Tips on finding People-Gifted, Business Sense, Consultants

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Finding People-People with Gifts for Business—A follow up to our post “Making it look easy”

Hiring the Right Consultant is Not Simple

Hiring a coach/consultant for human system’s or organizational culture issues is not easy. While I touted in my last post hiring “people-people” for human systems issues, the truth is, it is even more complex. You will need someone gifted in people . . . and someone with experience with organizations.

Making the assumption that any “people-person”—any expert in behavioral health issues—will “do fine” in the organization arena can be just as naive as assuming any business consultant has the necessary people skills**. . Leaders make this mistake when they expect professionals with gifts in business to be good with people issues in a consulting role. At the same time, many leaders make the mistake of referring employees with work issues to therapists. This leads to very mixed results because many therapist have limited experience with organizational leadership. They are experts in mental health and if the issues are really individually-based—anger, anxiety, chemical dependency—then this may be an appropriate referral. If it is a broader issue that includes leadership, management, or or institutional issues, it may be ineffective or detrimental.

Finding the Right Gifts

So, what’s a leader to do? First, determine if the issue in organizational or an individual’s behavioral “problem.” Second, if it’s an individual issue consider a referral to EAP or an independent mental health professional. Third, if it is truly an organizational issue—creating new HR policies, a strategic plan, or new electronic records system— consider a business coach or consultant. Fourth, if is is organizational but has elements of an interpersonal or “human” element—organizational culture, team conflict, motivation, etc.—find someone gifted with people that also has experience in organizational leadership.

To determine if a “people-person” has the necessary organizational skills can be tricky. Below are some questions you can ask the professional to assess their ability to act as a systems consultant and not just a therapist.

Questions to Ask

Questions to ask a therapist to determine if they can act as a human systems consultant or coach:

• What experience have you had in leadership/managerial roles?

• What areas of an organization would you not give advice on?

• What, to you, is the definition of a healthy work team/organization/leader?

• What are the primary causes of problems in teams/organizations? (Look for an understanding of systems)

• Tell me about a time you helped a team/organization with a cultural/systemic change?

• What would you consider to be a successful outcome from an organizational consulting contract? (Again, looking for an awareness or organizational goals not simply personal goals.)

Ask these questions and you will get a feel for the ability of the consultant to use their people gifts in an organizational system. (As consultants you need to keep it simple—Like Steve Jobs)

** Having trained during the heyday of systemic theory, I feel fortunate to have studied topics like “Cybernetics of Cybernetics” and “Human Networks# as well as more traditional “organizational consulting” topics. Many younger therapists I talk have not had this systemic focus and are more likely to have had training in narrative or postmodern topics. Our Leading Edge Coaching with these professionals often is the first introduction these professionals have to understanding human systems.

In the last post I shared a picture of my Taylor 614ce acoustic. Here is my other “axe.” A custom built “Batswatter” electric built by my brother as a surprise gift. Ne, I’m not a huge Batman fan. There is a personal bat story that prompted the time. Oh, and it lights up. Too cool for my skill set.

Making it look easy . . . .

Just built and primed this window frame on our four-season porch. I can do the work but my contractor makes it look easy!

Aligning With Gifts . . . for Success

I am convinced that when a person is using their real gifts, they make things that are hard . . . look easy. This is just the opposite of what happens when I play guitar.

To be fair . . . I have a lot of technical skill with a guitar . . . but playing guitar, and creating music in general, is not one of my gifts. I work hard to produce a good sound with my Taylor 613ce . . . something other musician’s appear to do easily, but . . . for me . . . is a lot of work. One night, I was struggling with a particular section of Eric Clapton’s classic Tears in Heaven—a piece that I eventually would master . . . after months and months of work. I asked my son, who has his mother’s gift for music, if he could help me with figuring out a particularly difficult section. “Sure,” he replied. “I’ll look at it.” The next day—the next day!— he came back playing the entire piece. “I’m not talking to you anymore!” I joked. In truth, I’m used to it. All my kids (6 in number) excel at things that are not my gifts—like art, writing, drama, etc.

When my son plays guitar, unlike his father, people pull out their phones and start taking pictures; or they ask me, “Is he left-handed?” (He’s not.) It is definitely something that comes much easier for him than it does for me. Fortunately, my son doesn’t see this particular gift as something that sets him apart, and above, others. “Talent is as common as table salt,” he quotes . . . when others admire his gift . . . and he’s right. Everyone is gifted.

Here is my Tayler. Love this guitar!

Gifts and Making It Look Easy

Gifts are what people can do easily. While I can’t master a challenging guitar piece without a crazy amount of work. I can read a room of people—even a room full of strangers—with a high degree of reliability. I see patterns I understand behavior. My family has forbid me, due to my ability to recognize patterns, from telling them what is coming in a movie, play, or television show . . . but I almost always know. While having a Ph.D. in human development enhanced this ability, the truth is, I have always been able to do it easily . . . and I can’t even tell you how I “know” except that I pick up on patterns and nuances of non-verbal and verbal cues. Oh, I’m also “on to” the patterns that writers and producers use to throw you off . . . so the viewer won’t predict what is coming. All my family members have such gifts. Things they can do easily that the “old man” can’t do well. Whether it’s grammar, spelling, music, art, theatre . . . truly talent and gifts are “common.”

If you want to learn to play guitar . . . hire my son. Want an editor, an artist, a recommendation for choreography? I can’t point to the kids in my family that have these gifts. You don’t want to hire me to teach you guitar—someone who has learned a lot of technique bur is limited in this area—lest you curtail your own development. Could I teach a beginner? Sure. But if they are gifted in music, I would need to pass them on to someone else very quickly to avoid delaying their development. The same goes for the other areas I mentioned that are not my gifts. In the same way, hiring people for their gifts will make hitting your targets more likely. I see leaders hiring business, finance, marketing, or other coaches then asking them about how to manage people. Maybe that’s okay if this is an area of gifting but most of the time I’d like them to work with someone whose talent and expertise is in human systems.

Giftedness . . . in Coaching/Consulting

This is why I beat the drum for leaders to hire “people-people” when it comes to improving their organizational culture. And the reason why we have spent a lot of time training graduate students and professionals in the mental health sciences to work with organizations and businesses.** Because a lot of business consultants have developed a techniques and tools for helping but, if they are not working in an area of gifts, their outcomes are likely to be poor over time. Poor simply because they are not working in an area of gifting and the things that come easily to others are not their strengths. (For a real-life example, see our post Consultant, Stay in Bounds! In this post we tell the all-too-familiar story of a consultant asked to work outside their area of gifting and the traumatic consequences on an organization). If interested, you can also check out a related post on why Consultants and Clients Shouldn’t be Friends or how Steve Jobs used his talents at Apple.)

Using Your Gifts

So, if you are a coach or consultant, make sure you are practicing within your area of giftedness. (Keep it simple. Focus on your core services.) Don’t let your own ambition, other people’s vision for your career, or the pressure of the organization or leader’s needs make you operate outside your “sweet spot.” Refer to someone whose gifts align with the needs. Hopefully, they in return, will do the same and refer to you the organizations and leaders that you can help with your gifts. Everyone “wins” and success is more likely. Also, be intentional about continuing to develop your gifts. Invest in training, coaching, and other self-development activities to enhance, expand, and deepen your gift. This will continue to make the value you can provide to organizations or leaders increase over time. It will also help to “fill the pipeline” of work and bring you more opportunities.

Hiring for Gifts

If you are an organizational leader, hire a coach or consultant for their specific gifts and do not let them—or let yourself—expect them to work outside their area of expertise. This particularly is a risk over time. A trusted advisor, who has helped in the past, is asked to work on something new. The focus is on the trust. But is this the right person, with the right gifts, for this particular problem or task? Rarely, is this the focus. The leader and coach/consultant simply assume they can tackle a new “problem” . . . and perhaps they can, but at what cost to efficiency and with what degree of risk? Smart leaders find the right tool for the job and smart leaders/consultants find the right set of gifts to maximize success.

In our next post we will offer tips for choosing consultants/coaches that have the people-gift and that are prepared to handle organizational issues.

** Even professionals in the people area need training and identifying their gifts. All “people-people” are not gifted in the same way either. Some are great at analytical thought, statistics, but not good at people skills. Others are great with people but struggle to use the analytical tools to help leaders. Some may be great at strategic planning and poor at conflict resolution. Others may be great at personnel issues but not good at visioning. It all depends on how they are gifted.

Hydrant Repairs . . . and leadership values

Here is the refurbished hydrant! Ready to water the orchard, blueberries, and garden areas. Pre-repair picture below.

Repairing, not replacing, Yard Hydrants

Repair or Replace? On my “to do” list this summer is fixing a couple of frost-free hydrants. To get technical, one is a Woodford Y34 that is starting to leak and the other a Woodford W34 that tends to freeze in the winter (see below). These two hydrants were put in roughly 15 years ago and only now are we having some minor issues. Interestingly, they are not our oldest hydrants. We have three that were already installed when we bought our property, 18 years ago, and which are at least 5 years older. But, the two hydrants with issues that I am repairing are the most used hydrants on the property and perhaps it is this fact that has led to the issues.

Notice, I said “repairing” and not “replacing.” Why? Why am I attempting to repair and not just replace them? Well, not because of aptitude or confidence, in my ability to fix mechanical things, that’s certain. I have never install— or fixed—a hydrant before and, if you are a regular reader of my blog you’ll know, I am not particularly mechanically inclined. But . . . I am cheap . . . and I don’t like the feeling of paying 3-4 times more than it’s worth to have someone else do the work if I think it is possible that I can accomplish it with a little—hopefully not irrational—faith and a willingness to take on small risks.

So, this kind of “new mechanical test of my adequacy” is, admittedly, threatening to my psyche. Fraught with danger . . . I struggle how to approach these tasks and minimize the nagging anxiety of failure hanging over my head. Do I order lots of extra parts to make sure I have the right ones? Resign myself to making multiple trips back and forth to the store? Try and figure out exactly what I need and order only the parts I think I need? Each of these options are laced with potential for feeling like I have failed. Extra parts? Waste of money. Multiple trips? Berating myself for not being smart enough to analyze the needed parts correctly. Exact order? What if I don’t have the right parts and have to delay the repair. Each feels like a failure, looming, like the foreboding outline of a turkey vulture, just waiting for death.

Yes, I know this is part of my irrational expectations for myself—is it too much to ask to just succeed, each, and every time . . . without too much trouble? An irrational product of a brain conditioning over time to fear even minor set backs. My healthier “mind” knows that even people who have good mechanical aptitude may have these issues and even do these same things . . . they just don’t appear to define it as proof of their ineptitude the way my brain does.

But this post is not about repairing my irrational thoughts and beliefs, but about how repairs reveal a leader’s values. (BTW, If you have the same unrelenting standards for yourself, like I do, you might want to do yourself a favor and read what I learned watching a choir make mistakes).

Here is the Woodford parts bag for the repair.

Choices Revealing Values

Lucky for me, that You Tube exists today! You Tube is often my source, or security blanket, for mechanical courage. So, one of my confidence boosting activities, is to watch videos, often times several, of repairs that I am attempting. Seeing the repairs made on the videos makes if much more possible for me to step over the threshold of fear and get started on my own challenges.

But repairing the hydrants reveals something about me and my values . . . here are some of them and, as it relates to leadership, I want to focus on the last one—wanting something that is common.

1. Yes, I’m cheap. I don’t like “wasting money” that doesn’t have to be spent. So, I am inclined to repair things if possible unless there is a clear advantage to replacement. I know not every one shares this value. Some want “new.” Fine, but I”ll take value, old or new, over “shiny” and “trendy.” Personal preference or value.

2. I prefer good quality over “new” and often trust that older items have escaped some of the present cheapening of manufacturing that does not make new parts, especially on the cheap end, better than old ones.

3. I like learning and becoming more mechanically competent . . . even if I’m afraid of “failing.”

4. I derive a strong sense of success seeing the results of overcoming my fears and items in good working order.

5. I want a popular quality name brand. I don’t want something that is unique, hard to find, an outlier. This is not true in other areas of my life. I like something different, unique, unusual. But not when it comes to hydrants. I want easy to find parts, An item that won’t be hard to repair or replace. There will be on-line advice on how to operate, fix, or replace. (Seven different You Tube videos so I can find one with the right tools, procedures, etc. that make it “doable”) These are the things I value. So, I have Woodford hydrants—one of the oldest and leading manufacturers of hydrants.. (If I was installing hydrants in a place like Mata Mata, New Zealand, better known as Hobbiton, I wouldn’t want Woodford. But then again, I’d probably be hiring someone else to manufacture and install them!)

Imagine my Woodford hydrant here? It would definitely look modern, out-of-place, and would spoil the magic.

Values and Leading

Recently, someone was telling a business owner about how we help repair human systems in organizations. He struggled to explain to her how we use intensive interviews, focus groups, executive reports, action plans, on-going consulting and coaching . . . to help leaders, teams and employees. Her response? “Why don’t they just fire them?” He retorted, “Sometimes you have an employee so valuable that you want to give them a chance to succeed.”

Now, any of us who have managed large groups of employees know that, regrettably, there are many times where firing someone is the solution that is needed. For me that demarcation line of an employee being “workable” or “not workable” is tied to things like integrity, safety, and honesty. An extreme example will make the point; for most leaders, in most situations, an employee who threatened other employees would be a cause for termination. Stealing, falsification, absences without leave . . . there are plenty of examples. But, most situations, involving people are not this clear.

So, I don’t want to be too hard on this owner. I don’t know what he was thinking . . . maybe it was about a situation most would consider a fire-able offense . . . or what situations he has encountered where repairs were made or were successful.. But I would propose that there are times, many times, when replacement is just not the best option. Let’s consider these from a view point of general principles.

1. You know that the overall product is good and of high quality. It just needs some upkeep or repair and it will work well for many more years. The cost, in this case, of replacement often exceeds the repair. In business terms, terminating an employee, advertising and recruiting, hiring, on-boarding . . . there are a lot of potential costs to turnover that must be accounted for in the decision. In human terms, what impact does firing someone have on the culture, the motivation, and production of the other employees. For every action there are reactions—positive and negative—that should be considered. There also may be the value of being fair, forgiving, loyal, or other values that make a leader want to factor in past years of good performance.

2. Replacing sometimes leaves you with an inferior product. Sometimes you just can’t get a good quality replacement or the cost to get the same quality “part” is too high. What do you lose when the experienced employee leaves? What if you can’t get a quality replacement? I recall the impact on an organization who fired a Child Psychiatrist in a rural setting. It was very difficult to find someone to relocate under the circumstances. The organization would up paying for a locum tenens Psychiatrist out of Boston for an extensive period—I’m sure that did not help the bottom line. Similarly, I run a 1948 Ford 8N tractor to do a lot of my shredding/mowing partly because the cost to replace it would be very high.

3. Replacing a part when the new part undermines the entire system. There is an ancient phrase, “You can’t put a new patch on an old wineskin.” At times a new part is “too much” for the old system. Often organizations bring in a new leader because of problems but if nothing has been done to deal with the underlying issues, these new leaders often either fail to make significant process or are “run off” Then the organization or team is often labelled as “toxic” and failure becomes an expected “explanatory fiction” of the “way it is” making transformative change extremely unlikely.

4. Replacing a part when it’s role is more than just it’s functional value. I mentioned the Ford 8N tractor earlier. The truth is, it is more than just a tool. It is my father-in-law’s tractor, passed down to his daughter, and an item around which many family memories have been made and core family values have been reinforced. That farm-born independence, hard-working, care for your equipment, cherished memories of past accomplishments . . . Maybe, someday, this tractor will pass out of our family’s ownership, but I don’t see it happening for the next generation or two for sure.

As a leader, conveying a belief that 1. your employees at their core possess good qualities, 2. that replacing them will not automatically lead to a better product, 3. that the system will react tot the seismic shift as an employee leaves, and 4. that employees and their relationships within the organization are not just a transactional exchange of function and remuneration can go along way to creating a valued culture where high performance can be built. It is not the “be all or end all” but it’s a good start.

Repair or replace? What ever you as a leader decide it will express your values and may define how you are perceived as a leader. Keeping a defective hydrant is frustrating, and discouraging to those interacting with it, and it may lead to more damage of the system. It needs to be replaced. But sometimes, really understanding the problem, taking it apart, and replacing the deteriorated bushing, refreshing the old hardened rubber with new, and a little paint gives you something more valuable, and less costly, that buying new.

Here’s my close up before the repair . . . so I can remember how the handle linkage goes together!