By Carter McNamara on February 12, 2013
Part 1 of this series is What Do Consultants Do?, which defines a consultant (as Peter Block puts it) as someone who is trying to change another person, process or organization, but who has no direct control over what they are trying to change. That post also listed numerous roles that a consultant might play […]
By Carter McNamara on December 10, 2011
In a project, whether you are conducting a formal, systematic assessment or just doing a rather informal assessment, your natural approach to gathering and processing information will influence how you work. The Myers-Briggs folks provide some useful dimensions to consider. (Myers-Briggs is a registered trademark of Consulting Psychologists Press, Inc.), Intuitive Versus Sensing Approaches to […]
By Carter McNamara on October 26, 2011
There’s a lot of money available to help small businesses, and it seems like there’ll be more available as we work to make more jobs. So OD in small businesses might be even more worthwhile. About half of our clients are small organizations. My experience of the differences of between OD in small and large […]
By Carter McNamara on October 15, 2011
Free Advice Too Often Backfires On You During a recession when potential clients are more reluctant to pay consultants for services, it can be very enticing for consultants to do almost anything to win contracts, even to do a lot of free consulting — to give away what the consultants otherwise would be paid for. […]
By Carter McNamara on January 21, 2011
Consulting books often suggest a sequence of steps or phases that a consulting project goes through. The nature of the sequence depends on the perspectives of the authors of the books. The initial phase has been referred to by a variety of names, for example, Start-Up and/or Entry. (Some books even mention these two terms […]
By Carter McNamara on April 28, 2010
Last week, I got a call from a consultant who lamented the “failure of all those management movements.” As usual in these conversations, the caller went on to explain how his particular idea was what leaders and managers really needed. That type of lament seems increasingly common in literature about the need for “transforming organizations” […]
By Carter McNamara on April 23, 2010
I conducted a workshop two weeks ago in which a participant mentioned that some of the other participants in the room were not from “mature organizations.” He went on to explain that their organizations were still somewhat small. I countered that it’s often an illusion to assess the maturity of an organization based on it […]
By Carter McNamara on April 11, 2010
Watch the following situation occur in conversations among consultants. Many consultants place extreme value on people’s feelings, beliefs and perceptions. That’s their natural “lens” on organizations. Many of them are from fields of psychology, human resources and coaching. In my experience, they often conclude their clients have problems primarily with, for example, interpersonal conflicts, emotional […]
Carter McNamara of Authenticity Consulting, LLC, provides organizational development, consultant training and Action Learning services, and is developer of the Free Management Library. [Read more ...]