The Best Consultants Do This One Thing Really Well
Making change last requires understanding culture, aligning incentives, and securing senior leadership support. Learn the strategies elite consultants use to ensure their interventions lead to last.
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Making Your Interventions Last Is The Most Valuable Thing You Can Do
The really hard work of an amazing consultant isn’t just dropping a bunch of clients and saying, ‘Do this, this, and this’.
A really terrific consultant is able to make their changes last.
The difference between average and great consultants is stakeholder engagement. If you can build relationships and bring everyone along the journey - you’re doing far better than most.
But the difference between a great and an elite consultant is long-term organisation change.
In short, can you make your interventions stick?
Why Don’t Interventions Last?
There are many reasons why an organisation doesn’t implement a consultant’s recommendations. Sometimes, the recommendations are wrong, incomplete, or not supported internally. These types of problems can be fixed.
But even if you overcome this, the change might not last because you’re up against unseen forces. These forces are usually a combination of incentives, habits, and culture.
For example, you might work on a digital transformation everyone supports; you launch it, there’s an immediate burst of activity, and you feel happy your job is done. However, six months later, you discover that everyone has reverted to the old systems and processes.
Let’s cover how to overcome this.
Step One: Evaluate The Culture
If you don’t understand the organisation's current culture, the odds of you landing on the right interventions are slim. This means a combination of:
Interviewing staff members/hosting workshops. Interviewing stakeholders is usually step one of any project. Ensure you interview people from those on the front lines of the work to leadership. You might also host workshops to gather group feedback on an issue and how they discuss it.
Undertake an observational analysis. Observe or research what people do in the organisation. How do they behave? Are processes followed? Identify potential issues. What is the tone of conversations?
Analyse relationships. Is it a collaborative or guarded space? Do colleagues like one another, and are they eager to collaborate? Or are they guarded and feel competitive with one another? How are decisions made? Is power centralised or decentralised? What is the risk tolerance?
This evaluation will help you understand the openness to interventions and how to deploy them.
Understanding culture and attitudes will help you properly position your intervention and identify the best way to introduce it. The approach to presenting an intervention in an open, warm, collaborative culture differs entirely from introducing an intervention in a hostile, combative culture.
In this phase, you should learn how people feel about your proposed intervention.
Are they excited by the idea, or does it make them uneasy?
Do they feel someone is treading on their turf?
Do they dislike the idea of changing the way they work (and why?)
Do they worry they might lose their jobs?
Do they not even have the time to comprehend and process the idea entirely?
What would make them feel better about it? What would they like to see in the intervention?
At this stage, you should be able to identify any hesitancy, resistance, or fear and determine its root cause.
Step Two: Learn From The Experiences Of Others
Here’s a tip that I wish I’d learned a lot sooner. In your initial conversations with the client, you need to ask:
What interventions have been successful before?
Specifically, here you want to know:
Why were these interventions successful?
How was the project launched and communicated?
How do employees feel about how that information was communicated?
What made these successful interventions different from those that failed?
You should hoover up every scrap of information learned from previous successful/unsuccessful projects to ensure your intervention lasts.
It’s also a good idea, if possible, to contact the consultants or agencies they worked with to learn from them about what did or didn’t work.
You should get a lot of handy tactical advice here that will make your intervention a success.
Step Three: Develop Habits
The reason why many interventions fail is they require a change in habits.
And we all know that creating or changing habits is hard.
Many people are set in their ways and don’t have the need or desire to change anything. Even if they do have the desire, change is hard.
Think for a second about the last time you changed a habit. I’m betting it wasn’t easy.
Many consultants train staff on the new behaviour and then assume it will stick. But knowing what to do and consistently doing it are two very different things. To make it stick as a habit, you usually need to:
Highlight WHEN to do the behavior. Depending on the behaviour, you must usually flag when the person should do it on a regular working day and highlight what behaviour it replaces. You can’t add something to someone’s workload without removing it. So, what are you removing to make way for the new thing?
Create mutual accountability. It’s much easier for people to make change as part of a group than alone. So, create a mutual accountability group where people benefit when they all perform the behaviour. Make it routine and design methods for people to check in with one another for behaviour to stick. Sometimes, simply showing the instances of the behaviour performed by each person in the group is a win.
Design short-term results. The behaviour should lead to positive results that will benefit those undertaking it. Make sure you have a means of tracking progress and highlighting improvement (almost any improvement) as quickly as possible. People must have a small victory and experience the results of their new behaviour as soon as possible.
Provide everyone with the means to track results. Create a measurement system and let everyone see the results of their collective effort. This means anyone at any time can see the benefits of the change they’ve made to their habits.
Step Four: Align Incentives and Metrics
In the majority of cases, if you want a change to last, you have to focus on two things:
The incentives of the stakeholders. While people might like the idea, they’re far more likely to engage in the intervention for the long term if it’s directly tied to how they are evaluated as employees, career progress, and compensation. It’s one thing to introduce a change as a good idea, but it’s another thing ENTIRELY if it’s directly tied to their career goals. If you can embed the change in performance evaluation, the change will be far more sustainable.
How performance is measured. It’s easy to say, ‘You should be doing [x]’, but it’s harder to find a valid set of metrics which reflect [x]. The problem is all metrics can be gamed or create unseen consequences. This is why you want to avoid specific targets such as ‘attending five collaboration sessions per month’ in favour of a subjective assessment from a manager of regularly attending and engaging positively in collaboration sessions.
Staff will almost ALWAYS prioritise the activities to which they are held accountable. Everything is treated as a side-project or a ‘nice to have’.
If you ever wonder why a change isn’t working, you should examine the incentives.
Aside: It’s ridiculously hard to change incentives as it requires sign-off at the highest levels.
Step Five: Get Senior Support Or Go Bust
The final lesson is perhaps the most obvious: the odds of long-term success are slim if you don’t have a senior supporter (and broad senior support).
Ultimately, senior leaders set priorities, and all behaviours and incentives are aligned with those priorities. If your initiative is not one of those priorities, you have a problem. This means engaging senior leaders at the early stages is critical.
The initiative itself needs to be aligned with the goals of senior leaders, and you'll need to contact someone senior. You might need to network your way up by asking to be introduced to your contact’s boss, their boss, etc.
When you are on the call, you need to be able to come up with a clear ask, the benefits of that ask to the leader (hence the alignment with their goals), and a clear reason why this needs to be done now. What makes it urgent?
This ask should be to promote the initiative, remove any roadblocks, provide the resources, make vital decisions etc…As mentioned, you will also need senior support to change the incentives to make this a priority.
Most importantly, it would be best if you did this early so they can collaborate in designing the change itself - the more they feel like a collaborator, the bigger the supporters they will be.
Summary
To quickly recap:
Stakeholder Engagement is Crucial: Great consultants excel in stakeholder engagement, but elite consultants ensure their interventions lead to long-term organisational change.
Understanding Culture is Key: To make changes stick, you must evaluate the organisation's culture through interviews, observations, and relationship analysis to tailor your interventions effectively.
Learn from Past Successes: Gather insights from previous successful and failed interventions, including how they were communicated and implemented, to ensure your approach resonates with the client.
Changing Habits is Difficult: Lasting change requires altering entrenched habits. To ensure success, identify when the new behaviour should occur, create accountability groups, and design methods to track and celebrate short-term wins.
Align Incentives and Metrics: Long-term change requires aligning new behaviours with employee incentives, performance evaluations, and measurable outcomes that resonate with stakeholders' goals.
Senior Support is Essential: It is critical to secure senior leadership buy-in early. Leaders must champion the change, allocate resources, and integrate it into organisational priorities for long-term success.
Involve Leaders Early: Engaging senior leaders early in the process ensures their investment, collaboration, and alignment of the initiative with broader organizational goals.
Good luck!
p.s. If you want to increase your proposal win-rate, make sure you sign up for our Proposal Mastery course.
Culture is huge. I once worked in an organization where the culture had been declining for years, largely due to poor communication and a lack of collaboration. Their solution? Endless town hall meetings, sticky-note sessions, and group collaborations that never went anywhere. It became clear that just giving people the illusion of participation wasn’t enough. Real cultural change requires initiatives that actually lead to meaningful outcomes—not just exercises that check a box.