Welcome to Consulting for Humans, a podcast all about life.

In consulting.

You'Re with Mike and Ian.

And in each episode we'll be shining a light on a new topic that gets to the heart of what makes consultants happy and successful.

That's right.

On the Consulting for Humans podcast, it's our mission to add just a little more humanity to the lives of all of us consultants out there.

And besides, we'd love to bring some of the skills and perspectives of consulting to help out in human lives too.

So if you're a consultant who's trying to be more of a human, or a human who's trying to be more of a consultant, then we think you're just our kind of person.

And welcome along if you are.

Last time, you might remember, we talked about the skill of delegation in consulting, particularly delegation, as you might say, downwards, to somebody who's going to get work done for you.

In today's episode, we're going to talk about a different kind of delegation, what you might call delegating upwards.

Getting work and advice and input from senior people or from subject matter experts.

And of course, this looks once again, Mike, like a great candidate for our traditional one minute treatment.

So we'll give that a try.

Oh, brilliant.

Love that part of that.

Today we're going to share with you what upwards delegation is, why we should think about doing a good job at it and what makes it difficult, at least in some situations.

That's right.

We're going to talk about some of the pitfalls, the most common mistakes that we see.

We'll talk, of course, about how to get around them and the special situation of delegating to a subject matter expert and how to get that right.

Oh, nice.

And after we've done our one minute upward delegation example, we'll wrap up with some thoughts on how leaders can foster.

Foster constructive upward delegation in their teams.

Very good.

It's going to be a great show today.

We're looking forward to it.

We hope you are too.

Now, Mike, let's talk about this.

What is upward delegation and why do we care?

Well, it's interesting.

I was working with a client up in Toronto a couple weeks ago and I bounced this off of one of our other partners and Ed had a really strong reaction, said, talking about upward delegation, you know, no junior delegates work to someone more senior.

What are you talking about?

She's right in many ways because the natural flow of work, like so many other things, is downwards from the point of view of the economics and the kind of natural ecosystem of a consulting project.

Everything works fine when work gets passed down to the most junior resource that's qualified to do it.

And that's like an axiom of the principle of profitability and the principle of leverage.

So from that strict perspective, I'm 100% with an.

But I can think of some situations where we've had to do that either because of force of circumstances or where the delegation is the event that is enabling us to get hold of the information or the permission or the resources.

We're asking for something, we're calling for something that only a senior person has.

And when we find ourselves in that moment, we're using some of the skills of delegation, albeit in an uphill kind of a direction.

So another way to put this, Mike, could be to say upward delegation is about figuring out how do you get the support or the help or the authority or the data that you need from those above you when you need it.

Because there are going to be some moments when you're going to need it.

Right?

Yeah.

And I'm sure Ed would absolutely agree with that definition.

It's interesting.

You know, I think part of my emotional response to Ann's emotional response came because I so much appreciated this when I kind of made my way into the senior ranks and was running projects, especially projects in a brand new era of technical innovation and a lot of differences where we were oftentimes making things up as we go along.

I know no consultant today has to do that.

Well, maybe they do.

Right?

Well, they were key members of the team on projects.

And I absolutely loved upward delegation.

I remember Carol Graser, who on one of my first project, one of my first projects with her, was a wizard at this.

Carol had a phenomenal background in change management.

She had a phenomenal background in project management.

And fact of the matter was, I had not a fantastic background in project management.

I was kind of more of a thought leader, if you will.

And my change management skills were honed in turnarounds, not necessarily in pure change management.

So Carol was great at really delegating things for me to do, whether it was as we were doing report ins, as we were talking about meeting with key clients and setting things up and having taken so much of that on, I think all of the things we're going to talk about, how to do this.

Well, Carol was a master of and taught me a great deal about it as well.

It sounds like a great opportunity for both of you.

Right.

And just imagine how it could have worked out if you'd kind of stood on your authority as saying I'm the senior here and you all are better just hold fire for a second and start doing important things only when I'm good and ready to tell you.

Like, how would that have worked out?

Right, Right.

Not at all.

Well, I think I would have become one of those typical people that I was used to working for.

Well, Mike, it's funny because I was thinking about this both as somebody delegating upwards to my seniors earlier in my career and as a leader of project having things delegated upwards to me by the folks working for me.

I was racking my brains thinking, let me think of a time when this went really well.

I very rarely can think of an occasion when either I was Carol or I got the benefit of a Carol.

It's been so rare in my career that I've seen this happening consistently and smoothly and efficiently that it really set me back a little bit thinking about this.

And I was trying to mull over what are the reasons why it's difficult.

Because surely you're talking about delegating something to somebody who is the most experienced and the most capable and the most savvy and the most composed with the most resources at their hands in the professional services world.

How come delegating to somebody like that doesn't always work out?

And I was thinking, well, what's the spectrum of jobs that we're talking about here?

So I was thinking at the bottom end of the spectrum, the easiest things that you might delegate upwards.

Something like, go find me a document.

Yeah.

You know, Mike, that document that you were talking about last week, can you go find me?

That's probably the easiest upward delegation.

Something that the senior only has access to on there, their computer or in their storage area.

Maybe getting an introduction to somebody that you could talk to, asking their partner, in effect, to say, spin that Rolodex for me and go find me the right person, please, that I need to go talk to.

That's probably an easy one.

And easy, if not always straightforward, is, can you do a bit of bureaucracy for me?

Can you approve this week's timesheets?

Can you approve my expenses claim?

Can you approve the allocation of hours?

There's something where I need you to click a button.

Those are probably the easiest things to delegate upwards.

And heaven knows I've seen enough of those go wrong.

But what's more, in the middle of our league table here, Mike.

Yeah, I think the middle, it's interesting because they're not only perhaps not quite as easy, but they're also a little bit.

Well, I shouldn't say more important, somebody who's been waiting to get an expense claim through.

Sometimes importance takes on different dimensions here.

But reviewing something for feedback or quality control, and that's part of that, I think is just always the preciousness of the time of some of the folks above us and getting their time focused on something and all the demands on them.

And that leads me right to escalating to solve a problem.

It's like we really got to get something done on this.

And even something perhaps as easy, but sometimes really important as calling or emailing somebody, a client or some other critical stakeholder that we really need your level, to their level communication for.

Yeah, and I can think of partners that I've worked with who are always ready to make a call, but I can also think of somewhere they've been, why do you need me to call this person?

And surely I, depending a little bit on the personality and the outlook of the senior person you're talking about, this might be a really, really big deal.

And then at the top of my list, Mike, I've got things like sharing an opportunity.

Because interestingly, asking a senior, a partner level person to engage in sharing an opportunity, the best of them would be absolutely golden about this.

Some of them would be really difficult, really protective, really def.

And finally, some of the basic things are hard to delegate upwards.

A piece of actual thinking or writing or analysis pitched at their own level of expertise.

That can be a risky thing because if they're motivated, it could go great.

But if their motivation flags a little bit or if their time management slips, then actually doing the work might drop down between the cracks that's delegating something to them that's at their level.

The most difficult thing that I think I've ever delegated to a senior person is asking them to do something below their level when for some reason because of lack of resources or it's a tight timescale or they just happen to be the one person available.

Can you do this really basic thing?

Can you create these three or four slides?

Can you write this simple document?

Doing something simple is really tough because it's a really hard thing to keep their attention on.

And very soon the effort involved in getting it done really outweighs the potential benefits of getting it done at all.

And I guess that's where Ann was thinking, right.

Why was that something simple to somebody senior?

And it's interesting because I think there really is a fundamental difference in who's catching the ball on that delegation a little bit.

Because I remember sometimes relishing the opportunity to roll up my sleeves and dive in and help.

Because I thought it a way to, you know, the esprit de corps, the we've got to win for the clients we gotta take.

Have each other's backs.

And all.

All of us know that perhaps sometimes this is what gets in the way of effective delegation.

As we said last time, when people are too happy to take that and say, yeah, because I want this done right, and you people don't know how to do that.

So, yeah, it really gets nuanced here and is vitally important.

It really is.

And there are a few different dimensions to what success would look like as well.

The priority when I'm delegating to somebody senior isn't only efficiency.

I think it's also maybe making sure that we do get some margin because it, like you say, it would be easy to delegate something to a senior and for them to burn up lots and lots of the billable hours maybe part of the priority, as well as making judicious choices about involving the senior.

Because if I'm a senior, I would like that little glow of involvement.

But I hope that you'll ration the amount of involvement just right so that I've got the chance to have my hands on it, but also manage my time.

And maybe also there's the difficult aspect of preserving the relationship.

If you know that when you're delegating upwards to a senior, they're also the person that's writing your performance review or is in charge of a promotion decision or is in charge of staffing decisions for who gets to work on the sexiest or the grimmest of the current assignments, then you're more sensitive, I think, about how you go about delegating to that person.

So maintaining the relationship is not a straightforward thing.

No, it's not.

And it's interesting because I'm back to thinking about generalized advice of, you know, if you want a better relationship, if you want to grow your relationship, if you want to build trust for somebody, this kind of thing back to whether it was Ben Franklin or the Power of Positive Thinking or what it's.

It's like, ask them to do you a favor.

And that's a hard concept, but it's a fascinating way.

You can't certainly, you know, we'll get back to our monkeys again from last episode, but yeah, interesting.

Love it.

Right.

We're going to talk about the book Influence Without Authority as well, which is a really reference on this.

And that's all about the different things that you can exchange the different tokens that you can exchange and it starts to get.

If you're coming at this from the perspective of, I don't know, having worked in the command and control structure like the military for a while, this would look like completely alien stuff to you, what these little obligations and favors and long term investments, all this trust.

What happened to just like the sergeant says, do it, so I do it.

But it's true.

It works the same in big matrix organizations as it does in consulting.

We are in the middle of this kind of network of trades and favors and obligations.

And the people who are good at this are good at investing long term in the favors and obligations that they have around the place.

We talked about what makes it difficult and I think we've got an emerging picture here.

Let's talk about how we can do it.

Well, beginning with maybe some of the typical mistakes, what are some of the things that we get wrong when we're delegating upwards?

Mike?

Yeah, and I think you're really onto something here, Ian.

Perhaps we have a tendency not to do it because sometimes it doesn't go well, but there are some good reasons for that.

Like under preparing before approaching a senior member, you know, throwing the problem over the friends, hoping that the senior will take responsibility for it.

That I, I'm not a big fan of here.

As we said in last episode, it's kind of underpreparing or failing to prove that you've thought through it.

Coming with some potential solutions really hone this thing.

It's kind of like walking in and saying, here, take my monkey.

No, we're back in monkey territory again.

It's true.

And I've seen this happen a lot.

And we think, well, you're smart, you're senior, you should just be able to deal with it and bless them, however smart they are, however senior they are, they need the preparation steps.

And I think when you get something delegated to you upwards by somebody that's thought about it, that understands how you need to understand context, that offers you some ideas for a way forward or a solution, that's really super helpful, Mike.

I want to add to the list of potential mistakes and that's timing.

Sometimes delegating upwards too early, most often delegating upwards too late.

Like I've expended all of the calendar slack that I ever had postponing the moment when I ask you, the director or the principal or the partner to do this.

And now I'm asking you at the last possible moment because I didn't want to ask you to do it, but now I've got to, and it's too late, and it's time critical.

And you're going to say all kinds of things like, you should have involved me earlier.

And I think that's a fair strike.

The skill of a really great consultant and consultant project manager is early enough getting the seniors involved early enough that they've actually got the chance to think about it and prepare and do the thing that you're asking them to do.

Yeah, I think that's so true, Ian.

I mean, it's our tendency sometimes to have that bunker mentality when things are not going well and that really.

We'll talk about strategic escalation later.

Now, we spent a lot of time this week, Ian, thinking about, you know, how about, are there mistakes that we've observed when you're a junior versus a consultant versus a project manager versus a principal or a partner?

And we found a little bit of fascinating symmetry as we were both kind of independently thinking through this and then coming back together and talking it through here.

That's right.

So the very lowest level, I think, possibly have something in common with the very highest level.

So at the very lowest level, we've got junior consultants, people who are in their kind of first.

First job, first one or two jobs in consulting, and they have a certain amount of anxiety when they're passing work back up the chain.

I don't want to look incompetent, they're thinking, I don't want to hold up the moment of escalation, but I also don't want to look stupid.

So juniors, for sort of reasons of their vulnerability and their inexperience, are thinking, how does this make me look?

I don't want to look bad, I don't want to look stupid.

I don't want to look naive.

And our symmetry here, Mike, let's jump straight to the top of the heap, if that's the right phrase, at the top of the heap.

I think principals and partners getting work delegated to them are also a little bit obsessed with how they look.

Right.

And I don't want to look like I am the person who's down in the weeds in the engine room when I should be up on the bridge steering the ship.

And I certainly don't want to get this wrong.

I don't want to get involved in something that I haven't touched for a long time and go, oh, God, am I going to look a little naive here?

Am I going to like, oh, right, yeah, that's it.

It's been a While since I put information in cells in a spreadshee, going to have remembered all the formulas.

Amen.

When I want to roll up and jump in there.

Right, There you go.

Well, interestingly, in the middle, maybe it's because life gets so busy and we're just trying to keep the balls in the air, but we found that with both consultants and project managers, there was this, you know, making that error in what truly needs attention upwards.

Perhaps not getting it, perhaps jumping it when it's not really needed.

Maybe with consultants, a poor filtering of what I'm going to send up.

And with project managers, this, you know, same sort of thing.

Insufficient prioritization of issues requiring senior input.

This is really strategic.

I really should go up with it.

Or let me just throw this, because it seems to be a problem right now and I pass it over and I'm essentially handing off a monkey, even though I've been around long enough to know better when it's not needed.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm reminded of a quote by the author Terry Pratchett in one of the Terry Pratchett books.

Somewhere it says something like, it's tough at the top, it's even tougher at the bottom, but halfway up, man, it's so tough you could use it for horseshoes.

So I don't think that's more or less what we're saying here.

Well put.

Oh, I'm going to have to find Discworld one of these days.

Yeah, you got to.

So there are some consequences that we're hearing about here.

We're hearing about consequences to do with the economics, to do with efficiency, or rather the lack of efficiency, allocating work in the wrong place at the wrong time for people who can't do it efficiently.

We're talking about timing problems like delays, failures, failures to escalate on time, decision making, bottlenecks, the slowing down and the.

And the holding up of key decisions.

But I think we're also talking about subjective impacts, like the happiness of the client, credibility of each other among the team, and also difficulties with learning and development.

We tend not to learn when we're not doing a good job at escalating things upwards.

So some of the consequences here are at the heart of everything that makes a project go well, and they're at the heart of everything that makes consultants happy and successful, which is what we're here for.

Yeah, and I think it's so easy and important to look at this in terms of problems, but I think everything we're saying applies equally to opportunities.

And I hate to you know, I had one partner that said, my God, we spend so much time stepping over gold to get to pennies.

We're missing big opportunities.

Even though it wasn't our remit in this piece of work, or, you know, you stumbled across this, or we're aware of this, or there's something we can use and we're so busy we don't get it to the right people or take advantage of it or focus on it or escalate it.

Those missed opportunities, including, as you said, the opportunity for learning.

Right, Very good.

So it's going to be really great if there's somebody around us who's got that looking ahead, looking for context, looking for the bigger picture mindset, because it's really easy to be conservative and defensive about timing and schedules and everything.

So I think I'm only going to escalate the toughest, gnarliest problems to the senior level.

Maybe we should also be escalating some of the really golden opportunities to.

And all of this was making me ask myself what kind of consultants are good at it.

Maybe if my experience has been a little bit jaded, maybe that's because I've stuck around consultants who tend to be analytical, who tend to have high intellectual egos, who tend to be a bit defensive of their ideas.

Maybe there are whole other kinds of consultants out there who are a little bit more open to sharing ideas and sharing authority.

And I think maybe, Mike, some of the people who are good at escalating or delegating upwards are the ones who are implementation consultants.

Right?

The folks who do big implementation problems.

And that's probably a good characterization of a lot of the work that you did in the middle part of your career.

Is that fair?

Well, it's interesting.

I did a lot of work alongside of implementation consultants and I learned so much from them.

A lot of some of the best techniques for scope management, I learned from implementation consultants a lot of this idea about delegating up.

Same thing, implementation consultants.

There were implementation consultants, especially when we had big multi discipline, multi business unit, global projects.

The people who were absolutely, I mean, we thought in the management consulting side, we had to get stuff done, they had to get stuff done, and they developed great ways to do that.

So that was it.

And the fact that these were those magnitude of projects meant you had super high profile accounts with a lot of very senior people on both client side and our side involved.

And we had to use them effectively to get these deals sold, to get these deals done, and to make these deals work, even when sometimes they were not going so well.

Right.

And I can remember some of the seniors who are implementation oriented had really, really great tools for doing this.

There was a guy named Rob who was a brilliant implementation consultant, was very new to this.

And I learned tools like raci, Responsibility, accountability, consultation and involve, like who gets to be informed and who has to actually sign off.

RACI is a great thing to have in a consulting project that lasts for more than a few weeks.

I had never heard of it.

It was really great.

All these ideas for matrices and plans and templates of being basically more transparent about information and being more transparent about what's in the plan and who's going to get it done.

That kind of spirit comes from implementation consultants, I think.

And when I learned from those guys, I think I learned a lot.

Yeah.

And it's interesting.

I think the knowledge management systems I saw done best were done best by implementation consultants.

I, I have real shudders when I think about management consulting and some attempts at doing knowledge of management systems there.

Boy, we've had some real dogs in that hunt.

And I mean that not no disrespect to dogs.

Absolutely.

It was.

Mike, we're getting back into our Gen X and Boomer and Millennial thing here.

Right.

You're right.

This was a Gen X consultants hot topic.

And for those of you who are under 40, I'm going to, you're going to have to trust me that back in the 90s and the early noughties, everybody was hot for knowledge management in management consulting and strategy consulting.

Oh, it's going to shape the way that we work and it's going to save all of this expertise and all this domain knowledge and all of this, all these information sources.

And it was an absolute colossal waste of time.

I dread to think if you'd ever calculated the ROI of investing in knowledge management technology for, you know, cat herding enterprises like strategy consultants.

I'm sure there are some that paid off and I'm sure they were great.

But let me put it this way, I don't think I saw very many of them, at least not until later in my career.

Well, as my implementation consultant friends would say, oh, yeah, we've always known that.

Garbage in, garbage out.

But I think, interestingly, AI now and some of the attempts to do that are going to redo this and could be redoing this in really important and interesting and effective ways to be.

To be returned to later.

Yeah, exactly.

Ian, how about SMEs?

We talked about seniors a lot.

Any advice on SMEs?

Because that's kind of a different up, if you will.

Right.

It is.

So delegating work to somebody who's in the line above you, who's like the partner in charge of your job or something, that has all this kind of political and authority and status kind of dynamics about it.

There are, of course, senior people, often the same rank or even senior to your partner or your principal, but who have got subject matter expertise or data or knowledge that they could share.

And I think that's much more like the classic influence without authority type situation.

Your success at getting advice and input from a senior subject matter expert is going to depend on you understanding their personality, understanding their context and their culture, understanding their motivation.

Because even though you both might work for the same firm and you're all going to get billability and hours and utilization from it, understanding what makes them tick is probably a big part of getting a good input from them.

And.

And I remember being asked as a senior to give input to projects and I remember asking seniors and what would turn me on and what would force me to say, oh, gee, I'm going to open my laptop and give them 20 minutes and write something down here.

What would make me do that is different from what would make somebody else do that?

So some things that, that might have influenced me.

For a person to whom I feel obliged and who seems like they're a nice, credible part of my network, a thank you and a favor owed might be enough.

And if we're in the office together and there are donuts and coffee around, and you bring me coffee and a donut and say, ian, here's a coffee, please take a look at my document.

I'd probably be down there.

Yeah.

And I think sometimes I found that, like you said, bilbo hours, sales credit, you know, always.

You can't forget about how people are incented and measured.

But also other things, intangibles, like a chance to join a client call or to be some other ways involved in some projects where they're thinking, yeah, what.

Not just what's in it for me, me doing the call, but what's in it for them?

What might they, ooh, I've got some ideas I'd like to bounce off of.

Or I want to find something in situ that I look at that.

So that's a possibility.

Yeah, I mean, the.

All the things that senior consultants care about, they care, apart from billable hours, they care about relationships with clients and they care about cultivating their knowledge base, the thing that makes them distinctive.

Right.

So I love this Idea of being curious about what's in it for them.

Maybe it's about choosing the right inducement and then kind of picking up on some of the things we talked about before.

If I'm a subject matter expert, I'd like to get my hands on something relevant to my subject matter expertise and give the get the chance to shape it or comment on it.

I might like to extend my network.

I might like to get an introduction to somebody else that I want to connect with.

And there are some pitfalls as well here.

Like subject matter experts and seniors in general are just as good as analysts are doing consultant, led, scope, creep of indulging themselves and playing with their professional toys from time to time.

And one of the things that I learned is that I should not expect that a subject matter expert has the same attention to my project that I do.

So if I'm a consultant or a project manager, then my current project and my current client is a 100% focus for me.

And it's a very, very easy prioritization equation in my head.

The things I'm going to do today are the things that are going to edge my current client project toward completion.

And in a way that makes my life easy, I'm going to go talk to a subject matter expert and for sure they would like the firm's work to get done well and they'd like to get it done on time.

But they have a loyalty that's just as great, maybe even greater to their own subject matter expertise, because they're going to keep fostering and growing the thing that makes them distinctive.

So I learned pretty quickly that I should modify my expectations.

A subject matter expert's focus is going to be on their expertise and on keeping it current and keeping it relevant.

And if I'm going to motivate them, I'm going to be respectful of that and even offer them the chance to do some more of that and get some more of that.

In the process of this delegation that.

We'Re going to do, I think it so often just comes back to our formulas about relationships, about trust, and about tell me a good reason why and tell me what's in it for me before you tell me, or you know, around, if you will, telling me what it is that you need me to do.

And by the way, come a little early, not at the 11th hour when you want me to see everything you've done, right?

No, no, no, Let me help you, guide you, and then let me look specifically at something that's going to have something in it.

For me.

So, Mike, we're talking about timing and one of the interesting things about subject matter experts is people are tempted to ask for their input or their suggestions or their feedback.

Right at the 11th hour, as you say, when the slide deck is done and the analysis is complete and we're sending it to them to say, do you have any comment?

It's a way smarter move to go to a subject matter expert at the beginning of the project when you're doing your framing of the problem and when you're trying to figure out what your data sources are going to be, go ask them to think hypothetically for a minute.

Getting a hypothesis or two from a subject matter expert is way better from getting them to edit your slides at the end of the process.

And it's more more efficient and it's more fun for them as well.

So early, early, early, I think is sometimes a really smart move for getting advice or input from a subject matter expert.

Absolutely.

It also gets them a little bit invested in your project.

So if you do have to come back later.

Bingo.

Especially when you do it with that right inducement as you were talking about earlier, Ian.

Yep.

So we've covered the ground pretty carefully here now, Mike.

We've talked about what delegation is, what the pitfalls are, how we can do it successfully.

This sounds like this is crying out now for us to do our one minute manager shtick one more time.

Let's see if we can give a one minute example.

What's going to have to go into our one minute approach here.

Well, I think great delegation is going to gain us these benefits like leverage and efficiency and respect for the relationship and so on.

And also it has to avoid the mistakes that we talked about.

So we're going to be very careful of senior time.

We're going to demonstrate that we've taken some care of some of the basics in advance here.

And like any one minute approach, we're going to be really clear, especially about the fundamental problem, the time for getting it done.

So I think we can probably tick off seven items.

Right.

As if we've always tried to have a formula and they look very similar to each other.

Things like what's the issue or the context, just the what's the business impact, the why, the prior actions we've done, the requested involvement, the proposed alternative solutions we've tried, the time sensitivity and the resources.

So what do you think, Ian?

Well, let's set this up here.

We've got an example that we want to try out.

This is a consultant delegating Upwards to a subject matter expert who's giving expertise and advice on cybersecurity during a project for a client in financial services.

Do you want to count me in?

Here I am.

All right, Ian.

Three, two, one, go.

Hey, Dr.

Singh.

I'm working on the First bank digital transformation project where we're redesigning their customer onboarding process.

That was context.

I've identified a potential security vulnerability in the proposed API integration between their legacy systems and the new cloud platform Issue statement.

And Ian flexing his AI tech.

Now, this could impact our Go Live recommendation next month and potentially expose customer data if not addressed properly.

That's the business impact.

I've reviewed the security protocols documentation and consulted with the client's IT team who vanished.

Knowledge is a concern, but don't have specialized expertise in this area.

There goes with our prior actions.

Now, I'd like you to review our integration approach for security gaps and provide specific remediation guidance.

That's the requested involvement.

Based on my research, I believe we either need to implement additional encryption layers or reconsider the authentication mechanism.

Those are the solution alternatives.

The client expects our security assessment by next Thursday, so your input by Tuesday would be ideal.

There's time sensitivity.

I've prepared a brief showing the current architecture and integration points to minimize your review time.

Would this timeline work for you?

Or should we discuss adjustments to the scope of your review?

Boom.

Again, close enough to a minute.

Mike, I think this is great.

I'm loving the one minute thing.

I do, too.

I mean, I think it also helps us wrap our head again around what's critically important.

Delivering the crucial information efficiently while demonstrating our preparation and ownership.

We're not giving you the whole monkey here.

We're keeping the monkey and asking your help here.

So, Mike, it was fun, like always to do the one minute thing and to look at how a bit of clarity and a bit of focus really, really helps us with an upward delegation.

We also wanted to spend some time pulling together thoughts for our listeners who are leading consulting teams, leading projects and leading practices who might be able to look at how their organizations can do a better job at upward delegation.

So, Mike, what are some of our final thoughts here?

Well, I think our final thoughts could be summed up by using strategic escalation as a crucial tool in consulting.

And from a leadership perspective, I think it's hard to argue that strategic escalation done well is really vital to success.

So escalating issues to higher levels within the team, within the firm, and when necessary, to the client's leadership.

I mean, the benefits are really clear.

Right.

And it's something that we all see the risks of, like, at what point am I going to blow my whistle?

But the benefits of doing it well and doing it professionally, calmly and on time are going to be super clear.

Like you say, having a clear path to do this means that the consulting team can stay intact as a team and not kind of wrestle with each other, can identify problems before.

Before they become major issues.

And then when they do get escalated, they get access to the kind of resources and the decision making that would always have been needed to address the problem effectively.

And if you always would have needed a partner's input or a principal's phone call or something, if you needed it, then you needed it.

Right.

So I think getting it clear and getting it done promptly is a big, big benefit.

Yeah.

In doing this well, making this a habit in consulting teams, in consulting firms keeps projects on track.

It addresses issues early, minimizes disruptions, and ensures that the deliverers, you know, provide the intended outcomes.

Escalation also provides consultants with valuable experience in navigating complex situations, working with senior leaders, making critical decisions.

And again, we're not just talking about individuals doing this well.

We're talking about documenting escalation processes, documenting lessons learned and creating a culture of learning and continuous improvement by doing this well, all of this around something that is, by definition delegating up.

Right.

And lots of the words and the ideas and the habits here are ones that come more naturally if you're in what we've both called implementation consulting, compared to if you've worked in something that's more analytical, more like strategy or management consulting.

And I think those are some of the firms where we could probably do a better job at being calmer and more organized about how we kick things up the chain to do, as you call it, strategic escalation.

It happens so much that it's got to be a critical component of consulting projects that are headed for success.

Doing it well means that we've already planned how we're going to be able to identify and address issues.

It would ensure that we get alignment and success more consistently.

And as you pointed out there, Mike, it would help us to learn and develop as a practice some of the things that we tend not to do well and consistently that hold us back from learning.

One of them is we don't review at the end of a project or at the end of a milestone.

And sometimes we're not very good at escalating things and asking for help.

And I think of this as a Habit.

And we've talked before about the power of habits and the famous seven habits.

Making good escalation into a habit for your consulting practice raises a few questions, like what are you doing right now to reinforce the practice, to reinforce the idea that escalating and asking for help is a positive thing and can be done constructively?

How are you making sure that that happens with positive reinforcement?

How are you helping your teams and yourselves as leaders to make sure that good escalation, good upward delegation becomes a habit?

Yeah.

And to put it another way, you know what happens typically when issues aren't escalated?

What happens before what happens or what happens before what doesn't happen?

That's for example, what happens that results in escalation not becoming a habit.

Perhaps because the issue isn't successfully resolved, perhaps there's no learning, perhaps the team suffers consequences that take away their motivation to try again next time.

What are we doing that stops this from sinking in all around?

Right?

Yeah.

What are the little patterns of negative feedback or the little patterns that get in the way of people doing this?

Well?

And I think it will be really interesting for us all to take stock, how well are we helping our teams to do a good job with this upward escalation, this upward delegation that we've talked about?

It reminds me, Ian, we talked in the past about loss reviews and loss reviews certainly fail and they go out of style when all we're using it is to sort of hang the guilt around, around somebody's collar to say, yeah, so whose fault was this?

And the same reason we kind of came back and said we could flip that over and say, what about win reviews?

Are we always thinking that?

Of course we got it.

Do we learn anything from wins?

And I would say everything we just talked about about strategic escalation, focusing on problems, take the same things and apply it to focusing on escalating opportunities strategically.

How many times are we again stepping over gold to get to pennies?

Great.

So Mike, with that closing set of thoughts about leadership and about organization and about long term habits, we've had quite a nice sequence now of episodes where we've extended our thinking to talk about life in teams or in full fledged firms with organizations and different work strands.

In our next three episodes, we're going to go back to the micro level.

We're going to shift our focus to life in consulting.

For those who are in what you might call a firm of one solopreneurs, one person shops that will be talking, if you like, about the I of consulting rather than the we and I think that's going to be a fun sequence of episodes.

We're going to look into how I manage myself, how I manage my clients, and how I look after my work.

At least that's the idea that we have.

So please join me and me next.

Time on the Consulting for Humans Podcast.

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