Consultants are expensive, they deliver no concrete results, they have no heart for your company, and they take over the work of your own employees. We can draw out all the preconceptions. Where there is smoke, there is fire: these preconceptions do not come out of thin air. Books have been written about them, which may or may not confirm these preconceptions. But let us especially not forget that working with consultants can also bring you a great deal, provided you keep a number of things in mind. In this blog, Arjen Verwer, management consultant at Summiteers, gives you eight tips for achieving a successful collaboration.

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1. Do it for the right reasons

If you are considering working with external consultants, the first thing you need to do is make sure you are doing it for the right reasons. Ask yourself: can we really not do this ourselves? Sometimes you need specific expertise or extra capacity that you do not have in-house, or you are looking for someone who can look at a problem with a fresh perspective. In such a case, you can indeed choose to let your own people focus on the content and decision-making, while the consultant leads the process. A consultant often has less knowledge of the specific sector or situation your company is in, but what they do know is how to effectively bring about change. And that ability to realize change, what we call “strategy execution”, is universally applicable. For example, Thijs and Wietse explained in an earlier article that a sustainability issue is “simply” a strategic issue like any other strategic issue.

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2. Have your expectations clear

If you do decide to bring in a consultant, make sure your expectations are crystal clear. Before engaging an external consultant, it is essential to define exactly what you expect from this collaboration. It must be crystal clear what role the consultant will fulfill within your project, so that no misunderstandings arise afterwards. For example, are you looking for someone to guide a process, bring in specific expertise, raise the internal quality bar to a higher level, or fulfill a combination of different roles? Making clear agreements right from the start about what support you are asking for ensures that you use a consultant for the areas where you are looking for support. Incidentally, you may expect a good consultant to help you make mutual expectations crystal clear, even if you have little experience with this yourself.

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3. Set the right selection criteria

Good, now it is time to select the right partner. To do this, it is important to carefully define the right selection criteria that match your expectations. A few important points to pay attention to:

• Check the consultant’s experience and references. It is not only important what a consultant or consultancy firm has achieved, but above all what specific role they have taken on in previous projects. This gives you insight into how they work in practice and what you can expect from them. Taking the time for a short reference check is therefore time very well spent!

• Are the people you speak to in the preliminary phase also the people who will get the job done? It happens that different consultants are proposed during the preliminary phase than those who will ultimately do the work. Make sure you know exactly who you will be working with and whether you trust that they will get the job done.

• Investigate how flexible the consultancy firm is in adapting its role during the project. It may be necessary to scale tasks up, scale them down, or add extra seniority. How agile is the consultant in meeting your needs? This flexibility can also mean that they do less than originally planned, should your organization prove able to carry out certain tasks itself.

• Do you expect the consultant to keep challenging you with the question: could you not do this better yourselves? This stimulates self-reflection and self-reliance within your team.

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4. Make clear agreements about knowledge transfer

Once you have found the right partner, an important point of attention is knowledge transfer. It is crucial that, during the project, the consultant is already working on transferring their knowledge and expertise to your team in such a way that you are internally able to continue independently. The last thing you want is to become permanently dependent on the consultant. Keep control yourself over safeguarding knowledge in your organization, so that you also reap the benefits of the consultancy trajectory in the long term.

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5. During the collaboration: keep the wheel in your hands

There are things you arrange in advance, but there are also aspects you need to stay alert to throughout the entire trajectory. You may expect a consultant to always be transparent and to communicate openly about the status, direction, and challenges of the trajectory. As the client, you must keep the wheel in your hands. You do not want to be faced with surprises. The idea is that the consultant helps you reach the destination you want, not that they take over control.

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6. Make sure pragmatism remains front and center

It is essential to keep your focus on what you ultimately want to achieve with the help of the consultant. Do not stare blindly at an agreement you made at the start of the trajectory, but keep continuously reflecting on the collaboration. Are we still taking the right actions to achieve our objective? Is the objective we initially set still correct? Do the activities we are focusing on still have priority? Is the current division of roles still appropriate for the project? This requires a continuous process of evaluation and alignment, and it is important to take the time for this. If new developments or insights cause priorities to shift, you must be able to make adjustments in consultation. This may mean that the context of the project changes and therefore also the content of the plan, or that you decide to move in a different direction earlier than planned. This flexibility is a prerequisite for a successful collaboration.

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7. Make sure the consultant does not take on a fixed position

Make sure the consultant does not unintentionally start fulfilling a lasting role within your organization. You hire a consultant to bring in temporary expertise, capacity, or a fresh perspective. You want someone who makes a start and then ensures that you can take over those tasks internally. If a consultant starts sharing their vacation plans for next year or no longer introduces themselves as an external consultant, you should become alert. This may be a sign that the consultant’s role is becoming more permanent than originally intended. If you are actually looking for someone who can fulfill a longer-term or more permanent position within your organization, it may be wiser to bring in an interim manager instead of a consultant.

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8. Completion and reflection: the key to a successful collaboration

At the end of a trajectory, it is important to briefly look back on what has been learned. Discuss again how you will safeguard knowledge transfer. How will the consultant ensure that they remain available as a sounding board for a while? Or can they support the safeguarding of the trajectory in another role? How will you stay in touch after completing the trajectory? And what valuable lessons have you learned yourself, or would you like to pass on to the other person?

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Need help with strategy execution?

We are Summiteers. We create movement, make what is complex understandable again, make big things manageable, turn a vague idea into something concrete, and make difficult things succeed. Could you use help with this? Get in contact with us.

Interested, but not yet ready for the journey? Follow our LinkedIn page and get inspired.

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