Top Five Times To Hire or Not To Hire a Consultant

I've been a consultant for 20 years, and in that time, I've learned a lot about what's great consulting and what's not, when consultants can help and when they can harm, and how to make sure I am offering what clients actually need rather than what I am trying to sell. This experience has helped me distill the right reasons to hire a consultant, and some wrong ones.

Great consulting can help when you:

1. Feel like you are going in circles in your organization's discussions about strategy or future direction, or seem to be bumping up against the same challenges, regardless of what you try doing to break the cycle;

2. Are asking key staff to serve in dual roles of facilitator and participant in meaty discussions about your work; OR, need to develop a longer term strategy or program and don't have the the right mix of staff skills to do it well;

3. Are a coalition with multiple interests at the table, and need to navigate tricky inter-organizational politics and priorities;

4. Need to inject fresh thinking, methods, or ideas in your work;

5. Need a neutral party who can challenge you, ask provocative questions, and disrupt ingrained thinking.

Consulting probably won't help if you:

1. Are considering using a consultant to build relationships with community organizations or individuals--because those relationships would belong to the consultant, not you;

2. Want to use a consultant to execute a project as a way to avoid internal resistance to that project;

3. Don't have leadership of the organization on board with the work;

4. Have let the work slide for too long and now have an impossibly unrealistic timeline for completing the work;

5. Haven't gotten any internal capacity to work with the consultant and make sure the consultant has access to the people and information they need to do their job well.

If your organization needs inventive strategy development, or if you feel overwhelmed and rudderless in a project, it might be time to step back and ask yourself if you need some additional support. Contrary to the stereotype, there are plenty of consultants out there who will not sell you things you don't need, genuinely want and have the skills to help, and will be a partner in moving the work forward. If you want some ideas of who to call, drop me a line and I can help you narrow in on your needs and suggest people to talk to about consulting (including me, but only if it is the right fit!).