What are the five most critical skills to earning trust and credibility with your clients?

When I talk to consulting leaders, it’s not hard to quickly reach agreement that there are a set of communications and relationship skills which make a world of difference in how well their technologists, scientists, and subject matter experts align with and communicate effectively with the individuals and organizations they are serving.

The practical problem which follows is, which of those skills will have the greatest impact? Because it is difficult and unrealistic to develop capability on 20 or so parallel fronts, it's helpful to get a sense for which of those skills and knowledge elements are the most critical to develop in the short term, and which can be deferred to later stages of development.

In this introduction, I'll discuss the work that I've been doing with a couple of key partners and invite you to participate in the research which will help us answer the prioritization question.

Partners International, Discovery Consulting and Ascendent Leadership are working together to better understand the critical competencies which enable a technologist, scientist, or subject matter expert to develop into the role of valued consultant or advisor.  We want to understand how successful consultants build trust and credibility with the people they serve.

As part of our work, we isolated 20 competencies which we believed were core to this transformation from subject matter expert to consultant.  Here they are, grouped by a high-level outline of categories.  Even though we placed each of them in one category for simplicity, most of them could be relevant in multiple categories.

Here is our take on the four key categories and 20 discrete competencies:

We believe that all these competencies are important and could be critical in any given situation.  That said, we wanted to understand how consulting leaders would prioritize this list of 20 competencies to best assist their technologists, scientists, and subject matter experts in developing the communications and relationship skills they need to become true consultants and advisors to their clients.

Since August of 2016, Ascendent Leadership and colleagues at Partners International and Discovery Consulting have been surveying successful consultants, asking them which of 20 commonly accepted consulting best practices ranked the most important in creating authentic advisory relationships.  (Original blog article introducing the research.)  While the research is continuing, we believe that the interim results accurately reflect the consulting community.  (Top five have been unchanged since we hit about 30 responses. (Total number of responses is now approaching one hundred.)

Active Listening was the runaway favorite, with 84 percent of respondents rating it as Critically Important, the top quartile of importance.  That was over 30 percentage points higher than the runner up, Asking Powerful Questions.

Here are the results for the top five, ranked by the number of total selections in the top quartile, as a percentage of total responses: 

All of the top five could easily fit under the umbrella term “discovery”.  How well is the consultant able to establish trust and credibility through focus and presence?  How well can they carry on a well-informed conversation about the clients’ business and their underlying success factors.