Why Corporate Coaching?

I have seen a lot of companies in all sorts of industries and countries. I got to know hundreds of managers and executives and from many of those discussions with them I realised that even though management consulting is still vital for pretty much all businesses, there are 2 areas where the product "management consulting" itself needs improving - the overall project cost for the client and the promised sustainability of results.

Cost: Having a team of management consultants on site for months is expensive. The average daily fee per consultant is around GBP 2000, and many companies, especially smaller and medium sized ones, simply cannot afford it. Also, smaller departments within big enterprises are subject to budget constraints and therefore limited in their choice of departmental expenditure.

Quite often my clients are telling me in confidence that if they had known me before the project they had given the assignment to me directly rather than through the consultancy. Clients do think in terms of cost, and many consultancies seem to forget that.

Sustainability of results: Every consultancy I worked with so far promises this. And there are various concepts and methods of how to achieve sustainability. They all seem to work somehow, but they are more or less far from ideal. For me the biggest problem is that many consultants tend to be "control-freaky perfectionists" who work extremely hard to deliver a top-quality product. But often they forget that the client cannot follow and has not been involved enough in the development phase of those concepts. For example, consultants deliver the best ever Excel-based planning tools, Access databases or even write whole programs which nobody understands and can work with. Initially, they all look fine and solve all the problems, but what happens after the project when alterations are needed? Who can make them other than the developer?

Apart from lack of client involvement the whole subject of sustainability is often pushed and dealt with into the "follow-up phase" of any project. Those phases are usually not part of the project and need to be extra sold and added afterwards. Clients are faced with extra costs they have not anticipated initially.

I don't want to elaborate any further, but it is clear - there is room for improvement and Corporate Coaching can help.

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Roland Brunner (Corporate Coaching - Management Consulting)