Consulting Skills — A 2-Day Course

 Open Public Course Closed In-House Course

Course Synopsis

• Are you working as an internal or external consultant or senior business analyst?
• Do you have existing basic consulting skills?
• Do you want to build strong working relationships with your clients?
• Do you have problems giving bad news to clients?
• Do you fear having a difficult conversation with a client?
• Would you like to structure your consulting engagements more professionally?
• Would you like to learn a new presentation technique which can help you engage and influence your clients and key stakeholders?
• Would you like to know how your behaviour might change when you are in a difficult situation and how you might adapt your approach to get the best for yourself and others?
• Have you ever wondered about the 'dark side of consulting'?

If the answer is "YES" - this is the course for you!

This course is run as an interactive experience based on a simple case study. It replicates the challenges faced by consultants and gives you the opportunity to develop your existing consulting skills.

The course is lead by an experienced consultant and offers a forum for likeminded people to work together to learn new skills and share consulting experiences.

The course uses proven tools and techniques for building a strong working relationship with your key stakeholders. It considers the management of consulting engagement and reminds consultants that their attention needs to be focused on their own line relationships as well as client relationships.

Course Objectives

On completion of this Consulting Skills training course, delegates will be gain:

• The chance to identify and create the key ingredients of a beneficial partnership
• Understanding clients' motivation factors and use them in relationship building
• How to handle difficult situations with tact and sensitivity
• The opportunity to evaluate the impact of differing management and leadership styles on the conduct of a consulting assignment
• The use of advanced presentation techniques to make a case for change
• The opportunity to build a personal action plan to support application of the problem solving techniques when you are back in the workplace

In the Practical Workshops, students will gain:

• The opportunity of working in a team to manage a simple but challenging client based assignment
• The opportunity to apply new techniques and tactics for engaging clients and to receive constructive feedback from an experienced consultant
• The opportunity to learn from others
• Time to reflect on your current practice and build confidence for future success

Intended Audience

This course is intended for:

• Anyone who works as an internal or external consultant or senior business analyst
• Anyone who works as a coach to a consulting team
• Anyone who manages a consulting team.

Benefits for your Company

Organisations that employ consultants, whether they work internally or externally, need to know that they are operating professionally and are able to cope with difficult situations. This course will help your employees to build confidence in client relationships so that they can handle difficulties, but more importantly can generate credibility to win new business.

Benefits for You

You will undertake an assessment of your behaviour when things are going well for you and when you are in conflict. This will help you build confidence to cope with challenging situations. In addition it helps you pick up clues about your key stakeholders and encourage their support and buy-in to your ideas. You will practice new techniques which will help to underscore your success in the management of consulting assignments.

Publicly scheduled dates, locations, and prices

Outline Course Contents

Introduction & Welcome

You will be introduced to the other participants, and to the format of the course. The interactive style of the event will be introduced with initial exercises to consider the difference between internal and external consultants, particularly in respect of the benefits they bring. There will also be an opportunity for you to share your personal objectives for the event.

Client Fears

A chance for you to work with your fellow course members to identify the fears clients might carry when employing consultants. These will be compared with research on the subject and we will highlight how understanding these fears can help to develop strong client relationships.

The Consulting Environment

We will look at a model which will help us to define the different management and leadership styles. In consulting, one style does not fit all and recognising the need to adapt our styles to meet the clients environment can be powerful. Following this session you will be introduced to a beguilingly simple case study which will form a back drop to the forthcoming sessions.

The Consulting Cycle

We introduce Block's consulting framework as a best practice example. You will be introduced to each of the stages and consider how your own consulting cycle differs. We will introduce you to the concepts of rectangular and triangular consulting management and help you reflect on the relationship between you, your client, your manager and the client's manager and some of the associated pitfalls.

Building and Maintaining Effective Consulting Relationships - Strength Deployment Inventory

This highly interactive session will give you the opportunity of understanding your style when things are going well for you and when you are in conflict with others.

We will begin with the initial assessment and help you to understand the main messages of the SDI tool. You will then consider how you might adapt your behaviour to influence others. You will understand your strengths and how you might 'overdo' these strengths which may affect others adversely.

We will consider what happens when conflict occurs, how your behaviour might change and the effect this might have on others. We will address ways in which you can adapt your behaviour to resolve the issue and prevent the conflict from deepening. This learning will be applied to the case study giving you the opportunity of meeting your key sponsor to position yourselves and manage expectations.

Politics and Culture

We will now explore this fascinating topic and help you to make an assessment of your own company's culture and as well as that of your clients. This learning will be applied to the case study where you will be challenged with the in-house politics likely to prevent project success.

Storyboarding

This session will introduce you to an excellent technique for building trust and commitment to any change. Storyboarding can be presented simply using flipcharts or, in a more complex way, using PowerPoint panel sets. Storyboarding will help you to have meaningful conversations with your clients. It helps you to challenge them in a far less threatening way than a formal meeting or presentation might. You will begin to build a storyboard as an informal presentation method for your client and other significant stakeholders.

Building Influence

A chance to recap on the story so far and consider two influencing models (the Johari Window and Influencing Styles) which we will use to assess the relationship you have currently created with your case study sponsor and other stakeholders.

Change Management

Many consulting engagements fall at the first hurdle because there is no robust framework for organisational change. Through the Extended Lewin Change Model, you will be introduced to the key stages which will underpin change success; the 7-S Change Model offers a simple technique for implementation planning. Returning to the case study you will develop your storyboard using these techniques

Building a Business Case

This session will introduce you to simple techniques for managing and delivering business benefits. The Balanced Score Card will be introduced. We will workshop the structure of a final report and consider the risks associated with the case study.

Giving Feedback to Clients

This session brings together many of the topics addressed on the course, but delves more deeply into the elements of handling difficult conversations and ethical consulting. You will be tasked with responding to blocking statements commonly used by people who are fearful of change. You will consider ways of managing people who are supporters and dissenters in the face of your change project. This session will be followed by your final meeting with the client when you will present your storyboard and give your client feedback on their own approach. You will receive feedback on how you managed the conversation and the level of success you achieved.

Personal Action Planning

This session will give you the opportunity to review your original objectives, share learning from the two day course and build a personal action plan as a facilitator.