Ethics and Lying
When you play the role of the consultant, you are usually expected to be the expert in everything. In reality, you will be placed in situations where things are very new to you. This is where the fine line between being a professional and outright lying can be difficult to navigate. Many times, your sales team will sell you and your role to a client without any outside input and you will be the one left on the hook to deliver the expectations they set. It would be easy to just tell everyone a few white lies to cover for yourself until you can sort things out, but that can and will land you in hot water pretty quickly. Remember, you are usually with the client who probably has some fundamental knowledge of his or her own day job and will be quickly able to figure out if you are making statements that you won’t be able to back up.
Since the situation of not always being the expert you were sold as is usually unavoidable from time to time, it is best to talk about what to do in this situation rather than really spend a lot of time talking about how to avoid it. In these situations, it is a good strategy to hide behind a wall of questions rather than a wall of lies. Asking the right questions is rarely seen as a lack of understanding and, in fact, can show your ability to connect dots, build rapport and give you the opportunity to get your footing and become the expert you are expected to be. Prior to walking into the client’s home turf, remember to do as much research as you can. Between searching the internet, the sales teams’ notes and your firms’ management, there is a wealth of information you should be able to gather. Research what the client does on their company website. Are you going to be working with their accounting department? The sales and marketing group? Read through some self-paced courses on the topic as there are plenty of free sources online. Ask your manager if there is any in-house training you could take prior to starting with the client. It is also vital for your manager to sit down with you before going onsite and discuss the details and responsibilities of the work that was signed off. If you are being sent to the wolves to fend for yourself with no support, it would be wise to raise that concern early as it is not a situation that will send you or your firm on a path to success.
Another big ethics violation you may encounter revolves around accurately recording and reporting hours worked. A great motto to live by is: “bill what you work”. If your manager or director is trying to artificially inflate your billable hours, that will be an automatic red flag. This is a cash grab and any ethical-based firm will not allow this. This action is also a breach of contract and could land your firm in legal hot water. Some firms usually try to mask this by suggesting you actually work 45 to 50 hours a week. If there is work to be done and you are trying to stay ahead of schedule or build a name for yourself, it is usually ok. However, if you are finding yourself watching videos online or scrounging for ways to kill time without producing anything valuable, it would be wise to raise this concern as it counts as taking advantage of the client. In certain situations, you may see the opposite of hour inflation where you actually work a valid number of extra hours but your manager is not billing that time in an effort to keep the project under budget. This situation helps no one in the long run and you lose a lot of credit and merit for the difficult work you may be doing. In these situations, your manager should be allowing you to record the true hours you worked so that there is a digital record of the true hourly cost. The manager can then mark the hours worked as non-billable time to the client so there is no financial cost incurred. This would be at your leadership’s discretion but allows you to be credited for the hours you put in while showing the client the actual work being done. This, in turn, keeps the billable run rate down if the work is not actually being billed.
Something Does Not Feel Right
In one of my earlier projects working for a smaller firm, I was sold to a client as someone more experienced than I really was at the time. That should have been my first warning sign, but not wanting to make a fuss and being young at the time, I went forward with the role. After a few weeks of staring at an empty screen and rereading the same documents to appear busy, I only billed the hours I was actually working. I was told after a few weeks by my employer that I should bill fifty hours no matter what. That was strike two. As the weeks went on, the project failed to deliver anything useful and my current manager was stalling on purpose. The client began to get angry and took their frustrations out on the consultants on the ground and threatened to take my employer to court for the fees they were charged and the lack of deliverables to show for it. I wish I could tell you how this story ends, but at this point, I knew something was not right and this was not how ethical firms would behave or ask their employees to behave, so I quit and moved on to a better opportunity at a firm I felt was led by better people.
Are you interested in starting a career in consulting? Be sure do read the full book Jack of all Trades Master of Some; An Introduction to Consulting available on Amazon.