Successful Consulting Skills

How To Use Your Expertise To Help Others

You’re an expert in your field. You have knowledge and skills which you’ve built up through years of experience.

Now, people have started asking you for advice. They have a problem and they think you can help them to fix it.

Congratulations - you’ve just become a consultant!

What do consultants do?

They’re essentially problem solvers. They use their expertise, their knowledge and experience, to help others.

You may have been doing this informally for many years, just giving people a hand when they needed help. Just listening and giving a bit of advice.

But now it’s actually part of your job description andyou need to make sure you have the skills to do it really well - in all sorts of situations, with all sorts of people.

Because being a successful consultant involves developing a new set of skills, which may be quite different to the ones you’ve developed in other areas of your work.

You need to be able to:

• help people to recognise what the key issues are that they need to address ( because sometimes they can’t see the wood for the trees )
• evaluate and set out their options for them
• help them to identify appropriate solutions
• give clear and relevant advice
• persuade and influence key people to take the necessary actions
• help them implement the solutions ( “ solutions “ is an important bit of consulting jargon, by the way, you need to practice saying it regularly )

Above all, you need to be able to think on your feet – because you never know what you’re going to be faced with when you go to speak to someone.

And you also need to build rapport with people quickly so that they trust you and are willing to listen to you and work with you.

No problem!

This Successful Consulting Skills workshop is just what you need.

It will show you how to:

• ask the right questions to draw out vital information
• apply a simple coaching model to help people to be clearer about what they want to achieve
• listen carefully – to what’s said and to how it’s said, to “ read between the lines “ of what people tell you
• identify, and deal with, the numerous barriers to effective listening ( don’t underestimate this - one of the most common faults of many consultants is that they don’t listen well enough )
• follow the “ consulting sequence “ to make sure you keep on track and don’t confuse matters ( another common mistake is doing things in the wrong order, e.g. jumping in and giving advice at the wrong time )
• recognise another person’s communication style ( and your own ) and adapt accordingly to build rapport and communicate more effectively
• use a range of problem – solving techniques to evaluate ideas and choose an appropriate solution ( there, I said it again )