Escaping the Rightness Trap

Given a choice between having a strategy consultant who is right and one who is helpful, which would you choose? What’s the difference? For starters, being right is about having a solution, an answer to the question, an approach that will generate the desired outcome. It’s what happens when you combine different perspectives and facts and create a new path forward. Being helpful is about being able to contribute to how a client moves forward, getting them unstuck and building momentum in a better direction than before. Put simply, being right is about finding the answer. Being helpful is about putting an answer into practice.

Lately I’ve been inclined to believe that a helpful consultant is far more valuable than one who is merely right.

Now, certainly, a consultant who is both right and helpful is ideal.  But lately I’ve been inclined to believe that the latter – a helpful consultant – is far more valuable than one who is merely right. Sometimes, in fact, being helpful but not necessarily having the right answer at the read is even more helpful. Hear me out. 

When I was a junior strategist (read: account planning coordinator before I was even promoted to the coveted role of junior account planner) I believed that being right mattered more than anything else. Put differently, being more right than anyone else involved in the work was key. That is not the same as not being wrong, mind you. Being wrong was grounds for seeking a new line of work. In order to ensure that I was more right, I tried to do more. I gathered research, I built slides, I crafted logical, strategic arguments that led to the irrefutable conclusion that whatever I was suggesting was, in fact, right. Which meant that clients, colleagues, creative teams all agreed with me, heeded my advice and did exactly as they were told. 

Except they didn’t. 

I expected clients, colleagues, creative teams to all agree with me, heed my advice and do exactly as they were told. 

Except they didn’t. 

As often as not (and maybe more often than not, if I’m going to be honest), my advice was not heeded. Sometimes it was a starting point for something else. Sometimes it was ignored completely. Sometimes I was sent back to the drawing board. I could handle all-nighters, do research in five cities in three timezones in one week, and craft 100-page presentations, but being told that I wasn’t right? No good, go home. 

And so it went. When the CEO of a certain software company in Redmond shook his head and grunted at my analysis of when they needed to start worrying about a certain computer company in Cupertino, I couldn’t believe it. When a bank CMO disagreed with my conclusion that they needed to rebuild trust by admitting their mistakes following the global financial crisis, I didn’t understand. And when the head of the consulting firm I was working with disagreed with my recommendation that we shut all of the underperforming offices and only focus on the ones that worked, I just couldn’t understand how he could disagree with my very conclusions. It took a client whose company had just been acquired to help me see that my job wasn’t to be right, it was to be helpful. 

But, for some reason, when the founder of a newly acquired software company listened to my analysis of how he ought to adopt the new parent company’s brand, retire the one he’d built up, and reap all the rewards of lower marketing costs, I realized that I was the one who had it wrong. My job wasn’t to be right. My job was to be helpful. 

My job wasn’t to be right. My job was to be helpful. 

This leader had been very polite. He’d listened to the team’s analysis around how quickly his brand could be retired and rolled into the brand of its new owners. He asked some pointed questions, nodded along as I built up to the inevitable “recommendation” section, and even smiled as I explained how nothing would be lost by migrating as quickly as possible. Then he said something along the lines of “Thank you for this amazing analysis. Really good work, some great findings. But, we’re not going to do that.” As it turned out, the question his team had asked us to address (What should we do?) was not the one he wanted an answer to (What’s the cost of keeping our brand?). Even though I’d answered the team’s question, we managed to give the founder enough to help him navigate the tricky waters even if our recommendation – the right answer – wasn’t right for him. And we didn’t get fired.

The more helpful you are, the better the chances your advice will be listened to.

If we think about the ways in which we as consultants can add value, it’s easy to fall into the rightness trap. That’s when for whatever reason, in our pursuit of the right answer, we forget to be helpful. It doesn’t matter if you're two years or twenty-two years into your career, the trap is always there. The trap is assuming that above all else, being right is the value creator for your clients. The truth is getting your clients to a right enough answer – one that they can own, sell in, put into practice and get results from – is more helpful than just giving them an answer. It’s why so many of us rely on client workshops to develop our recommendations. It doesn’t save time or money (I’ve priced it out more times than I care to remember); it doesn’t yield better, less biased answers; it doesn’t even lead to more follow on work. It does, however, get different stakeholders around the same table, foster a good discussion and lead to an answer that is helpful.

So, here’s a set of approaches I’ve been known to offer up to help folks starting out their careers as strategists, clients who are trying to build a practice within their organizations, and colleagues who seem to be teetering on the edge of the rightness trap.

Four ways to be a more helpful strategy consultant