There is more in common between a consultant and employee than you may think. I have worked in both roles, and I think I wear my consultant hat more often as an employee. Consultants have a sense of boundaries that helps one focus on work and think beyond assigned tasks to create visions and consider new ideas.
In consulting you are working for your clients; as an employee, you work for your manager. Believe it or not, he is looking to you for similar advice that a client would be seeking from a consultant. And by thinking like a consultant, you look at work in a different way that will help you see the larger value of what you contribute and not trip you up in details like how exactly your idea is implemented.
How do you do this?
1. Change your role to be a problem solver
As a consultant, I’m often asked by prospects: “What can you do for me? How can you solve my problem?” Then I ask him questions to understand his challenge so I recommend a solution.
Many times, your manager is thinking the same thing: “How can you solve my problem?”
Your manager may assign you a task, but that may not be the right task to solve a specific problem. There may be something that he’s simply not considering at that moment, making that task irrelevant. And of course, you can do better than that.
You sometimes need to expand your role to be a problem solver to help everyone win. Some ways to do that:
- Listening. By listening to what someone is saying, you are also listening to what he isn’t saying. By repeating back to someone what you heard (and indicate what you didn’t hear and ask questions about that), you may inspire him or her to see the situation differently.
- Provide another perspective. Add an option to a deliverable. Complete additional research. Take that extra step to expand someone’s view of a situation.
- Paint a vision. Sometimes, people need to see what the future could be. Define that future and create a plan to show how to get there. If anything, it will start a conversation that will eventually solve the problem.
- Go outside your comfort zone. Try working on something new that will help your manager or client and get you a new skillset in the process. Sure, it may take time for learning, but they will appreciate your efforts to pitch-in and find a solution. (And you get a new skillset in the end.)
By being more concerned about your role and what you do or don’t do, you limit yourself – and your manager. You need to generalize your own role a little to be a problem solver in addition to your title.
2. Just because your idea isn’t used as is doesn’t mean you didn’t contribute
Often as a consultant, my clients would ask me to come up with a list of options to solve a problem – including benefits and challenges. During a review of the list, the client would sometimes create his or her own options, inspired by my list (and sometimes choose their own instead).
Same with my manager – she often would ask me to create a list of options, and sometimes she would use one of the options on my list; sometimes she wouldn’t. Either way, her choice didn’t mean that I didn’t contribute to the final decision.
You have to let go of ownership when you are a consultant or an employee. Keep in mind, most decisions are made by consensus, and to get to the best decision you need a number of perspectives. Your recommendation isn’t always the best – it may need tweaks, adjustments, or didn’t take into account a whole series of work processes, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t contribute. Most likely, you influenced someone to think about a problem in a different way, and without that– the final solution never may have been suggested.
3. You don’t own your work projects
Every contract I signed as a consultant included a clause that the client owns any work I do for them.
The same is true for employees. If you read most employee agreements, the company owns any intellectual property created for it.
As a consultant, I would often design an approach and be almost indifferent to how it was implemented. Sure I cared, but I figured there were a number of people involved in making the changes and there were probably factors that needed to be addressed that I never considered. I would assume that the changes were for the greater good of the product and the company.
As an employee, there were times I’d work on a project and my manager and I had strong opposing feelings about a particular issue. In all cases, I needed to take a step back to try to understand her perspective. She could have known something I don’t know about the market or the company’s strategy, or had an insight into the business that I didn’t have. I needed to let go and include her perspective somehow into the solution.
You need to remember that if the company owns the work, then they own the decision of what happens to it – and you can’t get attached to the outcome of a project, as a consultant or as an employee.
If you start treating your manager like a client, you will notice that you maintain perspective and more easily see your worth and contributions. Over time, you’ll notice that you don’t sweat the small stuff, like implementation details, and you are more focused on creating a vision and promoting ideas. You will care more about the company’s vision and strategy, and talk more openly with your manager about her vision, her goals for the year, and how you can help her achieve them.
And that’s where you want to take your career anyway, right?
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