Advising and Consultancy
What is it?
This paper discusses many of the dilemmas faced by any manager, adviser or consultant when trying to choose a particular role as the most helpful one in a particular situation, especially if the best role is not completely obvious. Choices may involve giving advice, telling others what to do, playing the role of an expert, helping "clients" to figure out the solution for themselves, facilitating their own problem solving, even if that involves withholding what may seem to the consultant an obvious solution. But who has the right answer? Various tools and perspectives are presented below to broaden the discussion about the roles and required competencies of the advisor.
What can you do with it?
Basic (sub-) questions
• What is the most appropriate role to play by the advisor and under which circumstances?
• What are the most common steps in the advisory process?
Results
• Clarity over the common advisory process and specific steps, including how to develop proper relations between advisor and client
• An overview over three key roles of the advisor and the pros and cons of each, depending on context.
1. Introduction
“The adviser/consultant will know the answer” is the common misunderstanding, between the management of the “client organisation and the adviser/consultant. A misunderstanding that can lead to disastrous effects.
We define an adviser as an expert attached to an organisation for a relative longer period with a specific assignment to advise the management on a series of complex issues. Whereas a consultant is an expert attached to an organisation, invited to intervene on a specific issue for a dedicated period of time, very often based upon terms of reference, specifying the responsibilities and desired outputs of the consultant. Both the consultant and the adviser have no hierarchical position in the organisation.
When we are asked for advice from the client, we have a tendency to respond and to play the expert role. After all: "we are supposed to know, isn’t it?" When the solution is given the client often resists to the given solution, and argues that the problem is not correctly understood or that the solutions are too difficult to implement, etc. etc.
Developing competencies of an adviser for MDF means that it is important to deal extensively with the perception of different roles that both client and consultant can assume. An underlying assumption is that, both client and consultant can change role, if required. The challenge is to detect, in what extend these role changes are possible for us as consultants.
The Tango is a toolkit for advisers based on the MDF concept of advisory work in international co-operation. Applying the toolkit successfully depends on the skills of the adviser and her/his ability to create a well-understood role distinction between the adviser's responsibilities and those of the client system.
To clarify this concept, we introduce here three models of consulting:
1. The Process consultant
2. The Doctor / Patient consultancy process
3. The Expert Model
One of the dilemmas's that faces any manager or consultant is how to be helpful in a situation in which there is a genuine choice between:
- Giving advice, telling others what to do, playing the role of an expert, and
- Helping "clients" to figure out the solution for themselves, facilitating their own problem solving, even if that involves withholding what may seem to the consultant an obvious solution.
With this distinction in mind, we discuss in this chapter a number of aspects that are relevant for the MDF approach (beyond the toolkit) to advisory work in the sector of international co-operation. We further look into the skills, attitudes and competencies of the adviser in international co-operation and the role of the adviser in the organisational learning cycle.