A Consultant Journal – Lessons From The Field

Most of my client engagements are intensive sessions of three to four days. We create strategy summits, leadership and talent development programs and business transformation retreats. The creative component is in the unique customized experience we create to address the needs of the particular management team.

Executives often think that three or four days is asking a lot, that they don’t have the time or can’t afford to be away for so long. They think it’s too much until they are in the session and discover that the benefits and output is not just stratospherically higher and greater but that we are able to get to so much that they can never unleash and attain in the ongoing pedal-to-the-metal drive in the office.
There is nothing more exciting than a management team discovering each other in a new way inside a greater vision and purpose. They are then ready to breakthrough into territories and possibilities that were not attainable before and come up with innovative solutions that thrill them into unified action. It’s a transformational experience.

I get to see and experience it and facilitate and enable the breakthrough and the discovery. And I get to put on many hats – the consultant hat, the teacher hat, the coach hat, the transformational enabler and the trusted confidant hat and more. I don’t need to know the client’s business better than they do. That is their job. What I do is help them remove the blockage between where they are and where their greater potential waits for them.

On the Art—Science continuum what I do is probably more on the art side but the truth is that it’s both. I suppose it’s a form of mastery. What’s exciting about this work? Enabling people to discover and unleash greatness? I don’t know anything more exciting!

Read Part Two here.
© Aviv Shahar