Imagine you’re a consultant and you notice a few eyebrow-raising behaviors, such as a colleague who misuses a client’s meal stipend or an executive who screams inappropriately at his staff. Should you step in and speak up?
For consultants, especially those starting out, the tug of war of values and loyalties among clients, colleagues, and partners can present ethical issues that can be difficult to manage, says David Fubini, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School.
“You are an adviser. You are not an employee of the company you are advising,” says Fubini, who spent 34 years working at McKinsey, serving as managing director of the Boston office and leader of the global merger integration practice during that period. “These dilemmas will happen, and they will happen faster and sooner than you expect.”
“There are few bright lines on these ethical and moral issues; the lines are often blurred as to what is considered to be appropriate behavior.”
Fubini, who discusses a variety of ethical briar patches with students at HBS, has written a series of mini-cases
stemming from real predicaments his former students have faced. They are just a few examples of the challenges and skill-building topics he covers in his new HBS course entitled “Mastering Consulting and Advisory Skills” for MBA students.
“There are few bright lines on these ethical and moral issues; the lines are often blurred as to what is considered to be appropriate behavior,” Fubini says. “I tell students, never look for the line, you never want to be in the ZIP Code of the line.”
Here’s a look at three sticky situations, along with Fubini’s advice about how to handle them.
The case of the freeloading associate: A client grants a per-diem stipend to associates for food expenses while on the job. Instead of expensing meals, however, one of your coworkers grabs fast food while working through lunches and dinners, but later buys a gift card at a grocery store to make up the difference. He argues the client has already budgeted the money, so it doesn’t matter, but the practice seems to go against the spirit, if not the letter, of the expense management rules. Do you confront the person? Tell a partner? Or just ignore the transgression?
The verdict: The question of how you account for time and expenses is crucial in consulting, Fubini says, although people who say they haven’t sometimes fudged numbers out of expediency probably aren’t being honest. In a case like this, in which a coworker is visibly flouting the rules, however, speaking up is almost always the right course of action, Fubini says.
The consultant who actually witnessed this behavior ended up confronting the coworker, and the man only bragged about his ingenuity. “If you tell a partner, what will your reputation be with the other associates?” Fubini asks. “Will some ask or suggest that you are just trying to expand your prominence at someone else’s expense?”
In his three decades of consulting, Fubini witnessed all kinds of bad behavior by colleagues—shortcuts in analysis, intoxication on the job, inappropriate relationships. In general, the question you must ask is whether the issue ultimately affects the work delivered to clients and whether it harms the reputation of the firm.
“First and foremost, we are a ‘professional’ client services firm,” he says. “The client and the values of the firm are of utmost importance.”
The case of the abusive VP: During work with a client, you witness abusive behavior by a senior vice president at the firm, who uses inflammatory language, physically intimidates staff, and becomes verbally confrontational when challenged. Several staff members confide their discomfort in their boss to you, but when you bring your concerns to the partner of your firm, he advises you to just let it go. Do you alert senior leadership at the company about this problematic individual in their midst?
The verdict: As workplace standards are changing, loud and abusive behavior that may have been within acceptable standards a decade or two ago is increasingly being called out as toxic. That said, as a consultant, you aren’t operating alone, but as a part of a team, Fubini says.
“At the end of the day, you are an associate, and this is a partner-led relationship,” he says. “The partner is the one who has the core relationship with the client.” As difficult and distasteful as it may be to observe the behavior, in most cases you should defer to your partner, rather than address the problem yourself, he says. They are best positioned to judge whether the behavior is outside the norms of the client organization and whether the behavior could impact that ability of the client to implement the recommendations you might be suggesting.
The case of the AI analysis: You’re running behind on your analysis for a client and take a shortcut by relying on an artificial intelligence language model to develop some key insights. The client loves your report and praises the quality of your suggestions. Afterwards, however, you have a nagging feeling about relying on AI for suggestions, which theoretically the client could have done themselves. Should you come clean and disclose your methods after the fact?
The verdict: The question of whether and how to use artificial intelligence is a debate swirling throughout consulting—as it is throughout many industries right now. But the problem of an associate feeling pressed for time and relying on a shortcut to make a deadline is not new, Fubini says.
“The longer you wait on something, the worse it is going to be in terms of gaining absolution.”
He remembers a time when he realized one of his assumptions about a client’s project was wrong before making a big presentation to the client, and he made the uncomfortable decision to tell a partner. “I’ll never forget. He turned to me and said, ‘Does this change the modeled outcome?’ and I said no. He said, ‘Good, we’ll tell them about the wrong assumption in the meeting but not change the underlying model until after the meeting.’”
The point of the anecdote, Fubini says, is that transparency and disclosure is necessary. “The longer you wait on something, the worse it is going to be in terms of gaining absolution,” he says.
What matters most, however, is that you come up with the best recommendations for clients, not how you come up with them. In most firms, every analysis has a source noted as to how it was developed, so disclosure is critical. Even though clients will use AI themselves, consultants excel in combining AI with tried-and-true research techniques and knowledge of the client and the industry to yield better results.
Ultimately, there are clear expectations for how consultants should handle these dilemmas. As these three cases illustrate, consultants can use certain guideposts to help them manage day-to-day challenges in the most ethical and efficient way:
- Lean on your team first. Be transparent and rely on your own senior and seasoned colleagues for advice when an ethical issue arises.
- Focus on the needs of the client. Ask yourself if the work you will be delivering to a client will suffer as a result of an issue. That will help you clarify whether it’s worth questioning.
“Ultimately, you are a client-serving professional, and even your partners are going to be evaluating you on how well you serve your clients,” Fubini says. “That should be the North Star guiding everything you do.”
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