Handbook for Strategic HR - Section 2: Consulting and Partnership Skills

By OD Network, John Vogelsang PhD, Maya Townsend and 6 more

The role of the HR professional has shifted from personnel administrator to business adviser, which includes consulting and partnering with the organization’s leadership and other service providers. This section will help you learn what core skills are needed for consulting; how to develop partner relationships to support innovation and change; how to work with clients in a consultative mode; and how to deal with the challenges of being an internal consultant.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Release date: Apr 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780814436974

OD Network

OD PRACTITIONER is the quarterly journal of the Organization Development Network, an international association whose members are committed to practicing organization development as an applied behavioral science.

Book preview

SECTION TWO

Consulting and Partnership Skills

Introduction

Matt Minahan, David Jamieson, and Judy Vogel

VOICES FROM THE FIELD

For me, important models were joint union/management approaches and Schein’s Process Consultation. Seeing the people process at work. Seeing that HR was not about transactions and simple services. Rather understanding the large context and the systems view were most useful. . . . In my highly matrixed organization, everyone has multiple interests. Getting clear about each person’s role and leadership is a challenge. It is key to make a clean deal from the beginning. As a project proceeds, we need to stop and recontract around unexpected developments. The old HR mentality of service is not a contract.

—Chuck Mallue

We knew we needed to transform ourselves to become internal consultants vs. transactional day-today service providers. Our mantra was we will become the best consulting group. The key was the support of leadership.

—Sue Eklund

What would I do differently? Talk to as many people as possible before engagement. Engage the organization at multiple levels gaining multiple perspectives.

—Judith Gail

TOPICS COVERED IN THIS SECTION

• How to successfully complete the steps involved in a consulting process.

• How to consult on group and interpersonal process issues.

• How to develop the client-consultant relationship and manage the many aspects of the relationship.

• How to act in the role of internal or external consultant.

• How to develop and maintain partnerships with leadership, staff, and an internal or external OD consultant.

WHY CONSULTING AND PARTNERSHIP SKILLS

The role of the HR Business Partner is challenging and interesting with often conflicting accountabilities and allegiances to staff, management, clients, corporate headquarters, HR leadership, and consultants. As the role has shifted from personnel administration to business adviser, it has also become more complex, with multiple demands from multiple entry points in the system. Further, it has come to include the new role of consulting and partnering with the organization’s leadership and other service providers.

While there are courses and mentors to help one learn how to manage a consulting project and the skills needed to create an effective consulting partnership with managers and senior leadership, one thing is certain: the stakes can be very high and the risks can be significant. The role is complex.

There are several challenges on the road to effectiveness, and an important one is that the presenting problem is not always the actual problem. Further, clients are not always sure what they want, and the way to success is not always clear. For these reasons, establishing a consulting partnership relationship and contracting for the right work can be challenging and critical to results.

THE CHAPTERS IN THIS SECTION

This section includes articles from the OD Practitioner that help explain the steps in the consulting process, some of the challenges of being an internal consultant, and some of the strategies to develop in partnering with leaders and internal or external consultants. After an overview of a key OD process, Starting at the Beginning: Action Research, there are sections on the following subjects:

• Facilitation and the Consulting Process

• The Core Skills Needed in Consulting on Process Issues

• The Client-Consultant Relationship

• The Consultant as Person

• Partnerships Among the HR Business Partner, Leadership, Staff, and an Internal or External OD Consultant

Starting at the Beginning: Action Research

Among the highest priorities in the earliest days of scientific and psychological research was finding ways to keep the observer from influencing or contaminating the observed; the goal was to prevent any influence from the scientist on the subject of the research that could change the phenomenon under study. Rigid rules for observing events and behavior dispassionately were the norm through the early 20th century, until the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle determined that atoms change their behavior when studied carefully. At just about the same time, Fritz Roethlisberger and his research team at the GE Hawthorne Electric plant in upstate New York discovered the same thing happened with humans. When people believe they are being studied or observed, their behavior changes—just like the atom. This came to be known as the Hawthorne Effect.

During his research of schools and social systems in the 1930s and 1940s, Kurt Lewin confirmed the phenomena and decided to make it the cornerstone of his Action Research methodology, the core methodology of most OD consulting processes.

Action Research is the process by which managers and employees in an organization are engaged in the self-study of the organization to achieve desired changes. Data is collected and then fed back to the involved members of the system for analysis, action is determined and taken, data regarding the impact of the action is collected and fed back to the system; the cycle continues as more action is taken; and so on. Lewin describes Action Research as comparative research on the conditions and effects of various forms of social action and research leading to social action (1948, pp. 202-203) using a spiral of steps, each of which is composed of a circle of planning, action, and fact-finding about the result of the action (1958, p. 201).

Here is the spiral that is at the heart of Lewin’s Action Research model. When confronted with a problem or opportunity, the organization retains a consultant or establishes an internal team (or, ideally, both). It tasks them to collect data about and, preferably by, the system itself. The problem could be about the ways of doing business in the organization, of communicating, of deciding an issue, and of working together, or the organizational climate, or the organizational culture—whatever is under study. The collected data is analyzed for patterns and themes and presented back to the organizational system. The data presents the system with information about itself which readies the system for change. The system reacts to the data, reflects on the data, and decides on a course of action, which is then implemented. Then data is collected about how well the course of action addressed the issue and about the new state of the system. Similar to the first round, this data is analyzed for patterns and themes, and presented back to the organizational system. As in the first round, the system reacts to this new data and decides on additional actions, which may trigger another round of data collection. Once the system reaches the desired future state, the Action Research cycle can end.

The values that underlie Lewin’s Action Research methodology are similar to those of Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Freire, who proposed teaching and intervention methods that fully engaged those who were the subjects. Freire strongly opposed traditional models of teaching and community involvement in which the teacher or wise person stands in front of the group and tells them what to do and how to think, making the participants passive recipients or receiving objects of this externally imposed knowledge. He also had a strong aversion to dividing the student and teacher roles, preferring a deep reciprocity. Replace the education references with consulting references in the following Freire quotation and you get a clear sense of the values upon which Action Research are built: Education [Consulting] must begin with the solution of the teacher-student [consultant-client] contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously students [clients] and teachers [consultants] (Freire, 1970, p.72).

Facilitation and the Consulting Process

While Action Research as the core technology is a huge asset bequeathed by Kurt Lewin, it is not enough. It does not describe how consulting projects begin, get designed, get executed, get evaluated, or end. Flawless Consulting (Block, 2011) is probably the best known handbook for consultants, but it focuses heavily on the front end of projects, with less attention paid to the overall project cycle. For more depth on all aspects of consultation processes, refer to Rothwell, Stavros, and Sullivan, Practicing Organization Development and Change (2009) and Jones and Brazzel, The NTL Handbook of Organization Development and Change (2006). Both have numerous chapters organized around the consultation process.

For a high-level overview of the stages of the consulting process based upon Lewin’s Action Research Model, Facilitation 101 by Matt Minahan, Judy Vogel, Lee Butler, and Heather Butler Taylor (2007) is a good start. It also contains brief synopses of tools and techniques useful in the consulting process, such as the Bridges’ Transition Model, the Satir Perturbation Model, Schutz’s FIRO-B group development model, the Drexler-Sibbett Team Performance Model, the RASCI tool for accountability charting, and a Use of Self-Personal assessment.

Lurey and Griffen (2002) provide a good integration of project management and social psychology approaches to the stages of a consulting project in Action Research: The Anchor of OD Practice.

Marv Weisbord (1973) wrote in The Organization Development Contract: Clients in a bind don’t get much fun out of their work. They long for something simpler, better suited to their strengths, more consistent with their values. Above all, most clients long for outcomes. They want permanent change for the better, with no backsliding. In a preview of what Chris Argyris would later flesh out into double loop learning, Weisbord identifies three levels of outcomes clients might achieve from an OD project:

1. Reducing the immediate crisis (e.g., changing structures, policies, procedures, systems, programs, relationships for the better);

2. Learning something about their own coping styles—how they deal with organizational dilemmas and how they might do it better;

3. Learning a process for continually becoming aware and making choices about whatever issue presents itself.

Connie Freeman (1995) in Seven Deadly Sins of OD Consulting: Pitfalls to Avoid in the Consulting Practice outlines some of the mistakes that consultants, new and old, make and advises them to avoid the following: flight to nowhere, one size fits all, the consultant as surrogate leader, dealing with symptoms rather than causes, and several other approaches. Embedded in the ways to avoid these pitfalls are skills for data collection, analysis, and presentation; meeting design and facilitation; idea generation, option development, and decision making.

The Core Skills Needed in Consulting on Process Issues

So far, the focus has been on the consulting process. In a different order, those same words have a very different meaning: consulting on process issues, or process consulting. In the consulting role, an HR Business Partner can add value by observing and intervening on process issues in a group. Most groups are competent on the technical issues of their work, but, unless trained in the behavioral sciences, they may be blind to their own process issues and ineffective patterns. These require an outsider’s perspective and a specialist’s training in process observation and intervention.

Some of the best thinking in the field on process consulting has been done by Edgar Schein (Process Consultation, 1969; Process Consultation Revisited, 1999). In his 2002 Notes Toward a Better Understanding of Process: An Essay, Schein defines process as "not the what, but the how. It is not the final decision made by a group or individual, but the way in which that decision was reached. It is not the formal structure of the organization, but the actual behaviors that occur within that structure, what sociologists might call the ‘informal organization.’ He goes on to describe the essence of process," as

• the sequence of events,

• the interactions among components,

• the invisible forces at play,

• those things that lead toward an intervention, and

• evolving and changing as they are scaled up from the intra-personal to inter-personal to group to whole system

The job of the process consultant is to look for those invisible forces at play and skillfully to call them to the attention of the group. In her classic essay, The Consultant as Process Leader, Jane Moosbruker (1989) notes that groups invariably find it hard to look at their own process issues. "After a few process observations, the group would return to the content, often without knowing that that had happened. Trying to keep the focus on process, my agenda, not theirs, was often exhausting." Well over two decades old now, Moosbruker’s chapter has a still-excellent list of interventions for the process leader. She also has a comprehensive list of things not to do as a process facilitator.

The Client-Consultant Relationship

The client-consultant relationship is both interesting and complex. Since each situation is different, the consultant could be working on their 20th or 200th RACI chart or SWOT diagram, but the dynamics and group process issues are completely unique to the setting, people, and personalities of those gathered around the table.

The client-consultant relationship is complex in several ways. Regardless of the problem described, clients present some combination of author, director, and main character in the saga, but they often see themselves as bit players. Clients are also the owners of the problem and are both central in the framing of the problem and in recognizing the factors in the solution. It is a challenge to create the kind of relationship with the client that enables exploring this complexity. The consultant needs to build enough trust and self-disclosure to help the client endure the level of feedback and self-reflection needed to see their own roles in the problem.

Consultants hope to be The Trusted Advisor (Maister, Green, & Galford, 2000) with clients who

seek out your views and advice . . . accept and act on at least some of your recommendations, involve you in more complex, strategic issues, share more information that helps you help them, protect you when you need it, even from those in their own organization, Involve you early on when their issues begin to form, rather than later in the process, trust your instincts. (pp. 3-4)

Meanwhile, clients are looking for consultants who seem to understand them effortlessly; are consistent and truthful; always help them see things from fresh perspectives, but do not force things on them; do not panic; help clients think and clarify logic and emotions; criticize and correct gently and lovingly, but do not pull their punches; act like a real person rather than someone in a role; can be relied upon to support them and have their interests at heart; and remember everything they have ever said with or without notes. (Maister, et al, 2000, pp. 4-5)

As can be seen, the client-consultant relationship is more than just a goods-for-service exchange. There are often intense and personal feelings, in both directions. Both parties have personal and interpersonal needs that are at play.