Aubyn Hill
IN BIG companies CEOs and senior executives invariably are stretched out of their managerial shoes and have to deal with a variety of complex issues on any single day. Challenges cover a wide spectrum and often include dealing with aggressive and capable competitors, handling staff and union issues, seeking the correct financing package and putting it in place, addressing government and regulatory issues, while working towards keeping boards of directors and shareholders happy with an unbroken upward march of profits.
Smaller companies that are owned by the founding entrepreneur or owner-manager have similar issues, except that the owner-manager is often more stretched and stressed than executives in big companies. Big companies have a much more structured set of processes and support systems on which their executives can rely but which the smaller owner-manager-run company cannot yet afford.
WHEN STRETCHED AND STRESSED - CALL A CONSULTANT
Executives who are under constant pressure to perform and meet stretched profitability and other organisational goals and deadlines will hardly have the time or inclination to deal with the complex issues of transition. These change challenges may include moving the business from one market to another, or responding to market demand for a change in the business model of the organisation, or adopting a new business process or operating system in the firm, or putting in a new and complex managerial or financial structure in the company.
The board of directors may decide on a new strategic direction, or government regulations may require a change in the way the organisation conducts its business, and management simply does not have the time or resources to handle these organisational-wide issues. Under these conditions, corporate executives or the owner-manager of a small- or medium-sized business will generally need outside help to handle these kinds of transitional problems and opportunities.
Capable consultants operate with a measure of confidentiality that allows staff members of companies to take consultants into their confidence and share touchy, risky or overlooked issues that they will generally not discuss with their managers. It is not only senior management that is under constant stress and which must perform to stretched targets.
Middle management and employees at lower levels face their own kind of stress. When change is required in an organisation, good consultants, by providing an objective and essentially non-judgmental set of listening ears, act as stress relievers and pressure release valves for non-executive employees who use them as 'messengers of anonymity' to their senior management.
Most consultants will bring to their assignment a high level of academic training combined with rigorous analytical skills. The better ones will have the intellectual rigour and a very wide and practical managerial experience that they can use to assist practising managers. The best consultants work hard at helping CEOs and senior management make and digest very difficult decisions.
Invariably, senior executives know that changes have to be made in their organisations for them to remain fresh; indeed they often know which changes to make. However, for a variety of reasons - lack of specific data, the politics of the organisation or simply because of the difficulty of the decision - consultants are called in to add a significant measure of objectivity which helps to make tough change-decisions more palatable to all whom those changes will affect. Consultants act as management's pain givers. They help managers shun incrementalism by providing the analyses and recommendations to help executives take bolder decisions and actions that they may prefer to avoid.
CONSULTANT'S AWARD
In two organisations that I have led as CEO, I have installed a reward system to our most demanding and sometimes difficult customers that I labelled a 'consultant's award'. Each quarter or so a group of senior executives, initially led by me, met to look at those most disagreeable and demanding customer complaints that forced us to change the way we did business, or change a particular process in order to be more efficient and serve our customers better.
We would then award the winner a prize that was attractive and worthwhile, and we would publish the problem and the solution with a picture of the prize-winner in the local papers. This turned out to be a hit with customers and a torment to competitors. It also worked magic on the staff who then came to realise that criticism from a fair and reasonable critic especially one called (customer) is really the finest kind of consultancy - for free.
Consultants are in the unenviable position of being the bearer of bad news to executives and owners of companies who know their businesses well and to whom the most objective form of criticism will somehow sound like a personal attack. Good consultants, like many customers, will often find resistance by managers to making changes to the problems that are identified to managers. The best managers adopt the 'consultant's award' approach to the findings and tough recommendations by consultants, who are invited by management in the first place.
Aubyn Hill is Chief Executive Officer of Corporate Strategies Ltd., a restructuring and financial advisory firm. Respond to: writerhill@gmail.com
