It’s their idea, and the company didn’t have a process in place to let them present it except through your consulting engagement. Sure, if it’s a good outcome for the employee to work with you to get things implemented fine, but it still stings a bit that someone from the outside was trusted more than an invested employee before any traction occurred.
See also: “let’s hire a consulting firm to recommend an operating model to us.” (Often before we’ve asked our own employees)
I understand that, as the employee whose ideas have gone unheard, this whole situation may be perceived as a ridiculous waste of time and money. Sometimes it actually is. It might be management's own inability to discern good ideas from bad, a poor understanding of the business or technology problems they face, the solutions available on the market, or lack of trust in their own staff.
More often it's simply managers looking for a broader perspective from an outsider who has engaged other organizations with similar business and technology problems. I start with the understanding that they're sincerely looking to do the right thing until they give me reason to believe otherwise.
Do you have any recommendations on resources/articles/books, either for "rank and file" trying to ensure their messages are framed well, or for consultants or others who find themselves in situations helping ideas to cut through the noise?
I'll share one that I've found incredibly helpful in the past: "Never Split The Difference" by Chris Voss https://www.amazon.com/dp/B014DUR7L2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
It doesn’t matter that the $3M advice is given by someone barely more than an undergraduate. McKinsey wouldn’t still be a company if they fucked people over like that would they? (hint: They would)
The OP’s point about morale impact,however, still stands regardless of a consultant’s intentions, I think. Further, the fact that shorter engagement consultants will not really understand your org even with outside experience which is hugely exasperating for “human capital”, “change management” or “just do X” IT improvement decks.
So many organizations go straight to the outside instead of trying to establish some healthy internal dialog around improvement. To me this is an anti-pattern, and happens to be hugely profitable for consultancies.
Speaking as a consultant, my experience has been the opposite. I have walked into many organizations, said <obviously good thing>, and been hailed as a hero by the handful of folks who had been saying <obviously good thing> all along because FINALLY someone gets it! These are people who have been killing themselves in the trenches fighting this fight forever. When you finally show up and resolve it it's like the Army of the Dead in Return of the King. Fight's over, you can go bask in your "told you so" afterglow now.
It also turns out that most of the time, those people may have been smart enough to get <obviously good thing>, but were pretty bad at communicating the value of <obviously good thing> to anyone who mattered or at making a plan for how to get from <bad thing> to <obviously good thing>.
All of this is not to credit McKinsey or any of big consulting. They mostly provide a "signature method" to launder your your obvious observations into a glitzy powerpoint presentation to make it look like you applied rigorous testing and experience to what was really a cursory observation your entry level analyst made. All the people with actual experience are too busy killing themselves at business development and facilitating this "observation laundering" process to apply their brain power to developing actual insights.
There is nothing stupid or evil about how "organization" behaves. It's exactly same as the society we all live in, just at a smaller scale. When you are in the position to make the call, you see that someone's idea may be as good as someone else's idea. How do you decide which idea is right? Do you choose one and fire the other with another idea? What happens when a wrong decision is made? This is the exactly reason why CEO or executives make compromises. They have responsibility to make sure that the organization survives no matter which scenario pans out. Junior staff often don't understand this because they can always move onto another opportunity when things collapse. As their career progresses, they also come to understand that you can't torch the field just because you don't like the crop growing there - it's much harder to find fertile land to begin with.
As people move up they either still know the business or they don't. Not trusting the people whom are running the actual business is IMO terrible.
The COO at the company I work for (recently left) could describe the daily work in detail. He could have conversations with any recently hired staff, various level of management, but also with the board, investors and customers. Lastly, he (amazingly) knew all the people he worked with before. No matter if that person 10+ years later is still in the same position (or not).
IMO having a good network, being able to communicate with various levels is highly beneficial. Your post seems to suggest some staff should not be taken seriously. That's utterly weird to me.
> How do you decide which idea is right?
From your post it seems one of the options is not to listen to staff. Further, junior staff won't gain experience if you do not let them develop.
> They have responsibility to make sure that the organization survives no matter which scenario pans out.
For one, why isn't this explained? Secondly, some decisions are bad without actually going into it any further. Then multiple years are wasted while everyone involved knew this from the start; they were just not listened to.
IMO regarding "scenario pans out": for some cases it's entirely true. But also sometimes it's not the case at all... just nobody listened to the people running the business and too much disconnect.
Ironically the situation is exacerbated leaving the person exasperated.
When HN "published" your letter to the editor, it's not printed on atoms and distributed all over town, or mailed out to subscribers.
You can post a comment, edit it, and maybe even fix something based on feedback. I suggest that without being completely slipshod, it's better to go ahead and make a comment when you have a coherent thought.
The community will help you sort out any spelling, grammar, or attribution hiccups. I think this is a good thing for everyone, reducing friction and eliminating even self-gate-keeping.
Mixing up two homophones is not a tragedy. Someone not contributing because they fear that they'll be snubbed for getting a word wron? That's a tragedy.
JM2C, &c.
And this was with a DR who stuck up for me and mentioned to the CEO directly that we paid a consultancy big bucks to tell us something a chorus of engineering team members have been saying for years.
The consultants aren't the ones taking the money home, the firm is. So don't blame the 23 year old. He or she is honestly just doing their insane best to pay off their huge student loans.
The flip side is that it is also bad for morale for someone to be recommending a solution for some time, the recommendation is ignored, a consultant is hired, the consultant recommends the same solution, and then the recommendation is implemented. This is exacerbated when the consultant's fee is some large percent or maybe even a multiple of the salary of the person who originally recommended the solution. It makes the original employee feel worthless and doubt the leadership's ability to properly evaluate solutions.