21 – Issues in Consultant – Client Relations

Introduction

Numerous concerns concerning the client-consultant relationship must be addressed and managed for an OD attempt to be effective. These issues will be addressed in the future.

21.1 Establishing the Client System

In consultant partnerships, the question of who the client is rapidly becomes an essential problem. (While we usually refer to consultants in the single, the points we want to make also apply to consultant teams.) Similarly, the initial client could be a single person or a management team.) We believe a workable model is one in which a single manager is a client at first. Still, as trust and confidence develop between the primary client and the consultant, both learn to see the manager and his or her subordinate team as the client and, finally, the manager’s entire organisation as the customer. This phase should ideally begin with the first interview.

Another potential model involves a small, top-level management team as the initial customer group.

For example, consider the CEO, the vice president of human resources, and another vice president.

Another concept for who the client could be is a steering group comprising representatives from various levels and functional areas. If the CEO is not a member, the consultant must be aware of who represents the CEO or, in other words, who represents the power structure. If a steering committee is not free to operate without the CEO, the entire process will be ineffective.

21.2 Issues

These concerns typically revolve around the following critical areas:

21.2.1 Contracting and Entry

An initial discussion that leads to an OD consulting contract can happen in a variety of ways:

During the face-to-face discussion, the consultant delves deeper into the problem presented to the potential client.

Furthermore, during the initial discussion, the consultant and client would most likely choose which group would be the logical starting point for an OD intervention.

If the problems appear to be amenable to OD treatments, the consultant discusses how he or she typically approaches such situations.

The more formal compensation parts of the first contract are as crucial and must be established for the client’s and consultant’s peace of mind. One option is to enter an oral agreement for an hourly or daily price, with no payment for a brief phone conversation and usually no charge for a longer first exploration.

Constricting, both psychologically and financially, occurs frequently in OD consulting.

21.3 Issues of Trust

A significant portion of the engagement between the client and consultant during the initial contact is implicitly tied to developing a mutual trust relationship.

Similarly, the consultant’s faith in the client may be low at the beginning. The consultant will endeavour to grasp the client’s motivations and will aim to uncover any that are partially veiled.

On the plus side, the client may view OD as a technique for boosting both the client’s and the subordinates’ effectiveness. The client may also hope that a successful OD endeavour will result in significant recognition from superiors. Exposing such motives and investigating their consequences for effective behaviour will increase trust between the consultant and the client, hence ensuring the final success of OD activities.

Confidentiality must be preserved if confidence is to be maintained, as implied by Weisbord’s contracting ground principles. Even unintentional errors can hurt the consultant-client relationship. Gavin illustrates how participants received notes on workshop topics, action plans, and notes created by consultants on managers’ leadership and communication styles. The consultants were instructed to do the latter; the notes on the managers’ styles were to be used by the facilitators in private counselling sessions with individual managers. According to Gavin, any pretence of trust in the consultants had been destroyed by the time these notes were distributed.

21.4 The Consultant’s Area of Expertise

Due to their unfamiliarity with organisational development methodologies, clients frequently want to position the consultant as the expert on substantive matters, such as personnel policy or corporate strategy. We believe it is possible and desirable for the OD consultant to be an expert in the sense of being competent to present a range of options available to the client, but any over-reliance on the traditional mode of consulting, that is, providing substantive advice, will tend to negate the OD consultant’s effectiveness. The OD consultant must resist the desire to play the topic expert and, if necessary, clarify his or her job with the client. However, we believe the OD consultant should be able to illustrate in broad strokes what the organisation may look like if an OD endeavour were to go very far.

In other words, the OD consultant should serve as an expert on the process but not on the task. The OD consultant can assist by presenting some optional forms and addressing the potential consequences of each.

We believe that the more extensive an OD consultant’s knowledge of management and organisation, the more influential the OD consultant can be; however, remember the distinction between being primarily a facilitator-educator and primarily an advice-giver.

21.5 Diagnosis and Effective Interventions

Another trap for the consultant is the urge to use an intervention strategy that he or she enjoys and has achieved good results in the past, but which may not be compatible with a comprehensive diagnostic of the current situation.

We believe that a consultant should do what he or she is capable of doing, but the intervention should be suited to the diagnosis. This necessitates a thorough examination of the evidence, such as the themes from interviews.

Of course, the more interventions the consultant is knowledgeable about, the more possibilities the consultant can evaluate. The greater the consultant’s ability and experience, the less agonising it is likely to be to identify or construct effective remedies.

21.5.1 Intervention Depth

The degree of intervention is an important consideration when selecting effective therapies.

Harrison refers to the degree to which data is more or less public versus hidden or private and the simplicity with which intervention skills can be learned. Individuality refers to a person’s closeness to their perceptions of themselves, as well as the extent to which the consequences of an intervention are felt in the individual as opposed to the organisation.

21.6 Consultant as a Prototype

Another critical problem is whether change agents are willing and able to put their words into action in the realm of emotions.

For example, the consultant may advocate for a more open system in which feelings are regarded as genuine, and their expression is vital to compelling issue-solving while concealing his or her feelings about what is going on in the client system.

As a Microcosm, the Consultant Team

When considered a microcosm of the organisation they are attempting to construct, the consultant-key client team or consultants functioning as a team can be profitable. First and foremost, if the consultant team is to increase its reputation, it must offer an example of an effective unit. Second, practitioners require the efficacy that comes from continual growth and renewal processes, and third, the quality of their interrelationships with the consulting team directly translates into the quality of their diagnosis, intervention designs, and interventions.

21.7 Action Research and the Organizational Development Process

A related question is whether the OD process will be exposed to the continual action search that the client system process is experiencing and whether the change agents and the organisation will not learn how to make future OD interventions more effective.

The Dependency Problem and Ending the Relationship

Suppose the consultant’s job is to improve the client system’s abilities in issue-solving and renewal. In that case, the consultant’s mission is to help the client internalise skills and insights rather than to build a long-term dependent relationship. This issue is usually tiny if the consultant and the client hash out the earlier-mentioned expert versus facilitator issue and if the consultant believes that OD should be a shared technology. The facilitator position produces less dependency and more incredible client growth than typical consulting modes. The concept of shared technology leads to rapid learning on the client’s part.

Tannenbaum argues that many OD programmes end because not enough attention is paid to assisting people and units in letting go of things that must be laid to rest or die. He believes that, in reality, facilitators should be able to aid in the mourning process; nevertheless, to be of assistance, facilitators must address their tendency to cling to life and their vulnerability.

Occasionally, the organisation may be momentarily overburdened by externally imposed issues that absorb the attention of key personnel. Under such circumstances, the ideal method may be to reduce or stop more official OD treatments and allow people to continue with their strengthened skills before returning to the more formalised components at a later date.

21.8 OD’s Implications for the Client

An OD initiative has specific fundamental implications for an organization’s CEO and top managers, and we believe that these implications should be shared and understood from the start. OD interventions, as we have defined them, are essentially an intentional effort on the part of top management:

-To expand the database to make management decisions. Notably, team members’ expertise, perspectives, and attitudes throughout the organisation are given more weight than previously.

-To broaden the influencing processes. The OD method advances a mutual influence process; managers and subordinates tend to be influential in ways they have not experienced before.

-To capitalise on the informal system’s strengths and to make the formal and informal systems more compatible. A vast quantity of previously suppressed information within individuals or the informal system (e.g., appreciations, frustrations, hurts, opinions on how to do things more effectively, worries) begins to surface and be addressed. Efforts spent repressing things can now be redirected towards collaborative endeavours.

To become more receptive, Management must now respond to submerged data and begin to move toward the personal, team, and organizational effectiveness recommended by the data.

-To establish conflict as a legitimate arena for collaborative management. Rather than employing the win-lose, smoothing, or withdrawal modes of conflict resolution, the mode progressively shifts to confronting the underlying cause of the conflict and working through the problem to a successful resolution.

-To assess its own leadership style and management methods. We do not believe that an effort can be sustained if the top management team (the CEO plus subordinate teams or the top team of an essentially autonomous unit) does not actively participate in it. The top team is invariably a strong influence on organisational culture. OD is not a broadcast game for high management to watch; top management members are the major players.

-To legitimise and promote collaborative management of team interdependence and organisational cultures. The heart of OD is this broad intervention goal.

We believe that these elements substantially represent the underlying consequences for top management. The OD consultant must be clear about them from the start and assist the top management group in being clear about them as the process progresses.