Struggle to understand partners' expectations?
You worked on the problem only to find out later that it was the wrong one. All this hard work was for nothing, just wasted time. The feeling of embarrassment is overwhelming.
Imagine a situation. Your partner asked you to do a task. You did exactly what he asked. But apparently that was completely different from what he expected.
Ouch! Embarrassing!
I know this feeling very well. It’s a nasty mistake.
It kills your productivity. You waste valuable time. Now you have to redo the same task. You could have spent that time on something important.
You damage your reputation. Partners start questioning your basic cognitive abilities. That’s how you destroy their trust in you.
As a result, you destroy your confidence. You start questioning every decision, making your work painstakingly slow.
But why does it happen?
Well, it happens because consultants don’t ask clarifying questions to understand their partners’ expectations.
They accept tasks like soldiers: “Sir, yes, sir!”
They think that their job is to execute every partner’s wish without any challenge or thinking.
On top of that, they don’t want to look stupid. They don’t want to annoy their partners. They believe that good consultants don’t ask questions. They must know everything already. Or they simply don’t have enough confidence.
But if you think about it, the majority of your mistakes happen at this single point in time: accepting tasks. Then, if you don’t understand the problem or don’t know the right context, everything else you do downstream is just a waste of time.
And that’s why consultants do so much rework and so many iterations.
Imagine if you could solve this problem.
If you can better understand what your partners want. So you can meet their expectations and go beyond them. You can impress them. And at the same time, you save a lot of time by not doing stupid iterations.
Your performance as a consultant will dramatically improve.
Just think about it. So many mistakes will be eliminated even before they originate. The best problem is the one that was prevented.
Please, understand this important message:
Accepting tasks well and understanding leadership expectations is arguably the most impactful skill you can learn to dramatically improve your productivity and the quality of your outputs.
Become a person who doesn’t accept stupid or unclear tasks. Build confidence and skill proficiency to clarify your partners’ expectations. Let’s discuss how you can do it.
The recipe is fairly simple, but quite hard to execute well.
Push to better understand leadership expectations.
↦ Ask clarifying questions
↦ Clarify unclear points
↦ Play back your understanding
↦ Share your own ideas
↦ Align on your approach and outputs
Let’s deep dive into that more.
Ambiguous vs Precise Tasks
First, it’s helpful to identify what kind of task you are accepting.
An ambiguous task is when partners ask you something they don’t know they want.
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.’
A mistake here would be trying to over-clarify the task. The more questions you ask, the more you annoy your partners. You will make them feel stupid because they have no idea what they want. They won’t like it, and snap at you.
But as a minimum, ensure a basic understanding of the task. Playback what you have understood.
You can 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?’
A Precise Task is when your partners know exactly what they want from you.
You can recognize this by the precise language they use. They will use a suggestive tone. They will discuss details, such as layout and messages.
Here’s the thing. Partners think in slides. Most likely, they already have a slide drawn in their heads. And if you don’t know what it is, your chances of delivering a good output are close to zero.
If you produce a different slide, it will trigger a negative reaction from your partner because it’s not what they expected.
In this situation, your priority is to extract all these precise expectations as much as you can.
What about time constraints?
Yes, partners are super busy.
And consultants feel immense pressure to accept tasks fast. They feel they don’t have the right to ask any questions.
But you need to understand one important thing. Ultimately, it’s in your partners’ best interest for you to better understand their expectations. This way you won’t waste their time redoing your work.
Sometimes they might not understand it in the moment. But you need to softly but firmly assert your position. In a way, when accepting tasks well, you serve their best interests as well, even if they don’t understand it.
It’s better to feel slightly uncomfortable in the moment of accepting tasks, even if your partners become slightly annoyed, than to look stupid later when you produce something completely wrong.
The best way to do it is to make your conversations more engaging, so that partners actually feel that the conversation is adding value.
Interrogating vs Engaging
Most consultants use only closed-ended questions to get the information.
But to partners on the receiving end, it doesn’t feel right. They feel interrogated and become defensive.
Instead, you need to run it like an impromptu problem-solving session. You offer your ideas, they add their ideas on top, and you add more of your ideas. So back and forth a few times.
That’s when partners feel that talking to you was not a waste of time. And sometimes they may push the next meeting just to talk to you more.
So, essentially, to deal with time pressure, you don’t do it faster. You do it more engaging and valuable.
What information do you need to get?
Basically, for every task you need an absolute minimum of information: WHY, WHAT, and WHEN.
1. WHY you are doing this task
You might be surprised, but many consultants don’t ask why they are asked to do something.
By not asking the WHY question, you reduce yourself to a mere executive assistant, not a business problem solver.
You also deprive yourself of solving the problem most effectively. You might have better information than your leaders and can come up with better solutions.
2. WHAT you must produce
The WHAT questions are the trickiest.
If you ask, “What should I do?” you will trigger your leaders and get an answer: “Why do you ask me this question? It’s your job to figure it out.” That’s when they snap and get all snarky.
Instead, you should ask about specific expectations. You can’t know what those expectations are. So you can phrase your questions something like this:
“Thank you! I think I understood what you need. But could you let me know if you have any specific expectations?”
If you create space for your leaders to speak, they will likely spill the beans.
3. WHEN to deliver
You need when questions to understand the exact timeline. So you can produce your outputs not too early, not too late.
When questions are easier to ask. They are not triggering. It’s clear that you can’t know their timeline and deadline.
The best question to ask here is “When do you need it?” That’s when you get the exact timeline, not just the hard deadline, but any other interim checks in between.
These rules are not too 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 accept tasks that you don’t fully understand.
Give yourself a chance to win in this game.
But how to practice it?
It’s one of those skills that is really hard to learn.
In real-life situations with partners, you just don’t have time to practice new things. Under pressure, you fall back to old behavior.
That is why, in my Coaching Program, we role-play these situations.
I play the role of an AP. My clients play themselves as consultants.
I give them a task. I purposely withhold all the critical information. And the consultants need to extract this information from me.
They practice in a risk-free environment. They don’t have the pressure of limited time. And I don’t behave toxically.
So for the first time, they can do it in a perfect way. Once they practice the right skills the way they should be, they can start implementing them in real life, piece by piece.
And we use every opportunity to practice this important skill. Basically, we do it for every practice exercise that we have in the program.
Because consultants really acquire this skill only through repetition and can effectively apply it in their day-to-day jobs.
To make the learning even richer and more effective, I share videos of perfect performance of accepting the same tasks by other consultants. So you can see how this skill can be executed at its best. You see what great actually looks like. We exclude the guesswork from learning.
And it just hits consultants differently when they see fellow consultants do these skills at best practice. That’s when it really clicks for consultants.
If you are an MBB consultant and want to radically improve your productivity and performance, I want to talk to you and discuss how I can help through my coaching program.
BOOK A FREE 1-1 CONSULTATION CALL
We will discuss your pain points, challenges, and aspirations. No strings attached, just straight answers to your biggest questions.
If you want to learn more about my coaching program, read this post:
The coaching program for MBB consultants.