A study
Personal Legitimising
Personal Legitimising – a study of how management consultants influence their work environment to suit themselves - Dr Simon Haslam
Personal Legitimising is about how consultants legitimise their own work-based activities and how they gain acceptance for what they do and the way that they do it. Personal Legitimising comprises six behavioural strategies. They are ‘opportunistic accommodating’, ‘sequential impressioning’, ‘voluntary championing’, ‘support mustering’, ‘pseudo endorsing’ and ‘retrospective justifying.’ While these strategies work at a personal level, they all have a consequential impact on the overall consulting firm. The outcomes of this research are four-fold. First, it presents in integrated form, the strategies that consultants can use. Second, it informs the managers of consulting enterprises of the characteristics of these strategies. Third, it brings the issue of the consequence of these strategies on the firm, into the open. Fourth, is recognises that the freedom afforded under Personal Legitimising is often part of the attraction of working in a consultancy role.
Introduction
This paper explains the social process of Personal Legitimising, as practised by Management Consultants. The term ‘legitimising’ means to make logically acceptable or to serve as justification for. ‘Personal’ means such legitimacy centres on the individual in question rather than their firm. It is about how consultants secure acceptance for what they do and the way that they do it. The understanding of Personal Legitimising has come from a four year grounded theory study of the business development practices of consultants within smaller and medium sized management consulting firms.
The grounded theory of Personal Legitimising
Personal Legitimising comprises six behavioural strategies that management consultants seem to use to secure acceptance for what they do and the way that they do it.
Each of these is explained below, with reference to research data (shown in italics) to illuminate the concepts.
Opportunistic Accommodating
The first form of Personal Legitimising is opportunistic accommodating. Here, the consultant sees an opportunity to integrate an element of their personal agenda with their work priorities, so called as it happens on a piecemeal/opportunistic basis.
The head of the firm is interested in art. The company brochure is artistic in that it follows the design style of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, one of his favourite artists. His office furniture is also in Mackintosh style.
People follow their whims and exercise small indulgences.
“When interviewing for new staff he used to look at the CVs of those applying for posts in the firm and exhibit bias towards other rugby players. He brought the subject of rugby up in conversation (Oh, I see you play rugby!) and engineered discussion around it.”
The ability to opportunistically accommodate may be viewed as an un-discussed perk of the job.
“It’s like when we have to conduct field work and organise focus groups around the UK, we choose the field work locations so we can visit our pals. So I’m spending a lot of time in Manchester at the moment.”
A lot of opportunistic accommodating goes un-noticed by others in the firm, but all of it has a consequential impact on the modus operandum of the business.
I questioned one chairman about why his consulting firm had a recruitment and staff selection branch, after being told by one of his directors that the ‘chairman liked to dabble a bit in recruitment’. His answer was a laugh followed by an admittance that the recruitment branch “is an indulgence of mine”.
Sequential impressioning
Sequential impressioning is probably the most prevalent form of Personal Legitimising. It is people’s progressive shaping of their personal working world. This takes time (for example, many months) but has the ability to stealthily align the working world with personal agendas.
These two examples show consultants talking about leading clients according to the consultants’ preferences.
“We may equally choose, and do it increasingly frequently, to invite key clients to lunch, basically on a just ‘when you’re in town come and have lunch’ and we use it as an opportunity to talk about what’s happening and very frequently that triggers something (Good heavens, I didn’t know you did that, well actually we are interested in that)”.
The manager said his team was supposed to be promoting the ‘excellence model’. The consultant wasn’t personally keen on the excellence model as an approach and to potential clients said “You don’t want to bother with that.” When he gets back to the office and is questioned about the excellence model he says of the potential client “They aren’t ready for it yet.”
The techniques seem equally valid on internal colleagues as well as existing clients and external contacts.
Two consultants, Neil and Kate, who although working for the same firm, had different areas of activity, chose to undertake joint marketing initiatives, primarily they said because they worked well together as individuals, whereas neither undertook any joint marketing work with any of their colleagues working in more closely related areas.
Providing what consultants do remains within the freedom afforded to them by the firm, the direction of their endeavour remains largely unquestioned.
“…and I had to say (to a colleague,) hands off, that’s mine!”
The consequence is that, over time, sequential impressioning changes the focus and nature of what the entire firm does.
Voluntary championing
When a person wishes to dramatically re-align the direction and scope of their work, he or she moves into ‘voluntary championing’. If successful, they acquire new territory and their activity in and around it is implicitly legitimised.
“I’ve become the practice head for ‘bar work’ (working with barristers’ chambers). I did dome of this at the last place and enjoyed it. So I put myself forwards as the person to head what we do in that area.”
They (the consulting firm) recognised the value of getting decision makers ‘on the way up’, that is before they have decided who will be their pet suppliers. They created a junior directors club. This was instigated by MG (senior consultant) having got the blessing from the chairperson and managing director. MG recruited seven younger directors from business units of larger institutions, paying a few thousand pounds each. These are people in their first directors role. MG called in a few favours to make up the numbers and make the group viable.
After successful voluntary championing, the consultant ‘owns’ a new territory.
Support mustering
Substantial shifts in the areas of legitimate activity can be achieved through the fourth strategy, support mustering. This involves influential individuals changing the ground rules around which they and others operate. The winning of support from colleagues to jointly invoke change is part of this.
The firm went through a major change three years ago. It had grown steadily previously to that, but some people in the firm weren’t happy with its general direction. The chairman felt that it had reached a sort of cross roads and could go ‘up beat’ or ‘down beat’. Up beat involved having sales people and standardising its offering. Down beat involved an understated but flexible approach. The prevailing direction had been up beat, but the chairman was keen to go along the other route. After discussions, others of a similar persuasion joined him. The chairman used the phrase “the type of business I don’t personally want to be involved in” to help describe the situation.
Support mustering is largely connected with step-changes in operation.
Pseudo endorsing
The next two strategies are concerned with consultants defending their chosen directions. Pseudo endorsing involves giving lip service to an unappealing area of initiative thus freeing up the capacity to pursue more appealing interests. Here an individual agrees to support a direction or decision then impedes its progress by holding back on the resources necessary to complete the task. Here a managing consultant talks about the failure of him and one of his colleagues to champion their firm’s marketing initiatives.
“I mean I was supposed to look after marketing for about six months after the company split. Neil was supposed to have taken it on in total for about a year but I feel he probably didn’t have the interest in it either.”
The sentiment below from a senior administrator shows her disillusionment following the lack of effort put in by her colleagues to a project that she thought she had won support for.
“Yes, that’s how everything goes here. It starts off with lots of enthusiasm and just fizzles out. I don’t know why.”
Retrospective justifying
The final strategy is retrospective justifying. This approach involves the after the event justification of one’s action to colleagues. It happens when a person’s behaviour is questioned. The strategy involves the individual selecting the most appropriate line and style of argument for a given situation. Below, a senior consultant explains why his commitment to business development activities has dwindled…
“We are short-term thinking not because we can’t think in the longer term, but personally the business demands very short term responses. You know like last week, I had to write five pieces of development material which required three weeks to do.”
…and why he can’t make a significant contribution to the firm’s new brochure and sales presentations…
“…this raises the other problem in that all of the client work that I do is confidential. I can’t mention any of it, it’s absolutely unmentionable.”
…and in another firm, consultants’ reasons for not attending the regular management meetings.
“So one by one people have dropped out because they have more important client meetings on.”
With retrospective justifying, consultants select arguments and positions which stand up to rational scrutiny, thus defending their personal actions and preferences.
Within the firm, he (the consultant) was known as the ‘works department’ because of his jobbing shop mentality. His approach was to work on smaller consultancy assignments and complete them by himself rather than on a team basis as used elsewhere in the firm. When I raised this with him he legitimised his approach by pointing out that at any one time he manages three times as many clients as the other consultants and that he is the firm’s leading fee earner.
The implications of Personal Legitimising
For the first time, Personal Legitimising presents in integrated form, behavioural perspectives that other researchers have noted about the management consultancy and knowledge sectors . Experience suggests there are four main messages for the industry as a result of this work.
1. To consultants – we know that Personal Legitimising goes on, and these are the strategies you use.
2. To managers and peers of consultants – be aware that these are the strategies that those in your firm may be using, see them for what they are.
3. To the firm’s owners – the strategies within Personal Legitimising impact on the style, scope of operation and brand of the whole firm. The actions that individual consultants’ take (and get away with) have an organisational consequence. It is probably better that this is understood rather than be left to chance.
4. Also, to the firm’s owners – the autonomy and opportunity for personal fulfilment afforded under Personal Legitimising is often an attractive dimension to a consultancy role and accords with the values of many knowledge workers. If you manage it well you’ll have a culture which suits both the priorities of the firm and its staff.
Grounded Theory is a recognised qualitative research method. It was pioneered by Glaser and Strauss in the 1960s and widely applied in the area of gaining conceptual understanding of social processes exhibited in various organisational and societal contexts. In particular, the literature of management consultants and knowledge workers recognises the power of consultants as influencers, the tensions between personal and organisational goals and the influence of individual actions of a firm’s strategy. The Personal Legitimising research project included a rigorous literature search.
Dr Simon Haslam is a Chartered Management Consultant and a Chartered Marketer. He has fifteen years experience as a consultant, facilitator and business practitioner. He works on his own account as Haslam Consulting and is co-owner and director of social research firm, FMR Research. In addition to working with public, private and third sector enterprises Simon is an Honorary Fellow at Durham Business School. His master’s dissertation was on the subject of learning organisations and his doctorate examined relationships in the professional services sector.