Essential Traits for Consultants: Confidence, Vision, and Adaptability

In the SIRI skills workshop, my key takeaways are understanding different perspectives when collaborating with people, from giving feedback to interacting with clients. One insight I’ve gained is realizing how different people have different preferences in receiving feedback. While I appreciate honest and direct feedback, some feel defensive when faced with direct feedback. This feeling of defensiveness may discourage them from accepting the feedback. I also realized there is another variable that impacts how people receive feedback – their openness to change, which can be affected by their personality but also their environment. As a person giving feedback, I should strategize on how to give the feedback based on how open the recipient is to change. To gauge the recipient’s environment, our professor suggested starting the conservation by asking about the weather, how they feel, or where they are located (if meeting online). This can help me understand the person’s personality and probe whether the person is in a comfortable, open-minded state that can increase their likelihood of being open to change. If the person is more sensitive and feels frustrated by the external environment, my feedback might need to be more careful and not as harsh and include more positive feedback. To sum up, how adaptive I am in my feedback delivery impacts the acceptance of my feedback, which suggests the importance of adaptability in collaboration.

Another experience that widened my perspective was when I took up the role of VP of strategy in a simulation. I was asked to lose trust in SIRI students when I sense a lack of confidence and expect targeted questions. However, in the first round, the students were not confident and asked broad questions. I realized both of us do not understand what the project in discussion would be about nor what the company does in this simulation. This puts us in a challenging position as I empathize with their position but also need to assert my position. To respond, I improvise my response by asking them about specifics. This made me understand the clients’ perspectives: they expect consultants to be confident, have a vision of what the project is about, and adapt their vision to my expectations. This is contrary to having specific instructions on what to do, which students are used to. As I shared my realization with the workshop, the professor shared how being a consultant requires constant balancing of learning and leading. While we are used to learning, we need to balance it with leading the client. This leadership requires confidence and vision backed by research, training, and critical thinking, which are essential skills for a consultant.

A few days later, we met with our client. I was not the meeting leader on our end, so I listened and observed the interaction. We started with introductions, our client a system map of their organization, a family office currently investing in an app to support sustainable agriculture where efforts are recorded for a carbon credit project. When we asked him what he thought about our proposed project scope, he shared how he is interested in learning about our perspective as the younger generation, which is a major stakeholder they consider. I can see our teammates getting confused as our vision of the scope of work blurs. The client also suggested we do more research before immediately asking questions. While we wanted to hear from the clients themselves by providing some detailed questions through email, the clients expected us to come up with answers ourselves based on the content they provided us and what is available online. During the process of the research, it is natural for questions to arise. However, from the meeting and the simulation role of VP of strategy, many of these questions are not for the high-level clients but for us to guide our research and analysis to reach our proposed solutions. The client does not necessarily need more questions to ask themselves, but more solutions to potential questions/problems identified. After debriefing with my teammates and sharing concerns with the professor, we have adapted to the client’s expectations as we refine our vision and strategy, making us more confident to approach future meetings.