understand the technology, but being hands-on-keyboard only gets you so far. We all can see that this is especially true if you want to manage other consultants or go into business for yourself, but some might think it’s a stretch to say this is required of all technical consultants. I would argue that we ALL need these skills. In order to talk to our customers, we must understand where they are coming from when they make requests by being curious and caring, we must gain their trust by listening and being authentic, we must deliver authentically.

Many of these skills cannot be trained but must be practiced. Get feedback from other team members by asking specific questions on how you are doing. Rather than ask ‘Do you have any feedback for me?”, ask “I am practicing my listening in order to improve, do you think I did a good job listening to the customer today? What should I do differently next time?”.

Ask your customer how they feel about the work you have done rather than whether the work completed successfully, such as “Did you feel comfortable with the suggestions I provided to implement this improvement?” and use this to lead into followup questions such as “Was I effectively addressing your requests?”. This approach does require a different attitude, one of learning and continual improvement. Next time I’ll share some stories about how we hire early career resources that exhibit just this attitude.

Until then, stay safe everyone.