Can a management consultant help you transform your business?

Fabrice Rodrigue

A recruitment specialist has employed its first full time management consultant in response to a gap in the business transformation market. Fabrice Rodrigue explains why car manufacturer Henry Ford would have approved.

It might be strange at first sight to see a career management consultant moving into the recruitment space.

But I am confident there is a tremendous gap within the industry for professionals that can relate to a client’s operational and strategic challenges having been in their shoes, while at the same time being able to recognise and recruit the high calibre candidates they need to succeed.

To describe why, it’s worth drawing a parallel with Henry Ford’s famous quote about the legendary Model T: “If I’d have asked my clients what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” 

For those organisations going through a major transformation for the first time, doing so might be a daunting prospect.  Often a client will not know what they don’t know, and as such will not be able to ask the right questions or be able to fully articulate what their needs are.

With this fear of the unknown, as well as the anxiety of the challenges that lay ahead, it often comes as a breath of fresh air to talk to a ‘recruitment consultant’ who can offer fresh perspective – and even sometimes a ‘translation’ of what their needs are.

It is an alternative resourcing model to professional services firms that helps clients to tackle organisational capability and skill gaps, internal knowledge transfer and budgetary constraints.

Clearly the experience and expertise of a big management consultancy can still be invaluable to mitigate the risks involved in major transformation programmes.

However, a consultancy will often produce a team line-up consisting of, say 15 people, when in reality what the client is getting is three to four key people with real subject matter expertise and the rest of the team is made up of junior team members learning on the job.

As such I see my role as engaging with clients around making those three or four key appointments. It’s about articulating ‘what’ the resourcing model could look like and ‘how’ that would set their initiatives up for success whilst mitigating typical transformation programmes pitfalls.

The added value for clients is around providing an expert view on what the key attributes, skills and experience of those resources should be, as well as providing a range of ideas about how they might be able to resource the remainder of the programme with their existing internal resources. 

This ‘hybrid’ alternative is attractive to clients because they are able to retain more control of their programme whilst at the same time building a legacy of capability within their organisation.  This will be all the more relevant for those organisations that have continuous improvement at the core of what they do and who will no doubt undergo further transformation type initiatives further down the line. 

I see it as an educational piece – giving them an insight into the art of the possible.

Of course, a client can still go and get an Accenture or an IBM in to help them with their transformation initiatives, but at least they will be better educated around questions they will need to ask in order to get the best possible value out of their arrangements and ultimately they will be a much more ‘savvy buyer’ having discussed the alternative delivery options open to them.

But as Henry Ford realised over 100 years ago, there’s a limit to how fast a horse can ever travel. To make real leaps in progress, you have to understand what the customer needs, even when they don’t know themselves. The hybrid recruiter/consultant model is an attempt to do just that.

Fabrice Rodrigue has recently been appointed as a senior director in the business transformation practice of BIE Executive.