The Consultant Skillset
How the consultant skillset can help you lead leaders
It’s been almost 5 years since I took the plunge to start working as a Church Facilitator and Consultant, and believe me, I’ve learned a ton along the way. One of the most rewarding things I get to do is coaching pastors of churches and charity leaders in strategic matters. When a pastor or leader gets that penny-drop moment, there’s little like it.
Consulting is a completely different skill to team leading. When it comes to team leading, its all about getting the plan and the strategy yourself and then implementing it, looking after the team as you go and making sure people are heard and appreciated.
When you’re consulting, you’re not officially leading them, but you in many senses you are. I think that the ability to consult well is very much like being able to lead leaders.
At One Church, we have a leadership pipeline which has a type of leader where their responsibility is to ‘lead leaders’. At this level, you can’t lead like you’re a team leader, you’ve got to learn some of the art of consultation. Why? Well if you tell your leaders what to do, they cease to become leaders, and they just become followers. No-one wants to be treated, as Stephen Covey put it, a “gopher” – “Go for this, go for that, do this, do that.” That will work just fine if you want to keep what you’re doing small, but if you want your ministry or team to grow, you’ve got to change your posture of leadership. To lead other leaders, you need to become a little bit more like a consultant.
So what does a consultant actually do? Here’s what I do:
Listen – I often go into consultation meetings having absolutely no idea what the leaders are going to talk about. I’m just asked to turn up and add value. So the first thing I need to do is listen, and listen really well. What are the pain points? What are they struggling with?
Slow it right down – This sounds ridiculous, but often, what comes out of a leader’s mouth is really difficult to understand, because they’re talking about something that’s really niche. If you’re a consultant, or a leader of leaders, you don’t have the luxury of having all the detail, but that actually becomes your greatest tool. Get the leader to spell it out in simple words… cut out all the jargon and put it into plain English. I often find that when the jargon is cut out, often the answer just appears to them.
Start With Why – Simon Sinek’s famous book “Start with Why” is a great book and a great tool for you to lead leaders. Why? Exactly. That ‘why’ question gets the leader to think from a place of purpose before focusing on the issue. Unless the ‘why’ is clear, nothing will be clear. So make sure that the leader has defined why they want to do something. Sometimes the ‘why’ question is better phrased in other ways like, “So what are you trying to achieve with this?” or “What’s important to you in this?” They’re different questions that still help you get to the heart of the matter.
Read – In the book, “The Accidental Creative”, author Todd Henry explains that if you want to be brilliant at a moment’s notice you need to continually have your “bucket” of ideas full. You get that by reading, or by watching YouTube videos or blogs or podcasts. You need to have a bank of knowledge you can call on at any moment. Each item you add to your bucket becomes a potential tool to help your leader. If the problem is leadership development, I’m ready and armed to help the leader to develop a leadership pipeline. If its giving a vision talk, I’ve got frameworks that I use.
Using similes – We all know a simile in a sentence, just use the word “like”. When you’re helping a leader, sometimes there isn’t a direct tool to help them, but I’m sure you’ll have something that’s only a small abstraction away from the perfect tool.
I’ll give you an example… I remember a time I was helping some leaders (not in a church setting) work out why they had problems with some of their staff cutting their hours, so I asked them why they felt the staff were cutting their hours. They replied straight away, “They all work out in the community, so they can’t get into the office except once a week for a meeting, they’re really isolated so end up asking to reduce their hours.”
From there I remembered a book that I read on decentralised organisational structures and gave them a very rough gist of the book, and asked if they considered changing their model to a more decentralised model where instead of having one central office, they had smaller hubs.
Here’s where the simile came in, I said, “this is a bit like a multisite church model” – It wasn’t a multisite church model, but it was like it. And it was close enough that the leaders could envision a whole new structure to better support their staff which could solve the problem. I could use my knowledge of setting up multisite church structures to help leaders in a completely different industry.
Was that the solution for them? That’s not the point. The point is to get the leaders thinking for themselves so that they come up with the solution.
When it comes to church, we need to release more leaders, not fewer, and that means we need more leaders of leaders who aren’t making the decisions for their leaders, but they’re operating as a coach or a consultant to help get the best out of that leader.
Chris Bright