The consultant narrative: control your reputation by following these 3 steps
The consultant narrative: control your reputation by following these 3 steps
Reputation is the stock market of the office. Buy low, sell high, right?
However, unlike stocks, you can’t just trade your way to a stellar reputation: you’ve got to do the hard work to build it up from scratch.
If you are a young consultant, you are sitting on a gold mine of opportunity to shape how people perceive you. No baggage, a clean slate, and rooms full of people who are ready to form an opinion about you.
Today, I want to talk about the 3 steps you need to follow to create the reputation you want in a management consulting work environment.
The 3 steps to a stellar reputation in consulting
These 3 critical steps are deceptively straightforward yet challenging to master.
By following these, you will be set on the path to not just building but cultivating the reputation you aspire to hold:
Deliver quality
Know Your Audience
Self-promote (without looking like an a**hole)
Step 1: Always deliver quality work
Whatever your area of expertise might be, nothing tanks your reputation faster than sloppy deliverables.
For example, I will never forget a PowerPoint deck with typos.
I know sometimes you are asked to produce something fast and iterate later. You are told “not to worry about making it pretty”.
This suggestion is somehow true, but mostly not.
Your boss likely wants quality at the first touchpoint.
Anything other than quality screams carelessness.
Speed and agility are important, of course, but “iterate later” should never mean “ignore the errors now”. Your boss, and definitely your clients, are looking for that sweet spot where timeliness meets meticulousness.
First impressions are potent because they set the tone.
And in consulting, where your currency is your expertise and your reputation, a deliverable with mistakes can cost you more than just an awkward conversation.
It can cost you trust: the bedrock of any consulting relationship.
Step 2: Take time to Know Your Audience
In a consulting environment, your audience is as diverse as a UN meeting.
You know how it works: you have partners eyeing revenues, senior managers looking at utilization rates, and teammates concerned with who’s doing their fair share of the grunt work.
If you are constantly talking up your client-revenue-increasing exploits, the partners might love you, but your teammates? They might start thinking you’re just in it for yourself.
In management consulting, the weak link to achieve great objectives can often be team cohesion. If your colleagues find you obnoxious, it’s going to be hard to collaborate effectively.
Consider, too, the subtle nuances of different corporate cultures and client expectations.
Some work environments value modesty and let results speak for themselves. Others celebrate victories loudly and publicly.
Always be mindful of the context - you have to be strategic.
You need to selectively illuminate your successes in a way that also casts a favorable glow on those around you.
This leads us to the next step: self-promotion.
Step 3: Self-promote (but don’t look like an a**hole)
It might be useful to think of your work reputation as a multi-faceted diamond, reflecting light - or lack thereof - in different directions.
One facet might be your technical prowess, another could be your team-player vibe, and yet another could be your knack for client relations.
Self-promotion tends to light up only one facet - your achievements, for example - but leaves the others in the dark. While you’re gleaming in one direction, you might be causing shadows elsewhere.
Let’s see how to address this.
Did you managed to fix a complex bug in half of the originally estimated time? Awesome.
But maybe the tale you tell isn’t just about your technical genius: it’s about how the whole team came together - the functional consultant, the tester, your developer colleague - each contributing their unique skills to smash expectations.
That story not only makes you look good, but it also paints you as a unifying team player.
Plus, it recognizes others, which is crucial for earning respect.
That is how a small change in the narrative can lead to a big change in perception.
Become a soft-skills master
If the complexity of this balancing act is making your head spin, I get it.
If this was easy, everybody would do it.
Reputation-building in management consulting hinges not just on the hard evidence of your skills but equally on the soft, subtle art of human interaction.
It’s the soft skills - those personal attributes that enable harmonious and effective communication - that are the true architects of your professional standing.
To recap:
Quality work is your foundation. It’s more than a finished product. It’s a testament to your dedication, a mirror reflecting your attention to detail and your passion for excellence.
Knowing your audience, then, is the empathy in play. It’s the ability to listen, adapt, and respond to the unspoken needs and expectations of those different people around you.
Self-promotion is perhaps the most nuanced of arts. It’s the personal brand you build, not just through what you say about yourself, but how you say it and the impact it has on your peers. It’s about strategic visibility, the kind that illuminates your contributions while harmonizing with the collective effort.
Think in these terms.
If you have spent years perfecting your industry domain knowledge, your niche competence in designing operating models, your understanding of hyperscalers architectures (or whatever else that you do in your consulting job), then you must realize you need to spend time to improve your soft skills.
It’s the mastery of these intangibles that transforms a professional into a figure of lasting influence and respect.
Totally agree with you. I could not say which one of the three are the most important, so I'll say all of them are really important.
In my experience, I couldn't promote for so long, more than 10 years, because I didn't know my audience, or, in my case, the person in charge to say who promotes and who doesn't. I was lucky to comment it to him in a not meaningful conversation and, one month later, I promoted.
My lesson learned here is to understand and know the key persons at your company so points 2 and 3 will be easier.
What do you think?
I’m so with you on all three points, and notably the first. I haven’t heard it expressed quite like this before. But even a draft or interim deliverable deserves the respect for its reader to be of decent quality. There’s little excuse for poor spelling or grammar, particularly now that so much automation is available for it.
Thanks for the write-up.