Let’s imagine you go to the doctor with a pain across your lower back and down your left leg. Do you say, “No need to examine me, I just need these painkillers, and I’ll be on my way”?
Or you call out the TV repair man and say, “both my TVs have lost their picture – it keeps breaking up. Can you change the aerial sockets and sell me a couple of new leads? That should do the trick.”
You wouldn’t, would you? At least in these two cases, it should be obvious that you might be wrong. You’re not giving the experts the chance to diagnose the problem themselves.
So why do business leaders do this with consultants all the time?
A client once asked me to “run a time management course” for their IT support team – dates booked and invitations sent.
I asked a few quick questions. These are the issues the client gave me:
- Massive backlog of unresolved tickets
- Tension and finger-pointing between the team and its customers
- Stress, fingerpointing, absenteeism
Their objectives:
- Happier, more united team
- Improved team / customer relationships
- Reduced backlog
- Reduced absenteeism
The course was already booked and my client would be embarrassed by cancelling it, so I decided to go ahead. But instead we addressed the issues directly, allowing the team to air frustrations, make requests and take accountability. We set goals and made plans.
Six weeks later…
…the backlog was down, sick days were down, and team morale was up.
The manager said ‘Wow, that course was amazing! I never realised time management could be so powerful.’
It wasn’t of course. I’d taken a risk, and made the right intervention for the actual problem – and it could have gone very wrong.
Let them diagnose before they prescribe.
That experience taught me a valuable lesson: don’t let clients prescribe the solution before they’ve described the symptoms.
Whether it’s your IT support, your TV repairman, or your organisation development consultant, tell them what’s really going on. Let them diagnose before they prescribe.
Another approach, diagnosed by an expert, might actually be more effective…