Food for thought: In praise of selfishness

Anyone reading this will know that consultants - like anyone else - are far from being paragons of virtue! Why then praise selfishness?

Far from its popular tabloid depiction as exploitative, consultancy is a helping profession. Consultants love being asked, "Can you please help us with...", but there are pitfalls in being too ready to help - for example, taking on problems that only a client can solve. Consultants can end up with too much to do and as a result neglect their own needs. The training survey that we carried out a while ago on behalf of the IC showed, for instance, that most consultants had spent less time than budgeted on training, which we infer to mean that they were not taking up the opportunities for self investment offered.

And of late we have found this phenomenon applying to whole practices, who have become victims of their own success. They are so busy serving their clients that they have no time left to invest in developing the practice itself.

Here, I find the analogy of a car engine illuminating. The power developed by a car engine is used not only to drive the car but also to drive ancillary items - the water pump, oil pump, etc. If the engine is inefficient, the ancillaries will take up too much power, and little will be left to drive the car.

Organisations in this state spend too much effort on matters of only internal importance. Conversely, if all the power is diverted to driving the car, the engine will eventually break down - the threat faced by consultancy practices who spend all their time on client work.

It's a delicate balance and it requires a particularly strong constancy of purpose to pursue internal projects while denying lucrative work for clients. One way of handling this is to "projectise" internal activities and rank them pari passu with those done for clients...but whether any practice does this, I don't know.

Let me know what you think. Replies to me at calvert.markham@elevationlearning.co.uk

Calvert Markham