Why consultants shouldn’t want to be liked

Call me harsh, but I don’t think it’s the role of parents to be liked by their children.  Loved?  One would hope so.  But liked?  Like is for friends, for the people who share your interests and experiences.  Like is for those you want to be with but are afraid you might lose.  Parents may not be liked, but they are for life: it falls to us to tell our children what they need to know, not what they want to hear.

And so it should be with consulting.  We’re carrying out a wide range of interviews at the moment, as part of our client research programme, and one of the things that has struck me most from all these conversations is how much clients rely on consultants to be honest.  Any senior executive in a big organisation is surrounded by sycophants, yet success depends on receiving and acting on objective feedback.  “I want consultants to challenge my thinking,” said one, “to help me see where I’m going wrong even if I resent the criticism at the time.”

Experienced consultants will know how hard this can be: difficult messages sometimes have to be disguised or approached circuitously if they’re to be accepted; real courage may be required to stand up to overbearing managers.  There’s always the fear that an upset client will not hire you again and may not even pay the current bill.  But I worry that, these days, there’s more.  The public stock of consultants is not high and perhaps their awareness that they're not loved makes them more eager to be liked.

All of which has made me wonder why some consultants are better at this than others (that’s certainly what the clients we’re talking to are telling us).  I suspect it comes down to two quite closely connected attributes: subject-matter expertise and access to data.  People who know what they’re talking about and/or have hard evidence to support what they’re saying are much more likely to have an opinion and stick to it when challenged than those who are skating on intellectually thin ice.

Someone at one of the big consulting firms recently told me that the problem his firm had was that it was respected but not liked. He thought that was a problem, that it might damage their ability to form long-term relationships with clients.  I don’t agree.  Moreover, I suspect that wanting to be liked (I’ve ranted before on the multiple dangers associated with that dreadful phrase “working in partnership”) is a sign that a firm lacks depth of expertise and/or content.  Perhaps in the future we’ll be segmenting firms into those which are liked and those which are respected: which would you prefer to be?