The Client:Consultant Relationship

Research Abstract

• Consultancy has been practised in a number of guises since early socialisation of man, if one includes all forms of advice giving and guidance. This study related to the more modern manifestation of paid advice giving and facilitation by organisations and individuals identifying themselves as consultants, to commercial or/and charitable organisations.
• The study focused on understanding the experience of using external consultants. The study began with a broad sample of 43 senior executives, representing 39 organisations, in a range of industries. Each participant had an interview, then a smaller sample of 6 of these interviews was chosen for phenomenological analysis. We followed Moustakas' (1994) approach to phenomenology.
• The majority of client:consultant relationships and projects reported on by participants in this study are unsatisfactory. However, I found evidence of rare but special relationships that were unexpectedly enjoyable and effective, and very personal.
• The hypothesis that emerged as to the essence of the experience of using external consultants is based on the observation that the user of consultants - the client - enters a client:consultant relationship with a range of needs, and carrying transferential and projective (de Board 1978, 1990, 1991) material. He has a partial experience of personal power, the degree of which varies from person to person, depending on the degree to which he/she has integrated her/his subpersonalities (Rowan 1990), and full range of emotions (Postle 1993). The client's degree of personal power, combined with his level of awareness of his own needs, affect the way he conducts his relationship with his consultant; which in turn affects the way the consultant responds, the outcome of the project, and the client's ultimate satisfaction.
• The TA model, developed by Eric Berne and reported by Stewart and Joines (Stewart and Joines 1987), offers a helpful structure for making sense of the various types of client:consultant relationship, and their outcomes. To sum up (using Stewart and Joines 1987), an effective client:consultant relationship may consist of Adult: Adult transactions, or Child (client):Parent (consultant) transactions; in either case, the initial contracting has been conducted in Adult:Adult, and has covered the client's Adult and Child needs in the project and the relationship. An ineffective client:consultant relationship has not been effectively contracted, so the client's needs are unlikely to be met.