Building relationships, the myth of having all the answers, and the process of letting go
By Dana
Looking back on the last few months, I’ve learned many things related to financial systems, how to make financial education more inclusive, and some of the gender dynamics of money. I’ve also learned about myself, my team members, and the client on both professional and personal levels.
I will never understand how time flies even when there are smaller moments when it feels like it is crawling. In many ways, it still feels like the beginning of the semester where we have just received our projects and had our first meeting with our client, but months have passed and we have delivered our final presentation.
Looking back on the last few months, I’ve learned many things related to financial systems, how to make financial education more inclusive, and some of the gender dynamics of money. I’ve also learned about myself, my team members, and the client on both professional and personal levels. If you ask me what my biggest takeaways of the experience were, though, I may distill it into these three:
1. Relationship-building and trust-building are essential to the process.
Consulting engagements are professional in nature, but professional does not mean that you are devoid of your humanness. One thing I really appreciated about my team is that they are so personable. They took time in each meeting to display their humanness, they were authentic in talking about their personal lives, their relationship with money and their experiences and from that we were able to have more flowing conversations with our client. I’m often a put-your-head-down-and-work type of person, but through this project and many others in my MBA experience, I’ve gotten to see more and more the value of bringing your authentic self to work.
Relationship building is important for building trust. If people don’t have a sense of who you are and your values, why should they trust you to do the work? Why should they trust you with the future of a program or the organization? Building these relationships also means that you are more invested in the work, because you want to do well for the people you care about.
2. The consultant doesn’t need to have all the answers.
In my first blog post I pondered what makes us qualified to consult, coming from a place of being an MBA student with not a lot of traditional consulting experience.
I love researching, but even that has this limits, and this is only heightened given the different cultural contexts we had to keep in mind. At the end of the day, it is the client who are more of the experts, and we, as consultants, don’t need to have all the answers.
As a consultant, our job is more to provide ideas. But ideas without structure don’t always have a vehicle to implementation, so our role is to also provide a framework for how to think through them. We cannot tell a company what to do, but we can provide them with the tools to make the decisions on their own. We give options and a structure for how implementation could look. We take their grand ideas and make them a little more tangible.
To this point, what I found interesting in listening to my classmates’ experience working with their clients was the extent to which groups choose to engage their clients in the process. I think our process was fairly collaborative, but we were hesitant to make our client do work, instead opting for a simple question-and-answer kind of collaboration. I would have never thought to give our client “homework” but looking back can see the value of having this next-level engagement in helping her think through her options in real-time rather than post-presentation.
3. Let go of the outcome.
One thing that has always frustrated me about the idea of consulting is that you have no idea if the ideas you present get implemented or not. I have a deep desire to see the end product; I want to take something from the idea to implementation to analysis of the results. I’ve generally been the type to want to execute; to build the plan and carry it out and have that tangible, finished product at the end. Give me a task and I will complete it.
But that is not something you really get with consulting.
In many ways this could be a broader life lesson. I’ve always been the type to focus on the outcome rather than the process. But there is so much value in working through the process. And at the end of the day, our client at least seemed excited about the work that we’ve done.
I never would have imagined working with our client, an international renowned NGO, or with clients in Moldova, and I am deeply grateful for this experience. Just as the last few months seemed to fly by, the last two years of my MBA experience seem to have come and gone as well. I have learned so much in the last few years, and truly, this course and working on this project was a great way to apply all those learnings and close out this chapter of my life.