20 consulting skills to crush it in any job
In A Return to Love, Marianne Williamson writes, "Think of your career as a ministry. Make your work an expression of love, in service to mankind… A person acting from a motivation of contribution and service rises to such a level of moral authority, that worldly success is a natural result."
You might be thinking: “Here we go with the woo-woo stuff. I thought this was an article on skills to help me crush it?” Please hold. We’ll get there!
In this article I'll recap 20 skills/tactics I learned after nearly 7 years of technology & management consulting for 9 different clients, which included companies such as Google, Cisco and Allstate. By design, consulting is a client service business. So it’s no surprise that much of what I learned in consulting is grounded in delivering exceptional service.
Further, I open with the quote above because I believe these skills and tactics are grounded in being of highest service to mankind. These skills make life just a little easier for your client, manager, or colleague. And that’s service. Service isn't only donating 3 hours of your Saturday at a Food Bank. I believe we can be of service in big and small ways everyday at our job. And as Marianne writes, this mentality leads to "worldly success." It's true, we may be generous out of self-interest. That’s okay if you ask me. That’s how we begin. We suspend self-interest for at least a moment.
In short — deliver your work with a spirit of service to achieve success. With that belief as our foundation, I’ll provide you with ways to make that belief tangible through a set of professional skills and tactics. I believe these skills can help you crush it in any industry. In a way, this is also a letter to my future self — reminding me how to stay sharp. So I’ll use “you” more often than I typically do in my writing.
Alright, enough stage setting. Let’s get to it! Here is a table of contents in case you want to jump around:
The Basics
1. Create digestible emails and slides
2. Plan with purpose
3. Shit happens — do your best to spot it (risk) and avoid stepping on it (issue)
4. Always propose solutions with an invitation to co-create
Meetings
5. ALWAYS have a meeting objective AND agenda
6. Recap action items at the end of a meeting
7. You can solve anything with an objective and approach
Communication
8. A simple end-of-week update to keep your manager informed
9. Group and categorize to improve readability and create process
10. Use slides to communicate your message
11. How to create effective slides efficiently
12. Message strategically by thinking about your recipient’s reaction
The Strategic
13. Create maps for clarity and alignment
14. Enforce process through technology
15. Create frameworks for clarity
16. Always be outcome-driven
17. Make it REAL
18. Use numbers to increase objectivity
19. Build software using the double diamond
20. Be human-centered
The Basics
This is a collection of skills I learned in my early consulting days. A few might seem trivial at face value, but their subtlety is what makes them effective.
1 | Create digestible emails and slides with the following
Make your ask (email) or key point (slide) the first or second sentence. You might be able to get away with the third sentence, but the context that comes before the ask/point better be valuable af. As they say in journalism, “don’t bury the lead.”
Use bullet lists often and maintain consistency across the first word of each bullet, ideally leading with an action verb (e.g. Review reporting / Align on strategy…).
Create sections if bullets won’t suffice — sometimes you’ll have to write a lengthy email. If that’s the case, section out your email by creating bolded/underlined headers.
2 | Plan with purpose
I’ll admit “what’s your plan?” is a question that has made me roll my eyes. But having a plan, no matter how simple or detailed — one slide, an entire deck, or a simple outline — is extremely valuable. It’s the process of creating the plan that is the win. Often a project gets underway and you need to pivot. That’s ok. Don’t stay attached to your plan. Your plan helped you get started.
Also, as I learned from one of my favorite business books, Re-Work — don’t plan in more than 6 week increments. Human beings suck at estimating. We will more often than not overshoot and set unrealistic expectations for ourselves.
Planning or project management can often feel like a chore. I believe that’s because we’re not doing it with intention. If we make it intentional, there is value to be realized.
3 | Shit happens — do your best to spot it (risk) and avoid stepping on it (issue)
One of my favorite partners taught me this one. A risk is spotting a pile of shit on the sidewalk. A risk becomes an issue once we’ve stepped on it. This is managing issues and risks!
4 | Always propose solutions with an invitation to co-create
When a risk becomes an issue or you have to pivot your plan, propose a solution to your client/boss. This is truly consulting 101. Clients don’t hire consultants to just flag problems, they hire them to solve them. Create a menu of 2-3 potential solutions, make a recommendation, and invite your client/boss to edit or add to your list.
In the non-consulting world, your boss will LOVE you for this. This makes their life easier. This is being service driven.
Meetings
5 | ALWAYS have a meeting objective AND agenda
You’ll often hear one or the other. I say both are essential. The objective is the bigger “arc,” in some cases including a bit of context and a comment on where you are going beyond that meeting. Your agenda is a series of smaller arcs that lay out how you will make progress on your objective or accomplish it entirely. In other words — objective is your north star, agenda is your mini-roadmap. (More on arcs and meeting design here from my incredible coach and facilitation master, Daniel Stillman.)
80% of the time I type up my objective/agenda and share it on a slide or doc. What we write (or type) becomes real. And please include at least some form of the objective or agenda in the meeting invite. If you ask me, nothing is worse than getting a meeting invite with a 3 word subject… No one likes surprises at work.
By crafting a thoughtful meeting objective and agenda, AND writing it down you are in service to your meeting attendees. You are letting them know you value their time and that you’ve done some form of planning.
6 | Recap action items at the end of a meeting
Put a bow on your conversation by doing this. Bonus points for writing these down, assigning due dates and owners.
This is one I still let slip at times. Mostly because I fear being viewed as pushy asking for due dates. F that though. Ground this tactic in service — you are recapping actions for the greater good, to ensure we continue progressing.
7 | You can solve anything with an objective and approach (agenda ~ approach)
On one of my last consulting projects I was stuck af. Overthinking the work and spiraling downwards. One of my favorite partners at the firm reminded me to keep it simple — what are we trying to accomplish? And how can we get there? Another partner once said “always have an objective and approach.” It’s that simple folks.
You can apply the thinking in #5, to a broader problem or piece of work by creating a simple outline answering — what are we solving for (objective) and how might we get there (approach)?
Communication
The essence of work is communication. A majority of what we do at work is communicate. We’re consistently communicating with colleagues and customers, or communicating a message (i.e. idea). When we’re thoughtful about our communication and think about the person receiving our message, we are in service.
8 | A simple end-of-week update to keep your manager informed
Your manager is one of the most important people to maintain strong communication with. One of my favorite ways to keep my manager in the loop is with a simple end of week update email. This takes 15-20 minutes and they are likely to love you for it. Here is a potential structure for your email:
3 things I accomplished this week
3 Roadblocks / areas where I need your input
3 priorities for next week
I don’t send these every week. I send them when I get a sense my manager could use an update. You determine the right cadence.
9 | Group and categorize to improve readability and create process
Consultants are known for designing processes. I recently realized that process design is essentially grouping and categorizing information. Along with drawing relationships between each category.
When we group and categorize information, it’s more digestible. The end-of-week practice above is an example of this. When sharing this update, we could simply send over a list of what we’ve done. But that wouldn’t be as easy to digest.
10 | Use slides to communicate your message
Slides. Ah, yes. The consultant in me would be remiss if I didn’t mention slides. Consultants love slides!
You probably know where this is going – we create slides to communicate messages more effectively. That’s all we’re doing. Communicating. Further, a (good) slide is an artifact that can be used to facilitate discussions and decisions.
You might take the groups and categories from the previous skill, and put those onto a slide to communicate the information more effectively.
11 | How to create effective slides efficiently
I could write an entire essay on this, but will instead hit you with my top tips:
Suspend PPT – Don’t start a new slide in PPT. Always write or sketch out the slide(s) first. By writing up an outline or blurb, you are thinking. IMO, you need to clarify the idea in words before you introduce visuals. Otherwise you are working two parts of your brain at the same time, which is no bueno. Once your ideas are clear do the following…
“Steal Like An Artist” (a great mantra and book) – When you come across visuals at work and outside of work, capture them (screenshot it and save it somewhere, like Notes or OneNote). Stealing like an artist means understanding the thinking of the author behind the art and citing them.
Recycle – After “stealing” for a bit, you’ll build up your own library of slides. Use it! Don’t start every slide from scratch. I must admit, recycling can become a crutch though. I saw this in consulting frequently. The thousands of templates and assets would at times stifle creativity. Be mindful of that as you re-use and recycle.
12 | Message strategically by thinking about your recipient’s reaction
While reviewing a deliverable, I’d often hear senior consulting leaders say: “How will the client respond to this?” Being one step ahead of your client and thinking about their needs is being service driven. (You can apply this same question to something you are sending to your manager too.) Truthfully, I’ve yet to master this skill and make it second nature. It’s hard! Working on it.
On a similar note, while prepping for status updates with senior client executives, my managers would say something like: “You have 3 bullets, what’s most important for [Client Exec] to know? How can you pain a holistic picture for them?” I use to think this kind of thoughtfulness was BS and was fear driven. But I’ve come to see the value in painting the entire picture for a person – one which includes the good and bad.
Alrighty, we’re gonna use this “strategic” vibe we’ve landed on to move into the strategic portion of skills and tactics. Final section. Let’s get it!
The Strategic
While a few of these skills and tactics might begin to sound fluffy, I truly believe in these principles and frameworks. If you ask me, by nature “strategy” can be a bit fluffy. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s why we balance the strategic with the tactical.
13 | Create maps for clarity and alignment — experience maps, capability maps, and roadmaps
A | Experience Maps
An experience map is used to map out the end to end journey of a user. This user might be external to your company (customer) or internal (employee). I like to say “mapping is magical.” Nothing makes things more real than seeing an end to end journey on a slide. Like this:
This map does an awesome job of illustrating both the customer AND employee experience. This article linked in image is from UXPressia — an awesome tool that helps you create designer grade maps with minimal effort.
What I love about these maps is that they are flexible to meet your needs. After you map out the steps of a user journey, you determine what rows go below it — supporting systems/processes, interfaces, etc. That’s the beauty in these. These subtle differences in the bottom rows are what make people use different names like service blueprints, journey maps or user story maps. What they all have in common is the top row — a sequential view of a user’s journey through physical and digital spaces. One of my favorite frameworks for mapping a journey is the 5 Es (Entice, Enter, Engage, Exit, Extend) — this is another article from my coach, Daniel Stillman, on this topic. The book, User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton, is also one of my favorite on mapping. The book helps you turn big ideas into tangible, working software.
B | Capability Maps
For awhile I struggled with the word “capability.” It gets used a lot in consulting and initially sounded like BS to me. One day, a senior leader finally gave me a clear description: a capability can be any combination of people, process, policy and technology that enables a company to execute a business function or task. The same way us humans develop skills in order to [insert any task], an organization develops its capability to achieve [insert any business task].
How do experience maps and capability maps relate? You need a set of capabilities to enable an experience.
C | Roadmaps
Consultants sure do love maps don’t they? Roadmaps are a bit more self-explanatory and you’ve probably heard the phrase before. It’s essentially a phased plan saying when you will deliver what.
How do roadmaps relate to the other two maps I just described? At most organizations, it’s unlikely you will be able to deliver all the new experiences or capabilities you desire for your business, so you create a roadmap.
One of my favorite exercises to create a roadmap within 30 minutes in a collaborative way is with the Importance Difficulty Matrix.
Congratulations. With these three maps, you’re ready to pitch an innovation project to your boss or any company really. Consultants charge lots of money for these maps (and for what’s coming in #16)!
14 | Enforce process through technology
Often times after mapping out a process on a slide or Lucidchart (epic process mapping tool I highly recommend), I’d ask “What now? What do we do with this process?” I learned that the best thing we can do is enforce the process through technology. Don’t rely on human behavior. Rely on technology that drives the default.
My guy Ramit Sethi shares a good everyday example of this – investing in your 401k. In the early days of the 401k, many people avoided investing in the account. So the government and corporations had to figure out a way to change this behavior. This is a simple example that ties together a few of the concepts discussed in this article:
Desired Outcome: Increased number of individuals saving for retirement
Policy: Auto-enroll people in 401k
Technology: Software to manage your 401k (e.g. change enrollment status or investment amount)
15 | Create frameworks for clarity
Consultants love frameworks! With good reason though. In simplest terms, a good framework guides someone’s thinking on a topic. It brings together a set of concepts and ideas to communicate one overarching idea. (See the service element here again? You’re supporting someone in deepening their understanding.)
While teaching students about a growth mindset, I learned about the power of grouping information (i.e. think about how you use to memorize phone #s) and making connections between groups of information. This is essentially what a good framework does. Brain science tells us that we can more effectively memorize something when it’s grouped and related.
You can also consider a framework a formula. A formula to achieve [insert a business outcome]. And on that note, on to “outcomes!”
16 | Always be outcome-driven
Experience maps, capabilities, roadmaps, frameworks all to what end? To achieve a business outcome. AKA more often than not, make more money! It is business after all folks (and capitalism). Surprisingly enough though, you hear this word often used in the nonprofit sector as well — “what outcomes is your program delivering for your beneficiary?”
Clients don’t pay for maps… they pay consultants to deliver a business outcome. Our employer doesn’t pay us just to sit, they pay us to deliver business outcomes.
Sometimes this word — outcomes — annoys me. Why? Because aligning tangible work to a business outcome is hard. Delivering an outcome is hard too. And measuring it is even harder! But this is the opportunity.
A couple examples of business outcomes:
Drove alignment across 4 business units to reduce operational costs by 20%
Identified and removed sales process inefficiencies that expedited time to booking, growing revenue by 15%
Notice these capture some of the work done (i.e. alignment, identified), along with a measured result.
17 | Make it REAL
Shaping strategy (and slides) can be fun. But let’s be real, that can tend to be fluffy. Not very tangible. That’s why whether it’s through tangible business value (growing $ or reducing $ spend), an outcome, or a digital/physical product — make it REAL! Build things that people can see, touch, feel and react to.
18 | Use numbers to increase objectivity
At a consulting case competition I once heard a partner say: “We do what Consultants do – we assessed and scored performance with numbers, tallied up scores, then discussed and decided.”
This is a great approach to assess two technologies (e.g. Microsoft Office vs. Google Workspace), proposals, or anything that requires a comparison really. Create a set of measures, or a rubric. Assign a score to each measure and you’re on your way to making your assessment at least a tad more objective.
19 | Build software using the double diamond
(To my designers and engineers, warning – this will be an oversimplification of how to build software. Don’t @ me. )
Working software is one of the best ways to make something tangible and real. And these days, it’s really what makes the world go round (for more on this check out the timeless article – Why Software is Eating the World).
Here’s my simplified version of how to build software:
Identify a problem – explore and reframe the problem
Create a powerful vision that addresses that problem
Align the vision to business outcomes
Map the end-to-end experience with your users (people impacted by the problem you identified) — ideally, if you’re not able to map with them then ensure your design is heavily informed by research you conducted directly with your users
Prototype various elements of your experience WITH your users, to learn and gather feedback
Refine your experience with user feedback
Convert your experience map (created in step 4) into a user story map to document specific software requirements for designers and engineers
Develop your software (developers / engineers build it)
Roll it out to your users and gather more feedback
Refine and implement again, the cycle continues
One of my favorite design frameworks that communicates this far more eloquently is: Double Diamond. Also considered a “framework for innovation.” Check it out.
And one more note — this design process can and should be applied to pre-configured software (e.g. Salesforce.com) or custom software (e.g. custom web-app).
20 | Be human-centered
Building on #4-6 from the previous skill and from the image above — fight tooth and nail to gather input from your users. It won’t be easy. Most organizations – especially large enterprises – will claim they are “customer-centric.” Most are not. They often let bureaucracy get in the way of speaking to users. Do whatever you can to get in front of your users.
Conclusion
That is a wrap folks. Nearly 7 years of consulting bundled up into 3,421 words and 20 skills. As any good writer would, I’ll end where I started. Marianne Williamson often says giving and being of service is our natural state. I say this for me as much as I say this for you – I hope you can apply these skills and tactics with a service mentality. It’s not always easy, but it can help make your days and others’ days just a little better. And of course, we can only hope this will help us find worldly success.
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