What Is the Most Important Competence of a Successful Management Consultant?
INTRODUCTION
The management of a consulting project calls on a variety of skills. This is an actuality that has been stressed throughout the course lectures, seminars and cases as well as throughout the course literature. The fact that consultants must integrate their skills when conducting a consulting project is as clear-cut as it is evident.
But if no skill can be used in isolation from the others, is there such a thing as a most important competence of a successful management consultant?
In order to find an answer to the question stated above, this term paper will draw on the content of course 611 Management Consulting, including lessons learnt from company visits and guest lectures. I will start off by listing the three primary competences characterizing a thriving and successful management consultant. Thereafter I will deliberate on which one of these three competences I believe can be regarded as the most important competence. I will close the discussion with a brief conclusion, summing up my main standpoints.
AN OVERVIEW OF THE CONSULTANT’S FUNDAMENTAL COMPETENCES
Wickham & Wickham identifies three types of skill that effective management consulting is based on: analysis skills that enable new opportunities and possibilities to be identified on behalf of the client organization, project management skills that enable those ideas to be delivered to the client organization under budget and time constraints, and relationship-building skills that sell ideas and provide the leadership that takes the client team forward.
I believe this classification to be exhaustively complete, and the skills mentioned in Armbrüster and on seminars and company visits to all be feasibly subsumed under these three categories of skills.
ANALYSIS SKILLS
The ultimate purpose of a consulting exercise is to create value for the client business. In order to do so, it is necessary to gain an understanding of the business and the possibilities and opportunities
The management of a consulting project calls on a variety of skills. This is an actuality that has been stressed throughout the course lectures, seminars and cases as well as throughout the course literature. The fact that consultants must integrate their skills when conducting a consulting project is as clear-cut as it is evident.
But if no skill can be used in isolation from the others, is there such a thing as a most important competence of a successful management consultant?
In order to find an answer to the question stated above, this term paper will draw on the content of course 611 Management Consulting, including lessons learnt from company visits and guest lectures. I will start off by listing the three primary competences characterizing a thriving and successful management consultant. Thereafter I will deliberate on which one of these three competences I believe can be regarded as the most important competence. I will close the discussion with a brief conclusion, summing up my main standpoints.
AN OVERVIEW OF THE CONSULTANT’S FUNDAMENTAL COMPETENCES
Wickham & Wickham identifies three types of skill that effective management consulting is based on: analysis skills that enable new opportunities and possibilities to be identified on behalf of the client organization, project management skills that enable those ideas to be delivered to the client organization under budget and time constraints, and relationship-building skills that sell ideas and provide the leadership that takes the client team forward.
I believe this classification to be exhaustively complete, and the skills mentioned in Armbrüster and on seminars and company visits to all be feasibly subsumed under these three categories of skills.
ANALYSIS SKILLS
The ultimate purpose of a consulting exercise is to create value for the client business. In order to do so, it is necessary to gain an understanding of the business and the possibilities and opportunities