Social skills in classic consulting: Necessary to achieve a goal.
Empathy is the ability to understand another person’s emotions, motives, or thoughts. Or in other words, the ability to empathize with another person. But most consultancies (let’s call them neutral “classic consultancies”) have no use for this ability. Consulting projects of classic consultancies are subordinate to a – preferably measurable – goal. The way there is fact-based and as “unemotional” as possible. According to classic consultancies, social skills help to achieve project goals in the best possible way and they are subordinate to these goals. In this way, the required social skills are quickly determined: A confident appearance, for example, to be able to competently present the analyzes that have been worked out. Or the power of persuasion to convince the customer’s critical employees of a certain course of action.
It is the task of the consultant to convince the customer of the recommendations for action that have already been worked out on the basis of extensive analyses. The customer follows the analysis and social skills are required to get the customer there.
Empathy as a diamond among social skills: A completely contrary approach.
The entire model of classic consulting is turned on its head as soon as the consultant makes it his task to take care of his customers. At Tangram Strategy Consulting, we follow exactly this approach. We take care and we relieve our clients of worries, hardships, fears, stress and chaos. That’s our job and we can only do it if we understand our customers perfectly. How is that supposed to work out without the ability to empathize? In our eyes, empathy is the diamond among the social skills and a real differentiation criterion of otherwise sometimes difficult to distinguish consultancies.
We try to understand what our customer really needs. These can be well-founded analyzes or an audit of an ongoing project. We are flexible here and focus on the needs of our customers. And the more complex projects are, the faster the goals can change. Reason enough for us to only be satisfied when the customer is and not when we have convinced the customer of “our” goal.