by Martin Kihn
The Mormon reappears and calls you back for your listening styles assessment.
Back in the little room, he goes around the room, starting with Military Boy. The short form of his feedback on the test instrument is this:
Military Boy—High in Analytical Listening, Low in Empathetic Listening
Troubled Teeth Woman—High in Analytical Listening, Low in Empathetic Listening
Talky Girl—Low in Analytical Listening, High in Empathetic Listening
You—High in Analytical Listening, Low in Empathetic Listening
Question: Can you spot the nonconsultant in this group?
That’s correct—it is Talky Girl, who is actually an HR person who has come up from your firm’s headquarters and is auditing the Feedback Camp for the purpose of being able, at some point in the future, to be a group session facilitator. In other words, she’s in training to be a trainer, like the Mormon.
“What we have found,” says the Mormon anticlimactically, “is that there’s remarkable consistency across the classes, over the years. The listening styles for people drawn into consulting are pretty much consistent.”
He puts up a graph that entirely backs up his point; so much so it looks like false data. Analytical listening is an average of nine out of ten over the thousands of associates who have cycled through this camp—and empathetic listening comes in around a three. There is another slide, this one charting the results of partners who have taken the assessment. Strangely, they are a bit more empathetic.
“We’re not sure what this means,” says the Mormon.
“Maybe they’re more relaxed,” says Talky Girl, betraying her superior empathy skills—which, quite frankly, you had not observed. But then, you’re probably too analytical to notice.
This feedback was a good learning for you, it turns out. You realize you are in an environment where nobody has any feelings.
Including you.
Feelings almost appear the next day, after you cross the Acid River and hurtle yourself through the Web of Pain.
The acid river is not, of course, a real river—it is a metaphor created by consultants hired by your consulting firm to train consultants in how to give feedback, this time in an outdoor setting. The metaphor-creating consultants are not like you: They wear khaki shorts and sport mustaches and tans. They are handsome men and quite flirtatious with the few ladies, including, you notice, Shelagh.
“What we need you to do,” explains one of the handsome men in khaki, entirely at ease under a large shade tree, “is to get across that river.” He points to an expanse of threadbare lawn within yards of the superhighway. Two long orange ropes mark the banks of the river, and on the far bank there is a pile of wooden boards. The river itself has “rocks” in it: irregularly spaced gray cinder blocks. It seems you will have to cross the river on the boards, supported by the cinder blocks, with a twist:
“The whole team has to get over to the other side. All of the boards have to get over to the other side. And none of the boards can touch any part of the river, just the cinder blocks.”
It is an exercise in geometry, as well as balancing on narrow boards holding hands with a person from Chicago you don’t know. You saw it in business school as well—people appear, usually men, usually in their late- or even mid-twenties, usually shorter than average—people appear and decide they are in charge and yap and yak and push people here and there like sheep in the meadow. Then, after a few minutes of futility, another person appears, this one usually a woman, also young, perhaps average height—a woman appears, and figures out the answer.
“Put one board across the cinder blocks. Then put another board on that board and a cinder block.”
At the time, in context, this is a brilliant observation.
She doesn’t help with the web of pain, but that is not a brain puzzle. It is an exercise in lifting people up and putting them down. They’re lifted by the team, stiffen their bodies, keep their hair pinned down, and are passed through a web that looks like an acrobat’s net turned vertically. There are dire consequences for touching the plastic mesh on the way through the web.
For the debrief, you retire to a porch next to the tennis courts as the sun goes down over ConferenceLand and you assemble fold-up chairs into a time-honored circle of truth.
The head khaki man is glowing with health, while the rest of you are itchy and smell. The highway gets louder. You could really use a Fast Break.
After a moment to respect the moment, the khaki man says, “What did we learn from the web of pain and the acid river?”
The correct answer is: Nothing.
Nobody says it. And you are astonished, but nobody tries to be funny. They are surpassingly serious, this new class of drones.
“We learned that it’s really important to work as a team.”
“And…?”
“And that’s all.”
“What did you learn about working as a team?”
“That it’s really important.”
“Besides that?”
Blank looks—when you start this far from the truth, it is almost impossible to leave the realm of cliché. Debriefing phoniness requires phoniness in return.
And as you pack up the boards and disassemble the web of pain, you find yourself working beside the junior khaki man, the one with the mustache, and you venture: “So… what were we supposed to learn from this?”
It was now a pile of aluminum poles and a mess of mesh in the dirt.
“I don’t know,” he says not thoughtfully. “I think you’re supposed to tell us.”
Every year, either in March or in September depending upon when they started work, the members of your firm are appraised using a method called “360 Degrees.” This refers not to the temperature of the appraisee but to a concept of fairness wherein all those around the victim are contacted to deliver their feedback: underlings, peers, superiors, and the superiors of superiors who may have something to say. This feedback is delivered anonymously to an appraiser who, by definition, does not know the victim or, if she knows him, has not worked with him. Thus, the appraiser is free to form a negative impression of the victim based not upon personal loathing but upon off-the-record insults delivered by those in a better position to be unimpressed. Once all “360 Degrees” of co-workers have been interviewed, the appraiser completes a six-page appraisal feedback form, which attempts to inject objectivity into what is essentially a binary process—she is/is not good—by forcing observations into various matrices and “skill areas” supposedly useful for executing the job. Strengths are called “core competencies.” Weaknesses are called “development areas.”
Once complete, the appraisal document is discussed in the course of a two-day set of meetings. Only staffers of a higher rank than the appraisee are welcome—no peers. The appraisee/victim herself is not invited. A verdict is reached, often within minutes. The next victim’s appraiser appears.
Some weeks later—and, at times, not at all—those victims not immediately relieved of their livelihoods will sit down with the appraiser and receive the “feedback,” with particular emphasis upon the development opportunities identified. It is made clear that, if these development opportunities are not addressed, there will be no more appraisals.
Now, some at the firm like this “360 Degree”/anonymous system and believe it is “as fair as it can be.”
You would disagree, based upon two facts:
Fact 1: The appraisal interviews are conducted off a list drawn up by the victim herself. The only people contacted to provide feedback are those the victim has named, giving appraisees some real discretion in weeding out sources of trouble. Few of us are universally loathed; there are usually only pockets of antipathy. A job manager cannot be excluded, of course, without the appraiser getting wise. But job managers are rarely the problem. The problem is peers—all those mini-Machiavellis gaming the system by doing body slams on as many hapless peers as they can. Or perhaps peers who have seen through you to the inep
t depths below the glib surface. Whoever—these can be neutralized via a carefully honed list.
Fact 2: The appraisal is a charade.
Fact 2 may require some explanation. You are too angry to explain the obvious, that the appraisal process provides an arbitrary Potemkin façade to an equal-opportunity maw of destruction.
You are angry because you learned something, about four weeks after Feedback Camp ended, from which the only things you took away were eight pounds of ugly fat plastered to your sides and a bad case of low self-esteem.
You learned that, after her appraisal, they fired Shelagh.
Her feedback was she didn’t “know how to listen.”
The Complete Consultant’s Dictionary
Imagine you are listening.
It gets worse—now, imagine you are listening to a consultant.
She is dressed in the McKinsey uniform of black outside, white inside, and she is standing on a slightly raised dais in a cavernous hall with some company’s logo woven into banners draped across walls in the darkness. An audience surrounds her; some sit behind her at a long table the length of a darkened stage, populated by clean water pitchers and august old men and women at rest. You are in a large and hugely silent group of, say, three hundred people in stadium seats facing her. She is pretty and for that and other reasons you find yourself interested in what she has to say.
Looking down at some notes on the dais, she takes a sip of water from a glass and replaces it.
Then she begins to speak.
She says this:
Thank you for coming. Today I’d like to socialize our sanity check and robustify the straw man we set up to drive your strong-form learnings going forward. As you know, when we ramped up the pod and began to iterate on the so-what’s, we architected a baseline without boiling the ocean or reinventing the wheel. At the end of the day—net net—our key take-away was that the environmentals in this space are target-rich, and with the right learnings we could chunk out a deck that laid out the red light/green light to top-line growth. We knew this gap analysis was far short of a grand unifying theory, but we liaised with the stakeholders and put a chinning bar up. After a few revs, we got some reasonable pushback that—while our hypotheses were sufficiently outside the box—they were also sporty, and perhaps even off the reservation. Our worry bead at that point was that we were populating a deliverable, but we were not far enough along the curve—and may even, frankly, have been building a mag-a-logue that couldn’t pass the red-face test. Off the record, it was largely PIOUTA and FHA.
[long pause for laughter]
So we did a process check—and a bio break or two [more laughter]—and we decided our journeyline was suboptimal. We got no sat from the client team. A realization came that we were noodling around in la-la mode while we were in reality being incentivized to plug in our skillsets and knowledgeware to drive step change. We were visioning the incrementals, though we had been tasked to blue-sky rich change and drill down to the bogey of really opening the kimono. Once we understood the disconnect, we had a food fight with the summers on the farmer’s math [titters]… and we did what we had to. The stakeholders threw up on the process deck, and we were on receive. We needed to vision this wasn’t the moral equivalent of being the stuckee on a cactus job in a pre-Excellence ecosystem. No—we needed to make a five-forty to keep our cadence true north.
[pause for water and approbation]
The pod remained convinced there was a burning platform, but didn’t have the bandwidth to go into a black factory and blow up the paradigms with a white paper. Ultimately, we fell back on our core competency—we did a bounceback into crunch mode, and reached for your internal capital to take on a brain dump and data dump. With all the air cover we called in, the engagement became a kind of deathmarch into la-la land. But we didn’t want to end up as new alums.
[she chuckles, alone]
Our journeyline took on a lot more granularity. We got better visibility into the real drivers of our exposure, and decided it was game over if we didn’t change the optics. So we did that, and some client education. We knew this particular knowledgeware could have knock-on effects—and could even hockeystick into an advance, or some afterwork. It was determined by the SAs to pro-act and risk the pain zone. They pinged the practice area internal thought leaders and got some key parachutage into the critical path. After that, we were able to avoid a showstopper by assembling a series of work streams to craft a deliverable with a true end state vision.
[she looks directly at the audience, pausing for effect]
What we need now is your buy-in for the warm handoff and a warm fuzzy—not to mention the call up for afterwork!
With a triumphant flip of her mane—it’s a magnificent golden umber—she steps back to greet the applause.
And it comes… slowly at first, then with more vigor as the old men and women at the long table begin to bang their raw claws together like carpet beaters and—yes!—it is a triumph… a speech for the ages… and you join them—how could you not?—as the approval rolls over the crowd like a wave of despair….
The one question you would have is: What did she say?
You look at the program. It says that her name is Meredith, she went to HBS and works at McKinsey for the Rainmaker. She studied speechwriting with Barbara Minto in England. She is more intelligent than you; that much is clear. And popular, to judge from the calls for an encore! rampaging through the room.
What do these people know that you do not? For to you—to you, her speech was indecipherable. Words and phrases held together, but only for a moment, and the moment’s gone.
Much later, when a sympathetic partner takes pity on you, you will learn that the only difference between these enthusiastic speech lovers and yourself is a slim pamphlet entitled The Complete Consultant’s Dictionary: Words & Phrases You Need to Know to Talk Like a Top-Tier Management Consultant. The pamphlet contains fewer than two hundred critical words and phrases and their English translations—words and phrases all consultants know, and use to distance themselves from the truth. Each profession has its jargon, of course; it’s a mechanism for inclusion and, more important, exclusion. Private languages are used by gangs, by married couples with their baby talk and cooing, by pediatricians and bartenders and venture capitalists. “Ce sera notre problème,” says theorist Jacques Lacan, “quand nous aborderons la fonction du transfert, de saisir comment le transfert peut nous conduire au coeur de la répétition.”35
Consultants are no different. No, actually, they are—for their jargon must exclude without being unapproachable. It must function along very slender dimensions, creating a patina of authority and internal wisdom while also seeming quite clearly to say something to the listener, the industrialist, who has his own language of choice.
If you’d had your dictionary with you that day, you would have been able to translate Meredith’s speech into English. It would have read something like this:
Thank you for coming. Today I’d like to tell you what we have been doing. When we got here, we believed you were in a troubled industry and we could probably figure out some way to help. But we showed you a few ideas, and you didn’t like them.
[long pause for laughter]
So we did some soul-searching and decided to try again.
[pause for water and approbation]
We still felt like you were in trouble. To cover our asses, we called in some additional partners, even though we knew this probably meant more work for us. We also did some actual research—we didn’t want to get fired.
[she chuckles, alone]
We figured out you weren’t happy with the $1,500 team dinners, so we cut down and scheduled many pointless meetings with you to make you like us. Also, we found someone in our firm who knew something. After that, we put together a slide show we hope you’ll like better.
[she looks directly at the audience, pausing for effect]
What we need now is your agreement that we can stay!
&nb
sp; You see—entirely clear. Well-structured, even.
Encore.
SELECTIONS FROM THE COMPLETE CONSULTANT’S DICTIONARY36
Words & Phrases You Need to Know to Talk Like a Top-Tier Management Consultant
Consulting Word/Phrase p.o.s. Definition / Used in a Sentence…
afterwork n work done after the original engagement ends, for an additional fee; the ultimate goal of all consulting, really
bake off n process whereby a sadistic client auditions a number of different top-tier consulting firms for the same engagement, only to hire none of them
beachage, beach time n time between engagements; usu. spent pretending to optimize your knowledgeware
bio break n an extended process check, to allow for #2; usu. can only be called by partners over fifty
black factory n where consultants go when they’re doing an open-ended “study” no one will ever read
boil the ocean v phr what associates do, when they are not reinventing the wheel
brain dump n process of a person who actually knows something imparting information to a consultant
counsel out vt ax; terminate; fire
data dump n same as a brain dump, only more numerical
deathmarch n an engagement that rarely ventures out of the pain zone
dentists n investors
farmer’s math n flawed, quick, in-the-ballpark calculation; usu. accepted as the answer because it is done in public by a partner
FHA adj made up; comes from, “from Henry’s ass,” although Henry remains unidentified
five-forty n changing your mind, changing it back, then changing it again; a combination of doing a three-sixty and a one-eighty
la-la land n la-la mode that extends beyond six hours… to a few months
la-la mode n state of doing nothing, usually waiting for a data dump from the client
new alums n recently fired employees
pain zone n the product of (a) the number of partners involved in an engagement and (b) the inverse of the time until the first deliverable