The Batman trap: when helping isn't helping
Your ideal form of influence is first to help people see their world more clearly, and then to let them decide what to do next.
—Jerry Weinberg, “Secrets of Consulting”
Let’s suppose you’re a self-driving person, and you want to run your own independent business. You’ve practised the secret consultant’s mindset as an employee, and now you’re ready to consultate for real. What does that look like?
What is consulting?
As the name suggests, being a consultant means your primary role is to give advice. You may also do some hands-on work for the client, such as programming, but that’s an optional extra. What you’re there for is to know things, not necessarily to do things.
This distinguishes a consultant from a contractor, whose primary task is to do hands-on work. Generally speaking, the client tells a contractor what to do, whereas a consultant tells the client what to do.
But it’s a blurry line, and you may find yourself on both sides of it with the same client. Indeed, what you think a consultant does is much less relevant than what the client expects a consultant to do.
Four ways to help
As I write in my new guide to consulting and independent working, Master of Your Domain, clients may approach you looking for one or more of the following kinds of help:
System builder. The client has a requirement for a specific system, application, or service. They want you to build it, train them on how to use it, and perhaps maintain and support it over time.
Problem solver. The client has a specific issue that they don’t have the knowledge or resources to fix, and that’s where you come in. You may be fixing the problem yourself, or training other people to fix it, or both.
Problem finder. The client knows they have problems (that’s always true), but they don’t know exactly what they are. Your job is to find out what’s wrong, and help fix it.
Hired hand. The client knows what needs to be done, they just don’t have the time or resources to do it. Your role is to execute the tasks they give you.
Understanding exactly which of these the client is looking for is important, but it doesn’t mean that your engagement will be limited to just that one aspect of consulting.
Instead, you’ll probably find that what most clients need is some combination of these four things, whether they’re aware of the fact or not. Whatever you’ve been asked to do, your work as a consultant is partly to figure out what else the client really needs, and do that, too.
Three things you know
Still, it’s worth remembering that your primary value to clients is that you know something they don’t. If that’s not true, then you can’t do much for them. Your valuable knowledge falls into three main categories:
What to do. It’s very unlikely that the client has a problem that no one’s ever seen before. It’s probably been seen and solved many times, and you can guide them to the most appropriate solution.
What not to do. The client knows they are in dangerous waters, but they don’t know what specifically to beware of. With your help, the client can steer clear of the worst hazards.
Unknown unknowns. You can spot problems the client may not even know they have, or trouble they might be inadvertently storing up for the future.
One important thing you don’t always know, however, is what the client’s problem actually is. That’s because the problem they initially present to you may not be the one that really needs solving.
Always respond, not with an answer, but with a question: “What problem are you really trying to solve?” If the answer still sounds like a solution, instead of a problem, then keep asking.
The consultant’s job is not merely to give the client what they want, but to convince them to want the right thing. You can only know what that is once you understand what problem they’re really trying to solve.
Listening
The mistake most novice consultants make is to start by fixing the problem. Anxious to show value, they give the client a huge info-dump about everything they need to change, fix, discard, introduce, or understand.
Your job, though, is to not to be the hero of the hour, bravely pulling victims from the flaming wreckage. That might feel very satisfying in the short term, but it won’t bring you much repeat business.
Instead, aim to be the client’s undercover success engineer, discreetly assisting them in just the right ways, and at the right moments, and letting them take all the credit for the resulting turnaround.
After all, they were smart enough to engage you in the first place, so in a way they do deserve the credit. It takes a wise person to know when to ask for help.
And there’s another reason to begin every engagement by listening more than you talk: you might learn something. The client has a much clearer idea of the problem than you do. After all, they’ve been thinking about it for a lot longer.
If you try to start by explaining the problem to them, then, the danger is that you’ll come across at best vague and woolly, and at worst completely wrong.
Instead, be open and receptive, invite them to give you as much context as possible about the situation, and turn your ears up to eleven for as long as it takes for them to tell you what you need to know.
At this point the client will probably be asking “What should we do?” Again, you’ll be tempted to jump right in and start dispensing your hard-won wisdom. But a more thoughtful consultant would ask instead “What have you tried up to now? And what happened?”
If the obvious answers had done the trick, you wouldn’t be here, so it’ll save time to eliminate these in advance. The client has probably already done a lot of work on the issue themselves, so use that as a head start.
Let them get there
When you do present a solution, don’t drop it on the client fully-formed like tablets of heaven. Show them the general direction, and then they can come with you on the journey.
The best way to get someone to buy into an idea is to let them have it themselves. In other words, lead the discussion gently up to a point where what the client needs to do becomes so obvious, they don’t need you to say it for them.
And when you let them be the one to put the idea into words, they’re already halfway on board. You can move on to developing the idea along the right sort of lines: “That sounds great, and then we could…”
Even if someone is against an idea to start with, if you can get them to contribute a tiny bit to it, you may be able to turn them into an enthusiastic advocate.
Underpromise and overdeliver
Be pessimistic about timescales. In this business, “pessimist” is simply what an optimist calls a realist. Everything takes longer than expected, even when we expect it to, because of Hofstadter’s Law. That’s straightforward, but the danger is that the client wants you to lie to them about how long the work will take.
I mean, they don’t want you to lie to them, but they’re extremely motivated to hear an encouraging answer. If you say “three weeks”, they might argue with you until you come up with something else. If you say “a week”, they’ll probably accept it.
Like every other consultant, I grappled with this problem too. When I told clients the work they wanted would take ten hours, they were grumpy, but when I delivered it in only nine hours all was forgiven. When I told them it would take five hours, but delivered it in nine, they were furious—and didn’t use me again.
Telling people what they want to hear is easier than telling them the truth, but it’s just setting yourself up for failure. Letting clients talk you into unachievable timescales is like giving sugar to cranky kids: it might keep them quiet for a little while, but sooner or later a full-scale meltdown is inevitable.
The Batman trap
Things are the way they are because they got that way.
—Jerry Weinberg, “Secrets of Consulting”
There’s a saying that amateurs fix the problem, while professionals fix the system. Solving the immediate pain points is nice, but they’ll probably recur in one form or another. Your real work is helping the client figure out why these issues arose in the first place, and prevent them from happening again.
If you find yourself fixing the same problem for the same client twice in a row, then you’re evidently not addressing the underlying issues. Figure out what the client is doing wrong that means they keep having this problem, and help them build a better system.
The “system” you’re fixing includes the people who work there. A consultant’s natural and creditable desire to be helpful can lead them into the “Batman trap”. This is when people don’t ever actually acquire the skills and knowledge they need to fix things that go wrong. Why would they need to? The consultant always fixes everything!
If you find that your client’s staff regularly send up the bat-signal to get your help dealing with low-level problems, this may also be a signal that you’ve become Batman. A city that has a caped crusader standing ready to deal with crime and disorder is a city that doesn’t have the skills to fix itself. Don’t train your clients to become Gotham.
Of course you want to be a useful consultant, and you will be, but sometimes the highest form of consultancy is “helping by not helping”. Give people the tools they need and show them what to do, but don’t keep turning the wrench for them.
When things break and someone shouts for help, resist the strong temptation to swoop in and save them. If Batman stops showing up for every little incident, people will eventually figure out how to handle them without him. And Batman can move to another city where they haven’t figured that out yet.
Consulting has its limits
Even when we trust and value someone very highly, we don’t always agree with everything they say. There’s only so much influence you can have with any given client, and only so much change that you can achieve for them. It’s important to know when you’ve reached that limit.
One way or another, most consulting engagements come to an end eventually, even when you’ve done everything right. There are always useful lessons to learn, and it’s wise to reflect on what went well and what you’d do differently if you had the chance. Indeed, we learn more from our failures than from our successes. “When you fall down,” as the saying goes, ”pick something up”.
If you’ve enjoyed this series, you might like my new book Master of Your Domain. It’s all about how to build and run your own business, whether that’s consulting, writing, teaching, or whatever you do best. You’ll learn how to market yourself, how to make and sell products, and how to find and delight customers. Happy Independence Day!
