Eliminate Work Waste

Imagine you find out that you worked on the wrong question. All this hard work is for nothing, wasted time. The feeling of embarrassment is overwhelming.

Sounds familiar?

It happens to everyone.

This is a very bad mistake. It turns productivity to zero, if not negative.

It damages reputations. The leadership begins to question consultants’ basic cognitive ability.

It destroys leadership trust. Once you lose it, recovering is almost impossible.

It destroys self-confidence. Consultants get disappointed in themselves and start questioning every decision, making work a nightmare.

Consultants hesitate to ask clarifying questions to probe for more information.

They don't have enough confidence.

They don't want to look stupid.

They don't want to annoy leadership.

But every time this happens, they make a simple trade-off.

Do you want to feel uncomfortable now or look stupid later?

Let's learn how to accept tasks well to understand leadership expectations better.

1. New Hires vs Tenured Consultants

There are two different situations why this is happening.

This depends on the tenure of consultants.

1.1. New Hires

For new hires, it is normal not to understand what they are asked to do.

For example, in the first 2-3 months, I had no idea what was happening around me. All this consulting talk sounded gibberish to me, and the pace of everything was too fast to comprehend.

Consulting firms are peculiar in how they work and speak. Their methods completely differ from the normal ways of doing things in the industry.

New hires don't understand it, not because they are not smart. But because it is a new language, they need to learn. It is only normal to expect people not to understand a new language.

Leadership may forget how difficult it is to understand all this consulting lingo. They should be more patient and understanding. And if they get snappy, try to use humor and remind them that you are still learning the ropes.

1.2. Tenured Consultants

High-tenured consultants still make these basic mistakes.

If you recognize yourself in this situation, remember how often this has happened and how much cumulative time has been wasted.

What if this time was spent doing other, more important things? Overdelivering instead of trying merely to keep up with the existing workload.

This gap most likely occurred due to a lack of apprenticeship and coaching. Nobody explained its mechanics, why it was damaging, and what to do.

A more complex situation is when consultants don’t know they have this problem.

They bring their outputs to leadership and consistently get rejected or reworked.

Consultants think this is how the iterative process works: it is the necessary evil. Nothing serious. They do another iteration after another. They spend a disproportionate amount of time on simple things and then don't have time to overdeliver.

This might be the root cause of their inability to accelerate their development. That one single thing can hold them back.

This gap needs to be fixed as soon as possible. It is a bleeding wound.

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If you are an MBB consultant and want to improve your slide-making process and achieve high performance, book a free 1-1 consultation to discuss how exactly I can help you. There is no commitment, and you can ask me any burning questions you might have.

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2. A Simple Solution

You know that high performers are the most difficult people to assign tasks to. They challenge leadership during task acceptance so they can deliver outstanding outputs.

Over time, you need to get into a position where you don’t accept stupid or unclear tasks. Build that confidence and experience to filter it out.

For now, the recipe is simple.

Don't accept tasks if you don't understand them.

Ask questions. Clarify unclear points. Playback your understanding. Spell out your plan of attack.

Easier to say than do. It requires practice. There are more nuances to that.

Let’s deep dive into that.

3. Two Types of Tasks

For simplicity, there are two different types of tasks. Each of them requires different treatment.

3.1. An Ambiguous Question

Quite often, leadership will ask you to do something that they have no idea what it is.

You should recognize it by the vague language they use. They ask you to 'look into things,' 'research it'’ and 'come back with some ideas.'

This is a normal situation. This happens all the time.

A mistake here would be trying to clarify the task further. The more you ask questions, the more you annoy your leadership. You will make them feel stupid because they have no idea.

They see it as your job to figure out what it is and come back with your perspective.

But ensure a basic understanding of the task. Playback what you have understood. Say something like: 'This is a new topic we must explore. You want me to look into it and come back with a few options for approaching it. Right?'

Ideally, you need them to acknowledge that it is an ambiguous question. And output here can be anything. And they can’t expect a specific slide.

If they do that, even subconsciously, later, it will be hard to pretend that they expected something else.

If you get confirmation, then you can start working on it.

In this situation, it is important not to over-invest in something that nobody knows what it is.

Invest a maximum of 1-2 hours into that. Do high-level research. Structure the problem and your approach. Then, come back with suggestions on how to proceed, where you want to go and invest more time, and what next-level outputs they can expect.

This first alignment will be crucial. Very often, your manager will say, "Oh, this sounds too complicated, let's kill it'. And you stop doing this random task—the best outcome.

3.2. A Precise Task

There is another situation when your leadership is asking for a very specific task to do.

You can recognize this by the very specific language they use. They will discuss specifics, such as what graphical elements should be used and what key messages should be written.

Experienced managers think in slides. I guarantee they already have a slide in mind of what they want. The more specific their language, the more precise their picture is in mind.

And if you don't know what it is, your chances of delivering a good output are close to zero.

You can make a decent slide, but it may have a different layout, such as horizontal rows instead of vertical columns.

This alone will trigger a cringe reaction from the manager because it's not what they already expect, and you were not listening properly.

I know it sounds unfair. But we are all humans. React emotionally, even if it doesn’t make sense rationally.

In this situation, your priority is to extract all these ideas from your manager.

The less you know your manager and their working preferences, the more diligent you must be in extracting their ideas and expectations.

You must entice your manager to sketch it on a paper or whiteboard. This will ensure that you fully understand what they have in mind. Then, you can focus on adding value and making it even better.

If you feel your manager is impatient in drawing a slide, grab a pen and try to draw yourself what they are saying. Probe each graphical element and ensure you understand the layout and messages well.

If this is a killer slide, you must spend extra time understanding their ideas.

If managers get annoyed with this approach, you can turn it into a joke and say, "Hey, I can see that you have something specific in mind. Let me understand it correctly to do the best job here."

This phrase will snap your manager out of this frustrated mindset. And they will appreciate your diligence and use of a sharp playbook.

4. A Simple Algorithm

A simple sequence of actions ensures that new hires can catch potential mistakes early in the process.

This will not work for more tenured colleagues as it will come across as too high-touch and needy. Please use it with discretion.

4.1. Clarify Task at the Time of Acceptance

Try to clarify the task at the time of acceptance. We covered this step in length in the text above.

The best approach here is to playback and paraphrase your understanding. It reduces mistakes and gives others reassurance that you listen and understand them.

I can’t recommend it enough. This is a superpower in communication.

4.2. Align Quick Outputs

Many new hires make simple mistakes when selecting an approach to execute their tasks. It can be as simple as choosing a layout for a slide. Or how to go about collecting data and speaking with clients.

Their instinct tells them to 'boil the ocean.'’ They can’t imagine that the easier they solve the task, the better it is for everyone. They don't know how to work in an 80/20 way yet.

This step is dedicated to preventing them from doing it.

Once they accept a task, they need to respond quickly. They should work on a task for no more than 30 minutes, draft something on paper, and then return to their manager to align on approach and slide layout.

A short timeline reduces expectations of outputs. This allows them to bring something quick and dirty. A full-fledged quality slide is expected if they delay for 2-3 hours.

Important note: This step is only applicable to new hires. It would annoy leadership if tenured colleagues did this for every slide.

4.3. First Good Iteration

The next step is to spend 2-3 hours doing the first iteration.

It should be a true MLP (Minimal Lovable Product) output. Clean, well-structured, and well-written.

No visual noise, stickers, placeholders, and mistakes. I wrote about this in the post - How to create great slides.

I used to do one trick that helped me shorten problem-solving timelines. I'd send a screenshot of my first version to my manager via Slack, asking if this was going in the right direction.

Managers spend lots of time on calls. Often, they listen in and can do some work in the background. They can quickly glance over your slides and text you a few early inputs.

That's how you make it faster and more precise, not waiting until they get free in the late evening after back-to-back calls.

These rules are not strict. Once you understand basic principles, with practice, you'll learn to combine them and use them fluently.

The important thing is that you don't allow yourself to accept tasks you don't understand. Think about it as a pipeline. The earlier you catch a potential mistake, the better your productivity will be.

Give yourself a chance to win in this game.

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If you are an MBB consultant and want to achieve high performance, I would like to speak with you.

Book a Free 1-1 Consultation to discuss whether I can help you through my unique coaching program and playbook. There is no commitment, and you can ask me any burning questions you might have.

Read this post to learn more about the Hero’s Journey coaching program.

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