In the previous edition of Acumen, Dr. Jefferson Yu-Jen Chen explored the idea of 'the leader as a master consultant', highlighting how students in the GIBS MBA consulting stream have benefited from bridging academic theories with the process of developing and applying effective consulting toolkits in an interdisciplinary way.
Chen suggests various consulting skills and mindsets leaders can embrace to add value within their organisation. Based on this idea, it makes sense that employees could also benefit from tapping into these consulting 'toolkits'.
Eli Golovey, head of supply chain services at Nando’s, previously worked in management consulting. He is part of the GIBS MBA consulting team as a mentor, supervisor and assignment marker and believes there’s merit in this idea.
He says consultants tend to have a good work ethic, partially due to a heavy workload, and are skilled at pushing past the status quo to get to the root cause of issues, involving asking difficult questions required to do so, and seeing things through a lens of value creation.
“Consultants only make money if they deliver value to clients,” he says. “Because you're constantly solving problems, you tend to take that lens into the businesses in which you operate, which means you tend to push harder. You operate by looking at the bigger picture and asking whether this makes sense for the business or not. Good consulting entails looking beyond processes that work and interrogating further if the process is right and or if it could be made better.”
Jodi Scholtz, lead administrator at the South African Bureau of Standards (SABS), agrees that businesses can benefit from hiring employees with consulting experience, or cultivating consulting skills internally.
“Consulting comprises a range of skills that are applicable within all organisations,” she says. “Within the SABS, skills like creative thinking, collaborating across functions and solving wicked problems are just a few examples of consulting skills that have been used as part of our turnaround strategy. SABS, while a state-owned entity, also has a commercial mandate, so training employees in the tools of consulting will reap benefits as we need to transition from being a reactive institution that relies on work to come to us, to actively going out to hunt for new business. Consulting skills would definitely be used in bringing in new business, reshaping existing processes to identify new opportunities and to retain existing customers. Consulting also acts as a cornerstone of a new culture, which underpins the financial turnaround.”
The intrapreneurial aspect
Investopedia defines intrapreneurship as “a system that allows an employee to act like an entrepreneur within a company or other organisation. Intrapreneurs are self-motivated, proactive, and action-oriented people who take the initiative to pursue an innovative product or service.”
Golovey says consultants and successful entrepreneurs share a key quality of adaptability. This is increasingly important in business as the rate of change in organisations has increased rapidly in recent years (even before Covid, which increased acceleration even further). “Intrapreneurship is about gauging what is happening in the marketplace and adapting,” he says.
According to Scholtz, leadership plays a central role in demonstrating intrapreneurial skills. “Leaders should actively encourage people to walk towards their discomfort,” she says. “Additionally, the organisational narrative must support the need for each person to think and act like the organisation is their own business. Covid has really had a massive economic impact on companies. A different approach, with different skills, is needed. Infusing intrapreneurial skills into an organisation creates new impetus and can assist from a new business perspective.”
Training and deploying intrapreneurial consultants
Consulting skills could be taught through an internal consulting programme, Golovey suggests. “Or, maybe it's through the type of leadership that you give individuals and the mandate and license that you give them,” he muses.
Either way, he says it’s important to balance empowerment with boundaries. “You need to create an area in which people are able to behave like consultants and maybe some context of when it's not appropriate,” he says. “Thinking like a consultant in general is a good thing. But, like all tools in the toolbox, it's not appropriate in every situation. Finding balance is important, as is creating a common purpose amongst everybody that has this this way of thinking. You need to ensure they’re all solving the same problem. One of the biggest dangers is everybody having a different view of what the end goal is. That'll create an enormous amount of tension within the organisation or between your consultants because they'll all advocate for their solution based on what they think is right.”
Scholtz adds that to see the benefits of cultivating intrapreneurial consultants, there needs to be a critical mass of employees with these consulting skills to integrate across functional areas.
“Embedding these consulting or intrapreneurial skills across the organisation would add more value than limiting it to an area,” she says. “Bringing in intrapreneurial skills into one area only would just frustrate those employees – it’s got to be an organisation-wide approach.”
Golovey suggests intrapreneurial consultants would add most value at the key pressure points in an organisation. “For example, if you are a large manufacturing organisation, placing these resources on the shop floor might not be the best way to utilise as it is a repetitive task. Perhaps the most valuable place might be in R&D, or in strategy.”
Internal vs. external
Cultivating intrapreneurial consultants doesn’t necessarily negate the value of external consultants, Scholtz says. They can work well in tandem.
“An example of how this has worked at SABS was when SABS hired a financial turnaround specialist to coach the leadership team on how to develop and implement a turnaround strategy. Each executive had to undergo a 360-degree assessment on skills that high-performing individuals possess to determine where their skills were and to what extent these skills were visible within the SABS,” she says.
“Our next step was individual coaching, and this process was then cascaded to the next management layer and this is where we saw the most tangible results. People who had been with SABS for more than 20 years were now advocating and internalising the rationale for the turnaround and also understood how their direct role and function contributed to the profitability and productivity within SABS.
"Having this external consultant as the guiding force supporting leadership was a very effective way of empowering the executive team with a new set of skills, as well as support when things did not go as planned. This enabled us to learn a set of new tools and techniques that we applied as part of our key performance areas and reporting. This led us to make mistakes, quickly correct, and continually lead SABS through the turnaround. Our financial reporting strengthened immensely and we were able to look at areas within the business differently and then apply strategies to correct.”
Scholtz believes that through training employees in intrapreneurial skills, organisations are able to embed an ethos of continuous improvement.
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