Consulting has become a prestigious professional assistance service, which managers use to overcome situations that hinder the proper development of their organization, impact its performance, and affect collective and individual satisfaction levels.
Consulting and Change
Consulting is a professional assistance service based on a set of planned efforts that allow for directing and consolidating organizational change.
The change process, according to Lewin (1968, cited by Collerette and Delisle, 2001), involves three phases: Unfreezing, movement, and refreezing. The first phase corresponds to the fading of established behavior patterns, through the awareness of actions by the involved individuals themselves, who then find themselves in a situation of dissatisfaction (insecurity and anxiety) that demands new information to continue learning: an openness to change occurs.
The second phase, movement, is the transition towards acquiring new behavior patterns. This phase requires abandoning old behaviors and attitudes and acquiring new ones.
The third and final phase, refreezing, involves the internalization or institutionalization of change. Although consulting gains greater prominence in the movement phase; it needs unfreezing not only because it is the initial requirement for intervention but also because its analysis allows for obtaining information that facilitates the diagnosis and planning of the entire intervention process, and finally its evaluation. (Audirac et al., 2013).
The consultant acts in the movement and refreezing phases, creating the necessary conditions for behavior patterns to be progressively abandoned and new ones acquired, allowing for a change in a situation that causes dissatisfaction.
Essential Competencies of the Organizational Consultant
The complex implications of a change process, the guiding principle of consulting, provide an appropriate scenario to ask what the essential competencies of a consultant would be to achieve that change. Below are some of those competencies:
Applied Researcher
The consultant must be an applied researcher: a person who studies, updates their knowledge, and improves their skills to act appropriately in the different stages of the consulting process.
It is important for the consultant to be an applied researcher because knowledge is a basic requirement to understand the situation and support actions aimed at overcoming the difficulty affecting the client organization. The consultant is a qualified person who masters theory and links it with practice at all times.
During the consulting process, the consultant is in a constant search for information, which allows them to gain an understanding of the client organization and determine its weaknesses, strengths, opportunities, and threats. Knowing what to look for and how to look for it undoubtedly requires preparation. They must be able to abstract relevant information, understand it from a theoretical basis, and act appropriately, that is, with practical mastery of different strategies and tactics to facilitate change. Therefore, the consultant must be creative, flexible, and capable of contextualizing and adapting techniques to the particular situations of each organization.
On the other hand, the consultant must be able to respond to organizational demands that involve, for example, the use of advancements in a specific area. It is not an exaggeration to say that the consultant must be prepared for anything. This preparation is the basis for achieving change through an essentially educational process.
Change Agent
Undoubtedly, there is an interrelationship between the organization and the people who work within it, and in these complex relationships. The consultant must be able to manage various change situations that involve modifications at different levels: knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors, both individual and organizational, until these modifications are sustainable over time. Education is an appropriate way to achieve this.
Educator
The consultant will always be an educator, as they are a person who constantly teaches and learns.
Regardless of their profession and the tasks to be performed, the process consultant will always act as a change promoter, applying their substantive knowledge to resolve situations affecting the organization, with the firm participation of its members. Therefore, as an educator, they are always immersed in a learning-teaching process: they develop while developing others, reflect and make others reflect on their own practice. This is the appropriate strategy for changes to be sustainable over time.
Effective Leader
The consultant must be an effective leader: a person capable of directing and strengthening change in the organization, based on their ability to convince and their professional ethics, which will allow them to progressively reduce resistance.
Consulting is a temporary service for which scarce resources are used. In this context, a consultant who earns the recognition of the organization’s members and manages to present themselves as a leader —through the respect and empathy on which their actions are based— will have paved the way for those people to confidently accept change proposals and be able to transform those proposals into individual and collective actions through participatory change. Change will be possible, and resources will have been invested correctly.
If the consultant is not accepted as a leader among the organization’s members, their proposals and overall work will be in vain, as they will act as an external authority, imposing a coercive change that ultimately will not be sustainable over time.
Strategist
The consultant must be a strategist: a person capable of navigating a set of techniques and activities that allow them to achieve a specific objective.
The consultant works under a kind of uncertainty, which requires their flexibility to respond to the demands of various situations. For this reason, based on their training and especially their experience, they must navigate different strategies that allow them to progressively and effectively lead towards change.
It can be affirmed that, even before the consulting process develops, the consultant uses strategies that allow them not only to secure a contract but also to investigate the specific situation affecting the organization, interacting with key people.
The consultant, undoubtedly, takes on a great challenge due to the complexity involved in immersing themselves in the existing interrelationships among those who make up the organization, in understanding the situation that affects them, in achieving the participation of those involved, in hitting upon the appropriate strategies to overcome them and sustain change over time. This great challenge requires some essential competencies.
References
- Audirac, C., León, V., Domínguez, A., López, M., & Puerta, I. (2013). ABC of Organizational Development. Editorial Trillas.
- Collerette, P., & Pilles, D. (2001). Change Planning. Adaptation Strategies for Organizations. Mexico: Editorial Trillas.