On being promoted into our first “lead” position, we can feel nervous, but also powerful. We get to set the team directions! To decide what to work on. That’s the time we get to do some real strategy.

After some months, or a month, or a week, we can crash down. Our own managers and stakeholders make it clear: the work our team does is still their business. Our team is still, in a way, working for them. We may feel less like mini-CEOs, more like junior admins, passing messages. We wonder what we’re adding.

Both these viewpoints are wrong. Not just because extreme, but because they miss the point of our new role. We’ve been made a leader or manager because we wrap up some messy value in a practical package.

Our own manager can’t lead each of our team members individually. For one thing, they don’t have time for all those one-on-one meetings! But it’s not just a question of time.

It’s more a question of focus.

Your manager has several goals — some that they set, some that are set by upper management. Balancing those goals, communicating about them, takes mental energy. And your manager has other tasks that aren’t “goals”, but still need done. Budget work, performance management, unavoidable admin. With that much stuff to do, your manager won’t be able to dedicate themself to focusing on each individual goal intently.

Even if your manager could clear time to focus on one or two goals, should they learn or re-learn all the specific expertise needed to enable the team to get them done? You as a recent doer yourself, are still in touch with what it takes to really do the work. So you can ask the right questions, nudge the team in the right direction if they veer off course. You can help with the work directly (though you shouldn’t neglect your leadership role in doing so).

Also, your mix of practical knowledge and increasing understanding of the business means that you can actually shape the work better.

Your manager is typically working at a different level, where it doesn’t make sense for them to keep all that practical expertise in mind. Of course you don’t want them to be too out of touch with the domain. But they need to be looking wider, at the value generated for customers (external or internal). They need to focus on how that value keeps money flowing. They need to solve challenges to that flow of value, and be ready to unblock communication with other departments or functions.

So when you can take your manager’s goals and work with your team to get them done — that frees your manager to focus on what they’re most effective at. Which ultimately helps you and the team too.

So you are packaging the skills and value of your team into a neat, usable container. And that itself takes some skill.

When a company needs help to achieve something — something that it lacks the specific expertise and resource to achieve — it often looks to consultants. Does the Finance team need help with implementing a new accounting system? They’ll use consultants — maybe a consulting group within the system vendor, or another.

Does the Marketing team need a year’s worth of advertising campaigns to launch new products and general opportunities? They’ll often look for an advertising agency. An agency who in theory should be experts in that stuff, trusted creatives and data crunchers who will get the whole job done.

Does your boss need help with achieving a goal for which they have not the expertise, time, or focus to shape and run the work themself? We just said so, right? So they need a kind of consultant too. And that consultant, dear reader, is you.

You have skills and knowledge which they don’t. You have relationships they lack. In a way, you’re like the expert advertising executive or consulting lead, who can shape a solution for a given need.

Maybe you don’t feel like that. Maybe it seems like your boss is into everything your team does, telling you how to run things, what meetings to schedule, how to wipe your nose.

If so — maybe you need to be more like a consultant, that trusted advisor. You can do something to start it.

What every good consultant does

Good consultants listen. They listen to the stated needs of their client, but also listen to the situation. That is, they listen to client’s description of the situation. And to the client’s answers to questions that unpack the situation. And to everything else they can find out that gives them insight on the client’s situation — public news, or industry knowledge, or other hints, perhaps from seeing the client interacting with others.

Good consultants listen in this way to build a picture of what’s going on. Because it’s only with some bigger picture that they can truly help the client with what they need. They can focus on what adds value — which may not always be what the client originally thought they needed.

Maybe all this sounds obvious. Consultants listen to their clients — you listen to your boss — what’s new?

What don’t good consultants do? They don’t jump in with answers and prebaked solutions, and they don’t necessarily take the client’s immediate stated requirements as a tasklist, without thinking carefully about what really helps. These are things that new consultants often do, because they lack experience.

Some weeks ago (on Cedric Chin’s excellent CommonCog site), I gave some advice to a new consultant. He’d asked for tips on formulating solutions quickly during client meetings. He felt that unless he could offer quick solutions to the client’s stated needs, he wouldn’t be seen as an expert. Here’s part of my reply:

One of the most common mistakes in a sales or consulting conversation is to feel pressured to recommend something too early. Most of us do that at the beginning.

Why is that a mistake? Firstly because until they are paying, to offer too much advice is to devalue your expertise. For a hardline exposition of this rationale and its consequences, see Blair Enns “The Four Conversations”, or listen to all the episodes of his joint podcast with David C Baker “2Bobs”.

But the second reason that it’s a mistake to focus too much on what you can say, is that it distracts you from the more important task of creating a picture of the situation.

But the importance of that task should in a way relax you. Because it takes some pressure off. You and the (potential) client already share a main goal: that you should gain a useful picture of what is going on for them. And that starts by getting them relaxed and talking about themselves. Not about you and your skills or recommendations, not yet.

In early conversations, you don’t have to cover every detail — you can always come back for that, via text or a call or whatever. But you’re trying to be open to what is going on for that client and in the groups of people and processes around them. And a lot of that is curiosity, a desire to fit the pieces together. If they’re talking about working on stakeholder projects, how do those projects come to them? What happens afterwards? Are there odd gaps in their descriptions of processes? All sorts of things that may pop up. If you enjoy learning systems and fixing broken ones, you just apply that mentality to the people stuff as well as the tech side.

Knowing how to listen for that does get easier with experience. But if you are truly trying to be open, you already have a big advantage. Because most salespeople and consultants that that client meets will not be listening so well. They will already have an agenda, and they will have talking points just waiting to come out. They are over-eager. If you keep your cool and listen, you will have an advantage.

For what it’s worth, that was my most-liked post so far on that forum of experts (do consider joining CommonCog if you want to accelerate your business expertise!)

What does consulting have to do with your job?

How does the consulting relationship apply to you and your job as a team lead or manager? You can do your best work if you:

• Take your boss and stakeholders as being consulting clients.
• Take your role as that of expert advisor (i.e. not code for money)
• Take your boss’s and stakeholders’ requirements as expressive of a business need.
• Take the need in context — what does it enable for customers or others in the business? How does this translate back into value for your boss or stakeholders?
• Take meeting the need as your definition of success.j

Two quick, common examples:

A functional need expressed as a solution

Let’s say your team built and maintains a fancy dashboarding application. Each time a user goes to a dashboard, it checks for updates for all the reporting widgets. When there’s lots of data, that can take a while. So a customer requests the ability to just refresh each widget on demand, with a button.

That feels wrong to you. The point of the dashboard is to summarize current data conveniently without needing a string of actions from the user, like clicking refresh buttons.

But you ask your team “how could the dashboard become more useful straight away, even if it doesn’t have all the updated data”. They bat around the idea of progressive loading — loading each widget’s data individually then displaying it straight away, starting from the top. A team member suggests lazy loading — only loading those widgets that are in the viewport or immediately under it, before the user starts to scroll. But that would only work with longer dashboards.

Then a team member asks “couldn’t we use the new notifications service”? She explains: because that relies on a message broker, the dashboard could use it as a quick way to find out which widgets had any updates in the first place. The data sources were in the course of being updated to use that system anyway.

So you go back to the stakeholder — you say “We could implement that button, but we don’t think it would be a nice experience. Would you be prepared to wait three months until we had a new system in place that would make the dashboard load much faster?” The stakeholder says yes. The team doesn’t need to waste effort on a workaround, and the stakeholder is happy. (And of course the more value you’ll get from that message broker system, making it even more worthwhile investing in and maintaining into the future.)

A need whose source isn’t clear

Your boss comes back from an industry conference, excited about a technical approach she’s heard of. She asks whether you can fulfill a longstanding customer request with that approach. 

You’ve known about the new approach for a while. You think it’s great for some stuff but not really for the kind of feature the customer requested.

You want to find out what’s really behind this idea. Is your boss suggesting it for the sake of innovation and exploration, or really to fulfill the customer request in the best and fastest way possible? 

Be careful — as a recent doer, you might think that only the second reason is valid. That’s wrong. Sometimes by using a new technology to achieve something, even if there are other more traditional ways, you help the team and the product. It can improve team morale to learn the new thing, and builds knowledge that can help later. And in doing this new thing, you can talk about it, in the product marketing itself sometimes, and certainly at developer conferences. In the market, you keep your place as a builder of new, exciting things.

But many times it’s the wrong decision to use new tech just because it’s there. It can cost you more than you think.

So you ask questions carefully, and find out that the boss is more excited about the new tech than about solving that specific customer request right now. Because you do see the potential of that new tech, just not for that specific feature, you suggest some other current needs that you could try the new approach on. And a couple of team members who are just getting to the end of a long slog of work on something and could do with something fresh to try out. Your boss is happy and so are they. Later, so should be your customers, as they can see that you’re investing in new good ways to get things done and add value.

Summing up — why take the “expert advisor” consultant stance in your job as a team leader / new manager?

If a consultant is presented with over-specific requirements — a solution instead of a problem, they can do exactly as asked, to keep the client happy. That is quick and unchallenging. But misses potential value. 

What if the client proposed a solution that worked well from what they could see at the start of the project, but the needs changed over time? An overly specific solution doesn’t allow for that. And an experienced consultant would be able to avoid that pitfall. Or what if the consultant knows that several groups in the client organization have similar needs? If only the immediate request from just one group is taken, a bigger, more valuable solution is missed.

And in these cases, because the results of the consultant’s work may disappoint the client, or at least achieve less than what could have been, the consultant has less value in the client’s eyes.

Often, it’s worth a consultant finding out more about the needs behind the ask. And the organization behind the needs. Asking questions, building knowledge and relationships, to be able to help the client more. That way takes patience and sometimes bravery. But when it works, the consultant becomes a star in the client’s eyes.

And it works pretty much the same way for a team lead or manager who wants to do the best for their boss and stakeholders. Finding out more about their needs, and drawing on your expertise to suggest a solution, nearly always pays off. That’s why it really helps to view yourself as a skilled consultant sometimes. 

Questions

Of course there are many differences between being a consultant and being an employee. You might have questions. What should we do if our manager overrules us? What if stakeholder needs conflict? Do I need to be the main channel of communication between my team and stakeholders? Aren’t consultants just money-sucking vultures? Here are some answers for these and other questions.

How do I go about finding more about the underlying needs behind a request?

You could start with this post of mine: Told you need “big-picture thinking”? Then, for research methods, try reading the appendix to The Heart of Innovation, by Chanoff, Furst, Sabbah, and Wegman. And for tips on the core skill of open listening, read Listen Like You Mean It, by Ximena Vengochea.

Do I risk being annoying if I constantly look for deeper “user needs” when my manager just needs a quick task done?

Yes. So you have to judge when it’s worth exploring a bit deeper.

What if my manager overrules my advice? Doesn’t that break this “trusted advisor” relationship?

Firstly, a consulting client always has the ability to reject advice. But the consultant has the choice (at least in theory) of not continuing with the project. So that is different from a manager/employee relationship. A couple of thoughts though:

• Trust is built over time, both with consultants and with managers/employees.
• If our manager does overrule us, it might be a good thing. They could prevent us from making a big mistake, and anyway we can often learn a lot from them, whether or not they’ve taken the same path as us — from “doer” to leader. If they’ve taken a different path, they may have more to teach us, about the business, or different approaches to problems.

What if I really want to get my manager’s advice?

That’s good, if you handle it right. A really good consultant doesn’t need to pretend they know everything. Actually, it can show confidence if they are open enough to ask for thoughts and suggestions. And it can show your confidence too.

But you have to ask in a mutually respectful way. Appreciating your manager’s viewpoint, but not needing to overly humble yourself. You have good ideas too — that’s why you’re in a leadership role.

What if my boss trusted me but is now micromanaging more?

It can happen. Perhaps because they think you need that oversight. But equally likely, because their own managers are putting more pressure on them to achieve.

Either way, work on building up the trust again, by showing that you really understand their situation and challenges, and that you can help them effectively.

Should I restrict communication between my team and other stakeholders?

Not on principle, no. Giving your team access to stakeholders can be key to getting things done efficiently. And it shows that you trust them. That’s good for your manager to see, and good for your team too. Of course you need to grow their skills in cross-functional communication and decision-making. That’s part of your job as a leader.

But you do have to guide them in communicating effectively, to the stakeholders and back to you. And there might be times when it’s better if you handle the communication. Like everything, it takes judgement.

By the way, consulting firms grow their junior employees skills this way too — gradually giving them more responsibility and visibility, testing to see how they do.

What if a stakeholder need conflicts with other things you need to do?

Just as with consulting firms, this happens all the time. It’s important to understand the need in the first place, and in understanding it, you might find ways to solve it along with other needs, with one approach. But you’ll often have to prioritize. For hints on how, see Nice Managers Force Priorities.

Aren’t consultants basically money-sucking vultures?

No. Only some of them. Many individual consultants and small boutique consulting firms are very conscientious, at the risk sometimes of being better advisers than business people. The very big consulting firms, in their production-line approach, need careful handling. But there are also many well-motivated, thoughtful and effective people within those firms.