At least 8 reasons why you should never bring a consultant into your company from an entrepreneurial and managerial point of view!
Hordes of consultants flood our companies with dubious, senseless concepts and proposals for change. Do it differently, leave the consultants at home for the following reasons and don't disturb your stable daily work.
1. Cost
The consultant costs a lot of money, which you actually cannot afford at all! The daily 30-40% of non-value-added activities and blind services in your company, in addition to the high rate of illness and employee turnover already burden you so much, that an additional expense for a consultant is no longer in the budget!
2. Entrepreneur and management
With consultant support you run the increased risk that all your failures of the last years, all your non-action, all the missing decisions and your intransparent communication inside and outside the company will suddenly be questioned and possibly dragged into the daylight! That must not be, because with it your whole tradition and your continuance of "the old" would be possibly permeated by change desires! How do you then stand there before your coworkers?
3. Competences
Attention, with consulting your whole work could be exposed in the "competence trap" all at once, because states and ways will be examined, and valid explanations also suddenly become necessary towards the employees, who possibly question the taken "paths" from the past (see term "competence trap" in Wikipedia). In doing so, there may be uncomfortable findings and changes in plans for the future? So don't do it, everything is still so nicely in "balance"!
4. Corporate goals
If you have managed to keep your company goals intransparent and even secret, then the consultant will want to change this at the latest and confront you massively with transparency and employee acceptance of the targets. Then explanation is necessary and solutions must be found, how these goals, not only as a vision, but also on the lower levels can be translated meaningfully. This means a lot of work, persuasion and employee involvement, which sounds very dangerous for the continuity of the company, leave it!
5. Changes
If you get support from external forces, it may mean change on your system and in your system! Do you want this? No, because then you and your employees lose the familiar environment, the workplace is suddenly no longer as it used to be and many people are torn out of their comfort zone, in which they have been moving "successfully" for so long. Then, at the latest, the entire attitude of employees and managers towards your company could change.
6. Employee image
If you have managed to ignore the ideas and wishes of your employees so far, then this may suddenly come to an end with an external consultation. Your employees will suddenly want to understand why and in which contexts they have to do things. The pressure for personal responsibility and for decisions to be made at lower levels will increase. You will no longer perceive your employees only as a resource that can be planned, but possibly your entire image of employees will change! This may cause your previous way of looking at things to falter. You don't want to bring any problems into your company, do you?
7. Leadership and executives
Think twice before entrusting yourself and your managers with new tasks when you have not yet fully solved the old ones. Leadership? Perhaps consulting also provides impulses that call into question the previous type of leadership. What do you do with your managers when employees suddenly make decisions on their own responsibility and begin to organize themselves? The tasks of leadership in your company may have to be completely rethought and redefined. This will certainly meet with massive resistance, because everything has been so nice and well-rehearsed so far, so it's best to leave it as it is and wait for things to come. The main thing is that the numbers are still right!
8. Professional competence and methodological competence
A consultant will certainly bring new working, learning and training methods into your company and may thus get directly into the line of fire of other internal departments, which have everything "firmly under control" and also regularly ensure that the right employees are always sitting in the right place. This again brings a lot of unrest into the company and again gnaws at the so beautiful tree, which suddenly starts to give way from below.
Conclusion
You could spare all those responsible and yourself, all managers and all employees in your company this disgrace of transparency and change, if you simply continue to do everything as you have been doing up to now and, best of all, never appoint an external consultant. If, already a consultant, then at least take one who does not implement anything, but only drafts a concept for you, which you can simply make disappear again at any time without anyone noticing. However, if you have reacted too late and the consultant is already in the house, then simply do not participate in the implementation. This way you remain sure that no harmful influences from the outside can put your so sensitive construct in a slanted position.
Good luck, keep up the good work, we hope we don't have to see each other!
Im März 2021, Lean-komplett, Bernd Kühme