Dual C Business Solutions

Consulting Success Equation

Below is the equation that I have on my office wall to ensure the proper mindset for being a consultant.  I've got 2 chapters completed of a book outlining the equation and the application of it to consultants wishing to take their practice to the next level.  Stay tuned for more information. 

Passion + Relationships + Value= Satisfaction + Profit

[Actions]

Passion: Intense, subject matter enthusiasm.  I am passionate about Organizational Development and Technology.  Are you passionate about your career choice?  If not, make a choice to change.

Relationships: See “But enough about me” outlining the value of relationships in consulting.  Relationships are built on trust and nurtured through authentic communication.

Value:  Confidence is required that you can bring the value of your passion to your clients.  I believe it was Dr. Alan Weiss who wrote, “The first sale is to yourself”, which reflects the need for supreme, self-confidence regarding implementing your subject matter to improve your clients.  If you are passionate about playing golf on the moon, it is unlikely that will translate into a specific value to a client.  

[Results]

Satisfaction: This is the feeling in knowing that the client has realized the value of your consulting.  People talk about job satisfaction and life satisfaction.  Since a consultant’s life is intertwined with his or her passion, separating these measures of satisfaction is useless.  “If you enjoy your job, you never have to go to a day of work.” – Someone wiser than I

Profit: One of the benefits of pursuing my passion is that the quality of my work will be significantly higher than any other career choice.  A higher quality of work means increased client satisfaction and thus more profit.

Warning!

Fully adopting the attitude and approach above will result in having much more fun!

Top 5 Client Resistance Justifications

Below are the Top 5 client justifications for resistance to positive change along with responses.

1.    Client: "We don't want to stir the pot."

a.    “Are you more concerned that you will stir up something unpleasant or that you will have to eventually replace the pot?”

b.    “The only result of stirring in cooking is a better tasting soup.”

c.    “Put away the spoon and start cooking with a hammer.”

2.    Client: "We've always done it this way."

a.    “That would only be effective approach if all of your competitors felt the same way but I’m positive they don’t.”

3.    Client: "That would harm an internal relationship."

a.    “How much harm will be created by allowing dysfunction to fester?”

4.    Client: "This message should be softer.”

a.    “When has a soft message resulted in meaningful change?”

b.    “The only thing that can result if professional candor is not encouraged is mediocrity through sycophantic, decibel-driven decision making.”

5.    Client: “Leadership would never approve this approach.”

a.    “Why?  I’d love to illustrate the value to them.”

b.    “If the concern is how you’ll look if this idea is rejected, then you are not the correct person driving this change through.”

Be prepared, objective, candid and professional. 

Your attitude will set the state for your partners to act in the same manner.

The best advice I can give in overcoming resistance is to confront without being confrontational.

Results based Resume

The frustrating topic about resume formats is relevant to anyone who is "in transition". 

When did it become a social faux pas to say "I'm actively looking for a new job"? 

As a public service to all those who are unemployed.  Consider the following format.

It tells me what you bring instead of hoping that I can guess correctly.

Impact:

This single sentence should make me hunger for more information regarding an impact you have made to your business, company, industry or society.

Passion:

Define your passion and how it will translate to a company's results.

Results:

"At Company XYZ, I decreased attrition by % through ground breaking Organizational Development techniques."

"With Company XYZ, I blah blah blah."

"At" means, you consulted there.

"With" means, you were employed.

Competencies:

Think of this as the Key word section for recruiters who search by such things.  You should be able to link any competency to a specific result.

Experience

Simple list of time frames for employment.  Examples below.  Months are not relevant.

Dual C Business Solutions Inc., 2006-present, Principal Management Consultant

Microsoft, 2003-2006, Analyst

Eide Bailly LLP, 2002-2003, Application Developer

Education

Highest degree first.  Indicate "Expected" date if not complete.

OD in IT Value Proposition

http://dualc.com/organizational-development-consulting.html

Outlines my OD consulting practice and value proposition.

Consultant Interview Questions

This last week I was asked what questions a client should use to interview a potential consultant.  We’ve all had consultants come in looked fantastic on paper but had no practical experience.  I recall interviewing a project manager who couldn’t handle a question regarding scope creep and managing client expectations.  One technical architect claimed six years of Microsoft.NET® in 2004, which was odd considering it was released only two years earlier. 

Note: These questions are geared towards Change Management and Organizational Development consultants rather than technical contractors and staff augmentation.

Additionally, the requirement of being able to work closely with the consultant in a mutally respectful manner is implied.

Experience Questions

1.    Have you successfully addressed this issue for other direct clients? Please provide the contact names and numbers.

2.    What type of interventions did you use?

3.    If you have not addressed this specific issue, what similar experience would you be able to leverage to address this issue?

4.    What resistances did you face in implementing the intervention(s)?  How did you overcome them?

5.    What other industries have you worked in besides mine? 

a.    Specific industry experience is not necessary but there are might be optimal practices that exist elsewhere that you can leverage.

6.    What is the value of the largest change you’ve helped a client realize?

7.    Describe a change or intervention that was not successful.

a.    Humility is important.

b.   Applied learning is equally important.

Process Questions

1.    What is your process?

a.    “It depends.” Is not an acceptable answer.  Dig further for examples.

2.     What level of partnership will be required and at what levels?

a.    Look for incongruence between the issue and the expected level of partnership.

b.   The board of directors does not need to be interviewed to address a line manager’s performance.

3.    How do you define success?

4.    How will you make your recommendation?

5.    Are you willing to train our internal staff for the implementation?

a.    An excellent consultant will say “Yes”.

6.    How would you verify the results of the change?

What consultant interview questions do you use? 

Change Acceptance Spiral

Overview:

    The Change Curve has been used for years in Change Management to help individuals understand their response to change.  Unfortunately the pressures exerted throughout a change are not effectively captured in the curve so I introduce the Spiral of Acceptance®.  Each quadrant represents a set of pressures on an individual related to any change.  Note that the spiral starts in the External Drivers quadrant but the source of change could be from any of the four.  As the progress towards internalization continues an individual must overcome resistance, incorporate knowledge, and finally acceptance from each quadrant.

Arbys, Patterns and Poisson

Poisson not Poison.

One of the top skills that differentiate excellent consultants is the ability to quickly recognize patterns.  Reincarnating Rorschach isn’t necessary.  The ability to identify inefficient patterns of behavior is based on your knowledge and experience.

The recent Google Wave® application platform changed the collaboration model by allowing multi person editing or real time chatting.  Real time chatting is a game changer.  I can see what you’re typing instead of waiting for you to hit enter.   Google® recognized that the currently acceptable interface of seeing “Someone is typing” is inefficient. 

I was recently ate at Arby’s® and noticed a rather inefficient pattern.  Three individuals were taking orders and giving out the receipts with the appropriate numbers on them.  There was the usual snaking pathway to reach the registers.  The line moved quickly; which was good.  However, there were only two line cooks who were unable to keep up with the amount of orders.  After being properly routed through the ordering process, the customers were expected to create a melee at the end of the routing to collect their order.

It would make more sense to extend the line waiting time, an ordered process, to minimize the unordered process of food collection.  Add to the consternation was the soda machines was at the beginning of the melee.

I don’t need to be an expert at the Poisson distribution or queuing theory to recognize the idea that maximizing known, ordered events is more efficient that relying on unknown, unordered events.

Do I have the best answer for Arby’s®? 

Probably not, but here is what comes to mind.  Intuitively, the order would have at least 2 statuses; In Progress, Complete.  The metrics should be available to say the optimal amount of orders, perhaps even to the specific line cook.  If the total of the “In Progress” orders exceeds the ability for the line cooks to efficiently keep up then new orders should not be accepted or at least entry should be slowed.

When my Grilled Chicken Bacon & Swiss Sandwich and curly fries finally arrived it was delicious.

What inefficiencies have you observed?

Merger Mania

At a high level; a merger is simply the management of redundancies, communicating objectives, ensuring collaboration and most of all ensuring the proper partnership across all levels of the new organization.

Just an average day at the office, right?  Simple in the same way that open heart surgery is simple.  To further extend that analogy would require more medical knowledge than I can muster.  In a final effort to resuscitate the correlation, both activities require implementing change while still performing at full speed.
Beep beep beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep…

Moving on.
A Business Capability (BC) is a function that performs some discrete activity that adds value.  Most organizations have a catalog of these capabilities mapped to the different business processes and systems to ensure an adequate portfolio vision.
Below graphic is an example of the Business Development business capability at a generic corporation.

 
It is safe to assume that both organizations have teams, business processes, and technology to accomplish this BC.  Would you acquire a company that didn’t do business development?

For each of the business capability redundancies, identify:
1.    Percentage of overlap
2.    Gaps analysis
3.    Cost of closing gaps
4.    Cost of changing business process
5.    Risk of coexistence

Leadership will then be able to make the appropriate decisions on how best to address each capability based on priority, risk, and cost.

Communication needs to remain at the top of the list for leadership in ensuring a smooth merger.  Magniloquence and verbosity fall short in value to an organization than message content.  Have no doubt that the rumor mill is working all three shifts.

In one meeting at the MN Entrepreneurial group, The Collaborative. One of the CEOs on the panel was discussing his first companywide meeting after acquiring a business.  His introduction was one of the most impactful that I’ve heard.

    “If there are two things you need to remember from this speech, they are:
        Number 1;  You have a job.  You’ll have a job tomorrow.

        Number 2;  You’ll have the same benefits package you do today.“

Years later one of the machine operators said that his message immediately and unquestionably squashed the scariest rumors about downsizing and benefits.
It is imperative to communicate early and often about the pending changes to either people, processes or systems.

This most difficult integration point is the people.  The significant difference in personalities, cultures and attitudes between the teams will lead to difficulty.
Let me say that again.  Integrating people is hard.  Even more so if they are former competitors.
An unfortunate tendency of the acquiring organization is to discount the value of the people of the acquired organization.
The perspective change from ‘Us versus Them’ to ‘Us versus the Market’ is a time consuming, investment intensive endeavor.  There will undoubtedly be some attrition as individuals are unable to adjust.  Non-trite team building is necessary at all levels to ensure the proper partnerships are developed.

Other considerations:
1.    People
    a.    Career Paths
    b.    Job Descriptions & Levels
2.    Technology
    a.    Data Center Location and need
    b.    Licensing
    c.    Vendor contracts
    d.    Support SLAs
    e.    Technology Portfolio
3.    Business Development
    a.    Market segments and penetration
    b.    Customer lists and cross selling
4.    Strategic
    a.    Flagship product lifecycle
    b.    Hybrid products and services
5.    R&D
    a.    Investment priorities
    b.    Intellectual property knowledge sharing


Oh, did I mention that the new organization still needs to generate revenue while completing the merger?

Good luck!

Your Staff is not Normally Distributed!

Peer reviews, 360 feedback, mid-years, S.M.A.R.T. goals.  A host of techniques exist that are used and sometimes abused to better rate employees.  The challenge will always exist in translating subjective metrics to objective measurements.

For example, how can attributes like "team-player", “organizational agility” be translated into a scale that allows for valid comparisons across a team, division, and organization?    One approach is to provide a weighting for the different attributes. 
Below is an example weighting performance scale for an entry level technical resource.
 

Performance Attribute	Weight
Team Player	25%
Communication	10%
Technical Aptitude	50%
Organizational Agility	15%

     

Therefore resulting will be the Expected Performance   would be:
 
         

The next question to those still paying attention is how Performance Value,  is calculated.
Many organizations collect these values from peers, managers and direct reports.  Some companies weight the Performance Values based on the source.   The weighting system becomes further obfuscated to:

 

 

The dangers of Role weight is the topic of another article since the organization’s culture significantly affects this type of weighting.

Having fun yet? I could go on with adding employee level as well.
How does this compare to other divisions?  Certainly the weighting would be different.  The undoubtedly  extroverted sales division would weight Communication and Extemporaneous speaking significantly higher than the technical division.

Assumptions:
    There is a max performance and merit raise dollar value (B) for an entire organization.  To extend the assumption, this would be split in some way between the divisions and finally the teams.  For the sake of this argument, let’s assume an even distribution of these dollars.  Therefore:



 
Resulting in the following:
B(team) = Total dollars available for a particular team.
P^  = Expected employee performance on the team.

Final Step:

Intuitively the final step is mapping the division of B(team) to each employee.  This is one of the most difficult activities when defining the bonus & merit distribution.  Some organizations have yet another nifty equation to use.  Stick in the P, get out a bonus.  Others, leave the consideration to the manager and finally the scariest organizations are the ones who enforce a specific distribution for employee performance.  I know of a large tech company requires all the teams to have a near Normal Distribution for the bonus and merit increases.

Problems with forcing Normal Distribution in performance management:
1.    Effectively mitigates the ability for outliers, extreme high performers and awful employees, to stand out.   These outliers require significant focus from investment(high potential) or relationship severing(low).

2.    Fails the variable independence test.

Since both Team Size and B(team) is finite and known.  Employees are directly competing for the same B(team).  Employees will act in self interest in maximizing their portion of B(team).  Self interest will result in each team member attempting to game the system by lowering the Performance(attribute) value for team mates while working to maximize their own. 
Therefore, the lack of independence inputs results in a distribution unlikely to coincide with a normalized distribution.


Leadership Challenge:
I encourage leaders to challenge any math distribution specific performance management system.

How does your organization approach merit and bonus structures?

Corporate Villain Combat Training

Meeting Length:

Personal preference:  No meeting should ever take 1 hour.  I always try to schedule the meetings for 30 minutes.  The shortened time line encourages brevity and specificity when communicating.

I’ve reviewed my calendar for the last 3 months and I’m in an average of 5.5 hours of meetings per day.  That is a crazy waste of time.  If those could have been 30 minute meetings only, the savings would add up quickly.

Facilitator Tool Kit:

 

Agenda – You need a plan.  Say it together, “I need a plan”.  How you can effectively guide the direction and tenor of any effort without a plan is beyond me.  This tool is effective against all the villains because it prevents soliloquies, interrogations and other time sucks.

Agendas can be very simple.  Topic – Time constraints – Action Items – Responsible - Date.  Consistency in format is not necessary provided it can be easily understood for non attendees.  Arguably a consistent format of the meetings notes trumps the necessity for a stringent agenda template. 

Contrary to what some marketers may tell you… branding of meeting agendas does not affect company valuation.

 

Meeting Notes – Each meeting should have a scribe which captures the major decisions discussed.  It is your responsibility to set the expectation that everyone invited to the meeting will review the meeting notes and know them.   The notes should be captured in a repository of some sort that allows for easy searching, organization and retrieval.   

 

Facilitator Powers – cape and tights are optional.  Masks should definitely be used.

You wouldn’t be set free without revealing your powers. 

Interruption – this is my favorite method of pulling stories, anecdotes, ramblings, rehashing, mini-presentations, weekend plans, conference room quarterbacks back to the topic at hand. 

Referee – there are times when the negotiating can be very heated.  The facilitator has the right to call foul if one of the parties is moving from factual and objective to personal and subjective.  Immediately state the foul and bring the discussion back on topic.

Time Keeper – since the agenda contains the timelines for the topics, this minute (pun intended) but massive power allows for flowing through the agenda.

 

 

Common facilitator questions:

1.       A manager keeps coming to my meeting and derailing, how do I handle this?

a.       If the manager is not invited then you should approach them separately and indicate that the goals of the meeting are x,y,z.  You’d be happy to add the manager to a future agenda if they would like to discuss a specific topic related to the goals of group.

2.       My culture is meeting heavy, how can this be altered?

a.       Be a catalyst of change, none of the teams that I’ve ever used these techniques above have ever complained about having extra time to accomplish their work.  Word will eventually get around that you run an effective meeting and hopefully it will transfer over to other facilitators.

3.       This will never work.

a.       I agree, it probably won’t work for you.  Please feel free to read my upcoming “Positive Contagious Leadership” post early next week.

4.       How do you address phone meetings?

a.       Excellent question.  As the world is tightly coupled through technology while removing personal interaction it is becoming increasingly difficult to be communicate on a meaningful level.  The same tenets apply to conference calls.  It is imperative for the facilitator to ensure everyone is engaged on all the topics.  No-one likes to repeat themselves. 

                                                               i.      Vijay: “Carlos, what do you think about this approach?” 

                                                             ii.      Vijay: “Hello, Carlos?”,

                                                            iii.      Carlos: “Oh hey, yeah, ummmm what was the question again?”

b.      This is frustrating.  Stop surfing the web when on a conference call!

 

Wrap Up:

The above tools are to help ensure you have effective and valuable discussions with your colleagues.  There will be situations when not all approaches outlined will be effective or relevant.  It is your responsibility as the facilitator to use them.