Shownotes
Confidence and humility often stand at odds in the world of consulting, yet they are both essential traits for success. Confidence can inspire clients, while humility allows for genuine connections and collaboration, right?
Ian and Mike explore the delicate balance between projecting confidence and maintaining humility, questioning whether the overconfidence often associated with consultants is beneficial or detrimental.
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Transcripts
Welcome to Consulting for Humans, a podcast all about the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of a life in consulting.
Ian:You're with Ian and with Mike, and each episode will be shining a light on a topic that gets to the heart of what makes consultants happy and successful.
Ian:Not like you and me.
Ian:Right, Mike?
Mike:Right.
Mike:We'll bring you insights from our careers in this fascinating industry and examine the ideas, old and new, that underpin and inspire our work.
Ian:Absolutely.
Ian:We think that you get better as a consultant the more human you are.
Ian:If you came here for thoughts about success, then please trust us.
Ian:Being successful as a consultant comes along with expanding your humanity and your human skills.
Ian:We also think that there's a great opportunity for us all to bring some of the skills and perspectives of consulting to human lives, too.
Mike:So if you're a consultant who's trying to be more human or a human who's trying to be more of a consultant, or you might say, more consultative, then please stick around.
Mike:We think you're just our kind of person.
Ian:Absolutely.
Ian:And welcome back to our second show.
Ian:If you're fresh in from show one.
Ian:Thank you so much for rejoining us.
Ian:We were talking last time about the ludicrous notion of a perfect consultant, and here we are on show two, exploring what it takes to be a perfect consultant.
Ian:We've already talked about the tension between analytical skill and a creative outlook.
Ian:And, Mike, this week we want to go to our second access, confidence and humility.
Ian:Now, I had to stretch back to the times when you and I were both in the business thinking about hiring people.
Ian:And here's my little story about confidence and humility.
Ian:I thought that we did pretty great as an industry, weeding out people and selecting for people who had confidence.
Ian:And there's a certain school of interviewing that I think still kind of looks for that and favors a bit of extroversion and a bit of kind of, you know, outward shows of confidence.
Ian:Here's the interview question that I always wish I had set but never had the guts to.
Ian:The interview question would have been me sitting with the candidate for interview saying, would you like a coffee?
Ian:And they say, yes.
Ian:And I say, okay, help yourself.
Ian:Here's my cup.
Ian:I take mine white, no sugar, and just direct them to the coffee kitchen.
Ian:And my idea for humility would be, could they navigate their way around a strange office block, politely ask for help from people who they might think of as lower status, like receptionists and assistants, navigate their way to the coffee machine, and by the way, bring me back a foaming, steaming cup of the Honest Joe, if they could do all of that, if they could make decent coffee and humbly enough, ask for directions and not look like an arrogant jackass, then I think they would have made a great consultant.
Ian:But, Mike, it's a long story, and I never got to ask that question in recruitment.
Ian:Maybe in another life.
Mike:Well, and maybe at another time in the world of hr.
Mike:Yeah, that's great.
Mike:Oh, it would have been fascinating, though, because I will tell you that I remember hiring and oftentimes seeing what I thought was perhaps a cultural trait or more of a.
Mike:Because they came from XYZ consulting trait.
Mike:And I was always trying to tease this out as this, you know, northern countries versus southern countries is this.
Mike:But in certain firms, I really had a strong suspicion that it really was, you know, confidence bordering on arrogance.
Mike:And I had this suspicion confirmed when I was actually going through a buffet line where we had a lot of folks in the firm who were, you know, at a certain level who had been fairly successful and had one of these folks who I remember came from specifically a firm, and somebody speaking to him on the other side, we're going through the buffet together, said something about arrogance in consulting.
Mike:And he said, you can't be successful without it.
Mike:I mean, we were drilled on arrogance.
Mike:You had to be arrogant.
Mike:Nobody can say a price of this much or make some of the claims without arrogance.
Mike:And clients love that.
Mike:They respect that.
Mike:They want that.
Mike:And I then followed up with a little bit of a conversation that went in two different directions.
Mike:One direction was tell me more.
Mike:And the other direction was, we're not one of those firms who believes that.
Mike:But it was fascinating to hear how this was so underlined, so underscored, and so completely and totally believed.
Mike:And I think, well, I will rephrase that.
Mike:I know I had a couple clients who seemed to act like that's exactly the way.
Mike:And I actually went offline with a couple to talk about that.
Mike:It turns out out they were young partners from that firm who had gone into business.
Ian:Interesting.
Ian:Interesting.
Mike:And really, again, still look for that.
Mike:So confidence versus humility, Ian.
Ian:Well, now I was talking with a colleague to a coaching client a couple of weeks ago, and we were debating confidence.
Ian:And in this particular case, we were talking to somebody who said, I want to increase my level of confidence in certain situations.
Ian:I need to be able to access a higher level of confidence in order to be able to assert a point of view or make a strong recommendation.
Ian:And we talked about how up until the point that they make a decision about changing their business, most Clients have been dealing with us on the basis of something that's intangible.
Ian:And if we're going to charge them money for doing something that is intangible, that will essentially direct them or encourage them to do something that was previously not on their planet, then there's a good kind of confidence that I think we need to be able to access.
Ian:And I guess there are situations where clients look to us to exhibit confidence so that they can, they can gather some of that confidence for themselves.
Ian:Like I'd like to be able to make this big complex decision and I'd like you to look me in the eye and tell me with a steady sounding voice that this is potentially a good idea that I'm about to embark on.
Ian:But as you and I have said here, I think there's a fine line.
Ian:There's a fine line between confidence and arrogance.
Ian:And it's the easiest hit in the world against people in the consulting industry that we can tend to be a little bit arrogant.
Ian:Now, where it comes from and how we exhibit it right at the beginning of our careers comes from all sorts of different places.
Ian:Might you.
Ian:You talked about north and south with a very kind of British perspective on this.
Ian:I think of, you know, people who've been to a fancy university and a fee paying school versus people who've been to a regular university and maybe not a fee paying school.
Ian:There are all kinds of other social things that go along with people's ability to adopt a kind of confident tone.
Ian:In the very old days, I think our industry used to select for that and select for that in a kind of blind way.
Ian:I don't know, maybe we've got better.
Ian:What do you think?
Mike:Well, it's interesting.
Mike:I'd love to hear from some of our listeners what their current experience is with their clients, with their firms, because I do think that it does require both, that this is a genuine contradiction.
Mike:Humility certainly sounds like a much easier play.
Mike:But I wondered in my own mind, as you were describing your coffee question.
Mike:Fascinating.
Mike:I wonder who would play out and how they would find one versus an easier play than another.
Mike:Being able to defer to a client, being their honest and diligent pair of hands, you know, not offering a fresh opinion.
Mike:Sometimes I think that that could be humility.
Mike:Sometimes it can be a marked lack of confidence or come off as that.
Mike:And we all know we're in situations where we're perhaps dealing with clients who know a lot more in depth about content or process in a particular area than we do.
Mike:We may have a Broader thing from our own experience.
Mike:And we have to sort of assess to ourselves, what does this situation need?
Mike:After all, it's easy to fall back into the trap of if I never express an opinion, you know, you can never be, or I'll never be wrong, or I'll never be unpopular.
Mike:Right.
Mike:Ian?
Mike:You know, maybe it'd be helpful to take a look at some examples that everybody knows of, some people who combine this humility with confidence.
Ian:Right.
Ian:It's a great way to start the conversation because these are characters that I think people know about.
Ian:For example, Warren Buffett, the sage of Omaha, the investor, and also, I guess you'd say, philanthropist, known for his acumen as an investor, but also known for his modest lifestyle and also for his real openness, his candidness about making mistakes.
Ian:I think he's a great example of humility and confidence we have also in the world of big corporations, but now in the world of tech.
Ian:Satya Nadella of Microsoft, it turned around.
Ian:Microsoft in the post Bill Gates era with confident leadership, but also was known for really advocating a culture of learning and a humble style that went with that.
Ian:And then away from business.
Ian:But in politics, most of us, I think, can still recently remember Angela Merkel.
Ian:Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany for many, many, many years, one of the longest serving ever chancellors of Germany, certainly had a quiet confidence, certainly had that slightly nerdy quality.
Ian:Angela Merkel was a science professor when she first got into politics, but she was certainly good at remaining approachable, certainly open to diverse viewpoints and very open to things outside the regular kind of stream of opinions of what you would have thought of kind of center right brand of political thinking.
Ian:She was open to lots more than just that.
Ian:So, Mike, we've got some celebrities which at least tests the idea that these people can exist somehow.
Ian:How about people in consulting?
Ian:Have you come across anybody who's been able to exemplify humility and confidence?
Mike:You know, it's interesting, as we've been working on this episode, I've been thinking about it a lot.
Mike:And I have to say that I don't remember many of them, but that the, the ones that I do remember have kind of an influence that outshines everybody else.
Mike:I mean, I, I was amazed at, I guess part of it is just the difference.
Mike:The difference.
Mike:These people who were great, who were confident, who inspired people, you know, sometimes to, you know, to press on harder even when we were perhaps a little unsure and, you know, kind of caught the tailwinds of their confidence and at the same time, Very open and would walk in.
Mike:I remember one leader walking into a meeting where we were in.
Mike:We were in a big crisis, and he said, I want to be real clear here.
Mike:I'm about to ask your opinion on something, and I.
Mike:I don't need you to stroke my ego.
Mike:If one person wants to agree with what I'm about to offer as a possibility, I'm happy to have that.
Mike:But I expect everybody else to have a different opinion because I really need some help here.
Ian:Wow.
Ian:Wow.
Mike:And I thought, boom.
Mike:That was.
Mike:That was nice.
Mike:Yeah.
Ian:And did they get that?
Mike:They did.
Mike:They did not.
Ian:Just awkward silence.
Mike:No, no, they absolutely did.
Mike:I think that was all of a sudden this person saying, you know, I'm many levels above you, and I'm really looking for some other thinking here.
Mike:And I was like, whoa, I'll follow you.
Mike:Absolutely.
Ian:Yeah.
Ian:So that.
Ian:So they get to be followed and they get to stick in the memory.
Ian:I think that's really important.
Mike:I read a little bit of super communicators nowadays, and it sounds like, yeah, there's a little bit they could play in that.
Ian:Mike, I love this thing about super communicators.
Ian:That sounds like just the right kind of topic for us to unpack a little bit in the Deep Dive episode that's coming up, especially for those who are on our Luminary program.
Ian:Do you think we could dig into that some more?
Mike:Oh, I think we could, Ian.
Mike:I think we absolutely could.
Mike:A lot to dig into there.
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Ian:Now, back to the show, Mike.
Ian:This super Communicators idea is a new one on Me, Tell us a bit about that.
Mike:Well, it's interesting.
Mike:So this idea, a lot of it comes I think, very much from the Harvard Negotiation Project and is alluded to.
Mike:But there's an idea about people who are the catalysts that bring groups together and make them much more effective, that seem to have very big outcomes.
Mike:And they talk a lot about negotiators, spy recruiters, people in situations on juries and things like that.
Mike:But one of it is this ability to kind of sense the mood, to know what kind of conversation you're in and then to adapt it, you know, to kind.
Mike:And I couldn't help but thinking as we were working on this a little bit about the confidence versus humility.
Mike:Is it an all the time thing or is it also depending on where you are in this conversation, where you are in this situation, so that the, again, the both and the ability to have both are there because these people who would come off as always seeming to reflect back what's going on with somebody else, but at the same time being able to also challenge them or to adopt the emotional states that other people are in in order to essentially figure out what will work in order, as we would say in the negotiation side of it, to get to their interests, to find out what's in it for them.
Mike:How do we make it a bigger pie?
Mike:How do we start to distinguish what kind of conversation are we in?
Mike:Is it decision making?
Mike:Is it emotional?
Mike:Is it connecting?
Mike:Is it social?
Mike:So confidence, humility.
Ian:Absolutely.
Ian:Now, I've got a feeling that there are traps at both ends of the spectrum here.
Ian:Maybe you might say that the history of management consulting started out especially with people associated with big, high profile, intellectually very rigorous strategy consulting work.
Ian:And that that's easy to see as led by confidence.
Ian:Virgin on arrogance.
Ian:I know that lots of my clients are consulting firms and individuals who prize themselves a little bit on their humility, partly as a positioning versus the more confident, more arrogant looking firms.
Ian:But I think both of those are a trap.
Ian:If you get stuck, like you say, in the useful pair of hands end of the spectrum, then it's really hard to get valued.
Ian:It's really hard to really offer advice.
Ian:If you get stuck in the I'm the expert, listen to what I say, end of things.
Ian:And I think that's potentially also a trap.
Ian:And this goes back to, you know, who we are as people and how we see ourselves versus our clients, how we see ourselves versus our colleagues as well.
Mike:I think you're absolutely right, Ian.
Mike:And you know, the context in which we're doing that.
Mike:I remember putting together another big project, doing a.
Mike:A kind of a readout mid project, and having this firm who was number one in their industry say, you're focusing an awful lot on our industry and how to do this really well.
Mike:Why don't we start with the premise that we've forgotten more than you'll ever know about this industry.
Mike:Oh.
Mike:And get into the parts where you can really help us.
Ian:Sheesh.
Ian:It's really harsh, but very fair.
Ian:So I think then it seems like we need to be able to access both ends of the spectrum.
Ian:So, Mike, we're getting to the end here and thinking about what it all means.
Ian:If we can achieve this trick of bringing together confidence and humility as our career grows, what's in it for us?
Ian:What could be the payoffs?
Mike:Leadership is a little bit different than consulting.
Mike:However, I think that leadership, in my mind and in my experience, has been really important for successful consultants to be good leaders at any level.
Mike:And that really comes into sometimes leading when you're, you know, or at least having influence without authority.
Mike:You know, you're working in teams, you've got people working on multiple projects and doing all that.
Mike:And I think that's a huge payoff, is that, you know, I talked about the outside in, the outsized influence of these people, but they weren't all top leaders.
Mike:They weren't all many levels above you.
Mike:This was the kind of people, I think, that people gravitated to.
Mike:I know that I gravitated to on projects, people who had both.
Ian:It's funny, I can remember my unkind self saying about people who had just been hired and just been on board at the beginning of their career, well, gee, you know, they're so sure of themselves.
Ian:We better promote them quick while they still know everything.
Ian:Which was a.
Ian:Which was a good snappy line.
Ian:But I think I was probably a bit harsh.
Ian:There are reasons why, I suppose we might sometimes be working hard to project confidence, and maybe we should check ourselves before we look at somebody else and think, oh, they're acting super confident.
Ian:They.
Ian:They must be overdoing it.
Mike:Right, Right.
Mike:Well, and I remember teaching some brand new consultants who had a bullpen that they worked in.
Ian:Yeah.
Mike:And one of the things that came out of our discussion about standing on each other's shoulders and, you know, asking each other questions and checking in was, wait, is it okay to ask questions?
Mike:But, but won't they, you know, won't they think less of us?
Mike:Won't they.
Mike:And I would say here, absolutely, you know, Be confident enough and smart enough once you've asked the question once or twice, to remember that.
Mike:Don't keep going back and don't ask other people to do your work for you or to know things that you already know.
Mike:On the other hand, don't blow opportunities by being overconfident and not asking.
Mike:Yeah.
Mike:And I think that follows all the way to the top.
Ian:Right?
Ian:Well, going.
Ian:Going back to celebrities, like you say, Mike, there are people that we've remembered in our careers who've had that.
Ian:They have the payoff of being remembered by folks like us and their leadership and their kind of presence, having a big impact on the teams that they've worked in.
Ian:I think that's a really great point.
Mike:Well, and you mentioned Warren Buffett, and I know you're a big fan of these financial disaster books.
Ian:Right.
Mike:I mean, perhaps there's a little contrast there that illuminates this discussion a little bit.
Ian:Yeah.
Ian:Every financial disaster book in history is a story of hubris by some guys who got overconfident.
Ian:Yeah, very good.
Mike:And most of them ended up going to Warren Buffett saying, bail me out.
Ian:Yeah.
Ian:And then right after that, they went to jail.
Ian:So there you go.
Mike:Right.
Mike:It's fascinating the time that we spent here thinking about confidence and humility.
Mike:And I think it's not completely unrelated to this idea that will be coming up on next time.
Mike:Being certain of our facts or okay with ambiguity.
Mike:And I think sometimes those two have a little bit of an intersection with each other.
Mike:So if you'd like to learn a little bit more about the perfect consultant and these pairs of opposite traits that we need both of, but perhaps in different ways, please join us again next week as we'll take on this idea of facts or ambiguity.
Ian:Thanks so much for joining us.
Ian:Consultants and humans all will see you next time on the Consulting for Humans podcast.
Mike:The Consulting for Humans podcast is brought to you by P31 Consulting.
Mike:I know we can definitely talk more about that because I'm only on chapter three.
Mike:I just started listening to it.
