IN CONSULTATION YOUR REPUTATION IS EVERYTHING

In consulting, your personal reputation is everything. It is
the one thing by which everything else in your career
revolves around.

Here is the thing with reputations.

Once your reputation is set (whether it is good or it is
bad), it is very hard to change.

If you are seen favorably, more partners want you to work
with them, you get more choice of projects, you're able to
pick better projects, better clients, and better teams... and
not surprisingly, this often leads to you performing even
better.

Conversely, if your reputation starts off poor in a
consulting firm, you start a downward spiral.

Fewer partners want you to work on their engagements. You
get the worse managers (the ones nobody else wants to work with).

These managers don't coach you very well if at all... without
the coaching, you tend to do worse than your peers (while
still being held to the same standard) and the entire
process repeats and reinforces itself: If you ever end up in any professional
services business where your reputation was poor, the best
thing you can do is just quit and start over with no
reputation at another firm.

Apparently (and I now agree with this), having no reputation
is much better than having a bad reputation.

So what separates consultants who are strong performers vs.
those who are not?

While the list of distinguishing characteristics is long,
one trait that many McKinsey partners and engagement
managers often talk about is "coach-ability."

A new consultant is not expected to know everything from day
one. However, what is expected is that a new consultant will
be open to, listen to, and react favorable towards feedback.

So if your manager tells you that you need to do certain
things differently, if you are coachable, you will listen
and make improvements.

If you're not, you will be considered un-coachable and
stubborn... and often that is the beginning of the end of
one's career at a firm.

The people who often have the most difficultly with this
coach-ability trait are the consultants who have the highest
IQs and the biggest accomplishments before starting in
consulting.

Often this type of person finds it inconceivable that they
could possibly be doing something so poorly, when they used
to be so successful.

Rather than working on improving these new skills, they
start to argue with the manager as to why the manager or
partner is wrong.

This is not to say that managers and partners are always
right, but if you are arguing every feedback point... and
you're getting consistent feedback from multiple sources,
take a hard look at the data and consider that maybe the
feedback is right.

Some people have a very hard time with this, and ultimately
it hurts their careers -- hopefully only temporarily, but
often permanently.

This lack of "coach-ability" is really just a more specific
instance of someone generally being unwilling to learn from
others.

This more general trait is one that is absolutely positively
mandatory in consulting.

If you do not want to have to learn new things, don't go
into consulting!

You learn something new every day -- whether you are a new
analyst or a director with 20 years experience.

It is a factual reality of the profession (and some people
like me love it... others find it torture).

This is important to realize.

It is often very obvious which consultants in your office
are the ones who just got assigned to a new project. You can
often tell just by walking by their desk.

How can you tell?

They are the ones with a 1 - 2 foot stack of papers on their
desk that they are busy reading to "get up to speed" on a
new industry, a new client, and a new type of business
problem.

Often there are dozens of industry reports to read, dozens
of client materials to review, and entire stacks of practice
development training materials geared around a particular
kind of problem.

In most consulting firms, your colleagues will all have
strong learning skills.

Incidentally, this is one reason consulting firms favor
candidates with strong academic backgrounds -- at least you
don't have to worry that they are not capable of learning
something new (now getting them to be willing to learn is
something entirely different).

It's unlikely you will be more talented than your
colleagues. So the only differences between you and your
colleagues is what you learn and when you learn it.

For each project, there is a generally an obvious set of
documents to learn. Often one of your colleagues on a client
team (generally the one who used to be the "new" person on
the team prior to your arrival) will pass along his or her
big stack of papers to you... and eventually you will pass it
along to the next new person.

The project-specific learning materials tends to just
materialize when you need them. So everyone tends to learn
the same things at the same time in the lifecycle of their
role on a project.

Again, there is not much difference here.

Then there are the things one learns across multiple
projects... the skills of being a savvy consultant.

Most people will learn these skills within their first
two years of their consulting career.

Some will learn some elements of this through their firm's
new consultant training. Others will learn through feedback.
And finally, others will learn through trial and error.