What To Look For In a Change Management Consultant

Any change management consultant you consider seriously should have three things:

- Executive experience, preferably in your industry;
- Experience bringing multiple companies successfully through a business realignment process, preferably the same one you’re planning for your company;
- Experience with managing change in companies similar to yours in both structure and industry.

In other words, the perfect change management consultant for your business would be one who’s done exactly what you’re doing with two or three of your competitors.

But that’s not all you should look for in your change management consultant. He or she should also mesh well with your current management team. A poor choice in consultant would be someone that your key employees (note the multiple!) dislike. Your company needs to work as a team to successfully complete change, and dissention with your change management consultant will undermine everything you’re trying to do.

If one or two key employees dislike your change management consultant prospect while everyone else likes him or her fine, you need to ask yourself what’s setting this employee off. Is it really something about the change management consultant? Or is there a possibility that your employee is worried about losing his or her job during the process of your business’s transformation? You need to sit down with that employee and find out before ruling out that change management consultant; he’s not there to be everyone’s friend, after all.

The Use and Feeding of Your Change Management Consultant

Your change management consultant will probably be able to give you a very good idea of how he or she can best be used by your company; this is a question you need to ask them during your interview process. Change management consultants can be used for every stage of your company’s restructuring, from helping you come up with a plan with timelines to organizing your committees to training your staff on change management to helping everyone adjust to the changes being made.

You need to ensure your change management consultant is kept in the loop. Change is hard, and some of your employees, maybe even those you would least suspect, are going to resist. Have an open-door policy for your change management consultant – and a closed-door policy for any private communication between the two of you. Private meetings for updates and questions about difficult situations are absolutely essential. Your change management consultant should feel comfortable asking to go to most of your company’s meetings, and should be encouraged to get a feel for what everyone does. Part of what your change management consultant does is efficiency analysis; but in order to find redundancies and other structural problems, they need to have open access to everything.

With open communication between you and your carefully-selected change management consultant, your company’s transition should go smoothly and calmly.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR