Consulting during the Christmas holiday season often brings unique challenges and unexpected lessons, as highlighted by our hosts. They share memorable stories that reveal the importance of empathy and understanding within teams and towards clients during this busy time of year. From surprising gestures like allowing support staff to leave early for the holidays to navigating resource crunches with creative solutions, the discussions reflect on how small acts of kindness can have a lasting impact. The hosts also reminisce about their personal experiences, from chaotic flights to heartwarming holiday adventures, reminding us that the season is about connection and gratitude. As they reflect on these tales, they encourage listeners to appreciate the quieter heroes behind the scenes who help make the holiday season a little brighter for everyone.

Remember you can reach out to Ian and Mike to ask a question or share your thoughts - email them at consultingforhumans@p31-consulting.com

You can follow the show on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13116342/

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The Consulting For Humans podcast is brought to you by P31 Consulting LLC

Welcome luminaries.

Thanks for joining us and thank you for wanting to hear more about how the Christmas holiday season plays out sometimes for consultants.

As we were telling stories in the main episode about consulting adventures around Christmas holiday time, we realized that some of our best holiday stories also have a lesson for how we deal with ourselves, how we deal with our teams and our clients.

And those lessons might be useful not only at this time of year, but also all the year round.

So, Mike, let's get into it.

I think you had a story when we were talking before the session here, you had a story about just how people behave in the last days and hours before consulting teams and clients are due to head off for the holidays.

Yeah.

And I think that the magic comes from acting contrary to expectations.

Sometimes I think when all of our stories come to mind, it's oh, that additional grunge and burden right at holiday time.

But I remember one big surprise holiday when the leader, the project manager, dismissed the support team early the day before Christmas vacation.

This is back in the time people had actual office hours.

And when we weren't on client site, we had to be in the office to have plenty of FaceTime with each other.

And you know, it was just a determination.

That said, these are the folks who every year had to stay till the last hour when some of us could get out.

And we flipped it that time and we got a chance to have some of us stay, other folks to get home early to the families first time.

And that was a Christmas present for everybody.

It was for me.

I know.

Nice.

Very good.

So the support staff, the folks are normally in the office.

They get an earlier getaway.

I think that's very humane.

And we take it for granted.

Right.

Even if we're working very virtually these days, it's easy to take for granted that there are folks who keep the office turning over.

Yeah, it's their holiday too.

Well, Mike, you're right.

I was kind of racking my brains and thinking, well, I've got loads of stories of grimness like the partner who responds to the client RFP on Christmas Eve by going, yeah, of course we'll respond to this rfp.

We're going to write a proposal today.

Let's get to it.

And then passes the happy task down to the to the folks like me who are busy staying in to write this long proposal.

I've got quite a few stories like that.

I've also got some stories about how the year end resource crunch can affect everybody's mood.

I think it's sort of axiomatic these days that everybody says, oh, my gosh, quarter four, the fourth quarter of the year, it's going to be tough.

We're all going to have to work ridiculous schedules.

We're all going to have a really long list of work piled up for us to do at the end of the year, even with stuff that we've already committed to.

But I can remember a particular project that I worked on where we had that exactly that quarter four crunch.

There were a couple of work stages at the beginning of the project that were familiar to me.

There was the stage where the team was doing desk research and we were digging around looking for analytics that would help us and the client understand the situation that they were in.

And we then also had a program of primary research going out and doing research with subject matter experts.

And one of the cultural differences that you notice between the US And Europe, and our colleague Maffe was talking to us about this just the other day.

Americans, you can get an American subject matter expert on the phone anytime up to at least 3pm Christmas Eve, and they're normally back in the office again December 27th.

And you'll get them anytime.

For certain kinds of subject matter experts who live in what you might call Europe, it can be hard from mid December all the way up until the end of January.

And we were having a crunch exactly like that.

Well, actually, the desk research had gone really well.

And it was like the first week of December, and we were looking at this program of 10 expert interviews that we needed to get done.

And we'd said in the schedule that we would just kind of get it done.

And that we were faced with recruitment and organizing and fielding and writing up all of this research in the two and a half weeks remaining before the end of the business year.

And the idea surfaced that maybe we didn't need to do this primary research.

Maybe the desk research was already fine.

And then the idea surfaced that maybe we could take this to the client.

And I think of three or four people around the table discussing that.

I was the only one who leaned in and nodded at the idea.

Everybody else went, are you crazy?

Go and tell the client that you're going to skip something.

So we thought about it some more and we finally said, well, maybe we can go tell the client.

We've got such great findings, such great confidence coming out from our desk research program.

Maybe we don't need to bother ourselves, nor you, with all of the short run fieldwork that's coming up here.

Maybe we can save those consulting hours and save that budget and do something else with it later on in the project.

And we strategize for quite a while about when and whether and how to test this idea out with the client.

And it's one of my favorite stories because I get reminded of this anytime I'm thinking that I should maybe not ask the client for something, because we did ask the client for something.

We said, how about if we just take the desk research as it is right now, fold up the budget that we would have spent on the primary research into more useful things for later on in the project.

How would that be for you?

And the client said, that's a great idea.

So we got, I think, a little kudos from the client for having adapted our methodology a little bit.

We got kudos for ourselves for having rescued ourselves from a resource crunch right at the worst time of year.

And we got a little bit of Christmas cheer, a bit of Christmas motivation into the team's hearts in those last few days before Christmas as well.

And I thought that was a really great outcome.

I love that, Ian.

I love that.

I mean, it's fabulous when we start to take our own advice and apply some of our own approaches and techniques to ourselves, not just to our clients.

So that was great thinking.

It certainly, you know, do unto others as I would like to have it done unto me, if you will.

Too badly paraphrase that.

Yeah, I mean, we had another manager, another great Christmas story where they started early on and said, wait a minute, we always get to this year end.

Everybody is working on projects, they have deadlines, people having to man things there at the last minute.

And she started early and said, you know what, we've got stuff coming up and we've got holidays coming up, but not everybody's planning on doing the same thing.

And people have different priorities, people have different interests.

And we also had a very multicultural group.

And so it was clear that people needed different times.

Their 24th and 25th were meaningful to some people.

Other things were meaningful to others, including people were going, I don't really care about any of this.

I'd just like to have an ideal time to get to the Caribbean at, you know, reduce rates.

So, yeah, we actually started and discontinued on basically figuring out who would like to be there when and who could cross pollinate each other on projects, on work, on things that had to be done.

And people were now starting to almost bid to say, ooh, ooh, ooh, if I could get this week, I could do this.

Oh, actually, I've got this going on.

I really need to be here then.

And it turned out to be an absolute win win across the thing.

Instead of some people feeling they got left holding the bag at Christmas there.

Ah, that's great.

Now you and I, Mike, have, we've traveled to a lot of places.

Not very often, I've got to say to the Caribbean, but we've traveled to other places.

And lots of my memories of consulting and Christmas time include being in, you know, in, in pretty cities with snowfall and Christmas markets.

And I can remember you and I being in Central Europe one time.

Right.

And we had a particularly nice experience like that.

We did.

I'll never forget.

This was Warsaw, Poland.

You introduced me to one of the very best scotches I'd ever had.

Because nothing says Poland likes Scotch whisky.

Well, exactly, yeah, that's not it.

But what did say Poland was an evening almost candlelight.

It seemed like there was the snow falling, there were these gentle lights and one of our clients driving us around to see the real Poland and to hear stories from the history and to hear things about how the holidays were celebrated in addition to going to a local, not a touristy at all restaurant to have a very, very Polish meal at that holiday time.

And really for me anyway, and I think hearing tales from generations past, including some of that from World War II and what was happening and what was going on.

And it was, it was, it was just an historic holiday for me at a fabulous Christmas time.

I agree, it was great.

Warsaw is a really, really fascinating city with lots of very, very thought inspiring tales to tell.

And by the way, the food is great, especially in the winter because if you need warmth and high calories and delicious flavors, then Polish foods, your thing in December.

Mike, I can remember another beautiful European city, Copenhagen.

I remember being on the, what I was pretty sure was the last flight back to the UK from Copenhagen, Christmas Eve.

And I'd been with a client all day and it was like 8pm and the weather was terrible.

Really, really strong winds, gusting blizzards and the airlines were all still more or less running a schedule.

But I had climbed onto this airplane.

I think it was the last departure because the flights to the UK because of the time zone are quite often the last flights out of some of these airports.

And we climbed into this airplane and it had already been delayed and the storm was so bad that the whole aircraft was shaking on the air bridge, on the stand, the whole plane was shaking.

And we had watched two cabin attendants, it took two cabin attendants to make their first attempt to try and shut the cabin door.

Before they took the air bridge away, before they did that, one particular passenger said, hold on a second, this is nuts.

There's no way this plane is taking off.

I only have cabin baggage.

So he stands up, grabs his back and walks back up the air bridge off the plane, presumably to go find a hotel in Copenhagen to spend Christmas Eve somehow.

And the whole plane went silent like maybe that guy is tomorrow headlines.

Like, I was the only one who chose to get off the doomed Flight 456 from Copenhagen to London, whatever it was.

Anyway, big collective gulp.

Went all around the cabin.

It was fine.

The cabin attendants got the door closed.

It was as shaky as hell getting off the ground.

And for the first five minutes I thought the wings were going to come off the plane.

But then it was all fine.

We landed in London on time and everybody was safe.

And nobody else is telling that story anymore except me.

It's, that's fascinating because I was thinking back too and going, I had a very similar story, except I was the guy.

Oh wow.

I was the guy grabbing the luggage.

And it was again, if this wasn't the last flight out, but it was one of the last and get pretty late.

However, we had delay after delay with these little mechanical things and all this stuff, but now we're ready to go.

And I could was back in the day when you could sit up front and look through the open cabin door at the pilots and everybody's in there doing their last minute thing and as I happen to look up, one of the co pilots reaches up to the the dashboard and this arc of electricity jumps out and burns his hand physically, literally.

He yelps.

People are attending to him and flight attendant comes running in and then there's this quiet and an announcement that we're going to have maintenance back one more time.

Just one little thing to tidy up here before, before we take up take off.

And I just said, if you don't mind, quietly to the flight attendant, I've got my bag right here.

I have no checked luggage.

I believe I'm gonna stay.

I just thought, I don't want to be over the ocean when this thing arcs again.

Electrical issues just were not my bag then.

But again, like your story, I'm the only one telling that because they landed fine and they got home earlier.

But I felt just a little bit better that night.

I would too.

I would too.

And I think Mrs.

Schack would probably appreciate you doing that as well.

Yeah.

Good.

So, Mike, we talked about escaping from bad weather and we've talked about kind of Traditional European style snow and glu vine type Christmases.

There are other climates and other kinds of Christmas as well.

Right, right, well.

And it's funny, you never knew and you still never know where you're going to end up being around the holiday season and what kind of climate you're going to be in.

And I rem one Christmas, it was just before Christmas, for some reason they decided we need to have this specific industry conference right now.

And I got picked to be there and sent out and it was in Arizona and it was blazingly hot and they had all these pink metal Christmas trees.

And I was like, no, this is not getting me in the spirit at all.

And I think that the conference itself perhaps lacks some enthusiasm because of this closeness to the holiday.

And I, an accounting partner who I knew a little bit, kind of caught my eye from across the way in the midst of this conference and nodded to the hallway and I thought, hm, wonder what's up?

And I went out, he said, basically ascertain, are you getting as much or as little out of this as I am?

And I said yes.

And he said, I got an idea.

You want to go on an adventure?

And he took me, he was a pilot, as it turned out, and he had always wanted to fly a glider over the desert.

And yeah, I know, it's just what.

And so here we are hooked up and this plane takes off, pulls us behind, the two of us in the cockpit in this glider and we are for Christmas now doing, following these air spirals up and down across the desert before landing.

So I've got to say that was an early Christmas present and completely forgot about the metal trees and everything.

It was a great time.

Awesome, awesome.

Now the other thing that sometimes happens at around this corner of the year is that people are thinking about annual appraisal and I've been in the situation of, of receiving and giving out plenty of those at around this time of year.

And also receiving and giving out news about raises and promotions and bonuses and stuff.

I'll say one thing about the bonus season.

If it ends up being the same as Christmas season, it's never satisfactory.

I've sat in bars and conference rooms and coffee shops with people who've just received news that they've got enough bonus to put a deposit down on a house.

Also with people who've just received a news that they've got enough bonus to buy a pair of shoes and they're all more or less equally dissatisfied.

I've never met somebody looking at the check going, yeah, that's okay, I'm super happy now.

I'm going to work extra hard next year like that.

That never seems to happen for very understandable human reasons.

But I think that's.

I'm always happiest when that conversation is actually not happening right now, maybe happening in the first quarter of the calendar year rather than happening in around the season.

Because I think it's.

Yeah, it's a conversation that needs to happen in a particular way and we need to have a particular part of our brain switched on to deal with it.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I think back to an early time when we had just started and we were in our first first year.

Big ramp up of a global strategy and change practice inside of a larger corporation for which consulting was new.

So we had faced a number of times during that year the constraints of being a consulting group inside a corporation that did very different things.

And some of the HR policies, some various and sundry corporate guidelines just were not really conducive to consulting best practices.

Well, in this particular one, we had managed to carve out almost a secret existence and escape from a lot of that.

But we were growing so rapidly that we'd come to attention at the top and realized that we weren't necessarily following all the policies.

Well, one of the new ones that they wanted to apply to everyone that year and we got caught up in it was this idea of force ranking.

All employees had to be forced ranked.

So we had to get past this idea that 60% of our employees were the best of the best or something.

Well, in our case, all of the employees were actually the best of the best because we had just hired them to be that and people who weren't didn't stay very long.

So sitting there trying to figure out how do you explain to somebody who's always been one or two that they're.

On a scale of one to five, we've got to have some percentage of fives and some percentage of fours and some big percentage of threes and it's just wasn't going to work.

And these were, as you say, Ian, the kinds of people who not hitting that magic number would not go well with.

Yeah, we would not be having a pleasant conversation in the bar later.

We ended up having to appeal that all the way up the corporate train.

But while that was going on, our group's CFO had managed to figure out a way to work Christmas magic for everybody, regardless of the ranking which was tied to those year end bonuses.

He had found another way to make this happen.

So we eventually won our appeal.

But even before that, we were pleased to report there was no coal left in anyone's stocking that night.

Coal on this side of the pond being a bad thing.

Christmas stockings.

This is a really great time of year to try and summon a bit of gratitude for all the things that have happened through the year.

And you know what?

2024 hasn't been fabulous for everybody.

But there's one category of help that I'd like to remember to be grateful for, which is if there's somebody in your team who is the filter between you and the corporation, the filter between you and the person who dishes out the bonus checks, the person who's giving you top cover the way that your CFO did, I think that person gets a big thank you.

I can think of the one or two individuals who I know I've had cause to thank who just smoothed things over and just took care of all the bureaucracy and managed to make sure that the impact on us of some of these force ranking and comp decisions was at least a little bit moderated.

And it's a relatively thankless thing to try and do.

And it's a relatively unsung part of the job of managing a consulting firm which is looking after the compensation side of things.

And if you are trying to do a read across or trying to do a ranking or trying to help people get the news of their raises and bonuses and whatnot this year, then good on you.

And we hope that you get a big thank you from somebody.

Right.

Gosh.

Well, consultants.

It's sometimes undervalued, I think.

Sometimes not.

Only very occasionally.

Yeah, only very occasionally.

I do remember being a consultant who should have been undervalued, at least by my family, one holiday season, probably many holiday seasons, but one in particular where everything had completely consumed me to the point where I realized I really hadn't done anything to prepare.

All my clients were in great shape.

All their stockings were hung by the chimney with care and all that, but not for the folks at home.

And I had just gotten back in and I called one of my advisors, a travel advisor, who back in the day were real people who did really good consulting jobs and arranging everything and setting everything up.

And I was confessing my plight and going, is there anything, anything you could help me with?

And I was reminded, as this week, because she came up with a West Virginia resort with a special Christmas package that was just ideally suited to my young and growing family.

And it looked like I had pulled a rabbit out of the hat when everybody's expectations were very low that I might just show up to say, guess what?

Pack up.

Here's where we're going to spend Christmas.

I had.

I had a little bit forgotten about that.

And I was reading Eric Lawson's the Demon of Unrest, a historical review particularly pertinent right now back here at home.

But the name of this resort came up and I thought, oh, my gosh, that is where decades ago.

Wow.

You know, we spent a great Christmas and thanks to that consultant's consultant who really worked magic.

A Christmas miracle, if you will.

Fantastic.

Oh, Mike, that's a really, really great story.

Thank you.

So I think that's just about our show.

I think that we've learned a few things.

We've learned a few things about being grateful for the advice of folks.

We've learned a few things about planning and scope, creep and team, motivation and culture.

We're coming up to the time when we say Merry Christmas to you all.

So thank you.

Thank you for being with us here in the Luminars tier.

We hope that you and all your families are safe and having a peaceful time.

Happy holidays, one and all.