Consultancy Is A Full-Time Contact Sport | Niladri Roy, Visiting Faculty At IIM Shillong

IIM Shillong visiting faculty, Prof Niladri Roy is the Managing Partner & Co-Founder at Thought Arbitrage Transformation. At the institute, he teaches courses on Business Consulting and Strategic Human Resource Management. A Chartered Accountant by qualification and marathon runner by passion, we spoke to Prof Roy about life as a consultant.

Consultancy is thought to be a very glamorous profession, what is it actually like?

Life as a consultant is hectic with very high burnout rates, long hours spent on multiple cases, constantly moving across locations. In case you don’t enjoy a life of constant travel and ambiguity then the role of a consultant is not for you. While it looks glamorous at the face of it, I travel 180 days a year, which is far from easy. A strong mind resides in a strong body. You see, consultancy is not just a job, it’s a full-time contact sport. You must have the endurance of a marathon runner and the patience to work through all that this profession throws your way.

What are the skills needed to be a consultant?

When you enter the field, you find yourself at a very young age giving advice to people who are doing that specific job day in and day out. Garnering expertise in any domain takes a long time, and your clients know their jobs thoroughly. For example, the BFSI sector is different than the insurance sphere. How do you handle this? You need to come up with horizontal patterns in your mind. Develop metacognitive skills- it’s the ability to think and be aware. These skills come from knowledge, exposure to a discipline, and by doing it over and over- all the things your client already has. However, since consultants can’t be working on the same job over and over, we need to figure out industry patterns at a high level of abstraction, then understand the client’s level of understanding and explain it to them in their language. If you can’t figure out how to get the point across in the best possible way, you’re just a plain Jane or John.

How does one develop these skills?

You have to practice the industry patterns as I said, be able to convert the world into big blocks. Consultants need to understand that since their clients are better at the application aspect, consultants themselves need to be able to understand and grasp quicker. What really matters here is the questioning techniques, how you get the most out of your client in order to understand what the situation needs.

I would suggest that new entrants master two things- Firstly, business models to understand how a business makes money, who are its customers, what is unique about its value proposition and secondly, its operating model or the internal structure of the organisation to understand how the execution happens. For example, organisations today have vulnerable digital models, one must understand the far-reaching implications of it on the business.

What are the most challenging and essential aspects of being a consultant?

It essentially comes down to how do you engage with a client who’s older than you, and knows more about her/his field of work. How do you enable the change in the client’s mind, build a narrative, allow your knowledge and their wisdom to marry and create to the optimum solution? You have to accept that you need to understand what the client has to offer if you believe you have a silver bullet, then you’re putting yourself at risk.

The most important aspect is having the appetite to learn along with humility. Hubris is easy. You’re in a profession where you’re interacting with powerful people and you start believing that you can affect change. It’s a slippery slope!

*Editor's Note - If you wish to publish interviews with your professors or do a featured story on them, please get in touch with Nidhi at nidhi.malkan@insideiim.com