The Consultants’ Job

The past semester has been an irreplaceable experience in my graduate school. Starting from zero, I now understand not only the past involvement in incorporating gender in the financial system, but also the framework that can guide financial investors to make gender impacts in the future. However, reflecting on this amazing experience, I realize that a successful consultant is not necessarily the one who understands the most in a certain professional field of knowledge, but he/she must be the experts in the following two areas:

1. Understand your strength and become a member of the team

Every member of the team must have their own specialty and interest for a certain project. Understand each other’s pursuit in the project can be especially helpful for scoping and task assignment. Using our project as an example, my strength of the financial market has been set as a standard to filter out the unattainable bonds in the gender market while my teammates’ legal knowledge, developing country background and gender specialty all become key pieces of our main argument. In general, you do not need to become expert in all topics but rather taking your specialty as a foundation and learning from each other’s perspective and thoughts.

Meanwhile, know your teammates as a person rather than a working professional is critical for relationship building and trust establishment. This has been especially important for me since I received thyroid cancer surgery and treatment during our project. I have received tons of support while I was trying to manage both my health and the academics and I believe me and my teammates will become lifelong friends after the project.

2. (Re)Define the questions and understand the scope

The first challenge we have faced during our project is to define “gender in financial products”. What does gender mean here? Does it mean an increased opportunity in education and work space for female or does it also incorporate factors unbalanced influence female people, for example, environment. What does it mean by financial products? Does it mean bonds, equity, derivatives or all of the above?

Understand the team’s capacity and also discover the most critical aspect in the topic can be a crucial step in project formation and initial communication with the clients. Most of the time, we do not have answers to all of the questions. However, we can constantly redefine the questions and scope as the project move forwards. Figuring out the most optimal scope without burning out the team will always be a consultant’s first task.

Learning these two life-long lesson is extremely beneficial to my career progression. Meanwhile, I would never expect myself growing from a person who barely knows anything about systematic solutions to gender issues to someone who starts to think about cost reduction and bond issuance packaging with gender and environment. I am extremely grateful to this experience and also my team members, who were willing to step up as I dealt with my medical emergencies and who are dedicated to our project.