Top-tier consulting firms are notorious for two or three-year up or out policies, and poor work-life balance. But by working smarter, doing ‘just enough’ is usually sufficient for promotion and can also improve your quality of life.
Before getting into the tips, I remind you that your personal life is more important than being a good consultant. And good consultants minimise the trade-off. Below, I talk about behaviours and skills that can help you do the same.
Note that none of these tips should jeopardise the goal of doing good work for the client: it’s intended to help you get the most from the work you do, while protecting time for yourself. Let’s begin:
1. Behaviours
First: don’t be scared of being fired
Maintaining the habits I outline below will come more comfortably if you get over a fear of being fired – your professional life is unlikely to suffer as much as you may fear. It’s hard to be fired outside of normal performance evaluation processes, and even the absolute worst that can happen is a cushy exit-opportunity down the track. Not worth losing sleep over!
Limit work after 9pm
Very little value is added late at night, so don’t be afraid to leave earlier than you think you should, and deprioritise tasks to the next day. Deadlines will always be met, and the extra 10 percent achieved while pulling a late one often isn’t a career deal breaker, nor worth losing sleep over.
Work from home – or at least appear to
In the office, work tends to expand to fill the time you have available. Telling your team you prefer to work from home in the evenings will make them more conscious of helping you get out on time, and once you’re home, you’ll probably realise you don’t need to make those extra appendix slides, but you can choose to work if you need to.
Invest upfront in your reputation to coast on it later
Within your firm your reputation will precede you. Managers talk amongst themselves about juniors, just as juniors talk about their managers. Ahead of a new project, each team member will do their due diligence on you through mutual connections. When you’re first entering consulting, or starting a new project with new people it’s particularly important to over-index on effort and to do as good job as you can for at least the first two weeks. Later, if you want to take the foot off the pedal, their initial impression of you as a hard worker won’t go away and your subsequent actions will be received in light of this perception. It’s easier for someone perceived as a hard worker to take nights off than for someone perceived as a slacker, and you lay the foundation at the beginning of your time in the job or on a project.
Establish credibility
How you communicate an idea is at least as important as the content itself (and sometimes more important). Strong visual and verbal communication makes you appear confident and trustworthy. This is the basis for pulling off the practical skills below.
2. Practical skills
Prioritise speed over accuracy, and understand how to frame half-baked ideas
The quick answer is often sufficient: try not to dive into a problem and over-calculate an answer. Often, a plus-or-minus 20% answer is sufficient. Five interviews will probably give you the same insights as 20 interviews. A back-of-the-envelope calculation or 30-minute quick and dirty Excel model will get close enough to the actual answer for most purposes. If it’s not, you can do the detailed analysis on an as-needed basis. If you have sufficient credibility, the right mix of confidence and rhetoric can cover up any holes you didn’t get around to filling. Often, simple assurances can be enough: try “early analysis provided a directionally correct answer” or “I deprioritised X because Y” or “the research team advised this was an appropriate ingoing assumption”, followed by “but I’d be happy to look into it further if you think it’s worthwhile”.
Frame your actions
Your manager will not understand everything happening on the case or within your work, and their perception of your performance is more important than your actual performance. You can get away with less by guiding their attention, overplaying the difficulty or intensity of tasks, and constructing a reality in which you are working harder than you actually do. Senior managers more removed from your position don’t always have a good grasp of how long a task should take. Always ask for more time than you think you’ll need: and you will have the choice of having spare time to yourself, or appearing efficient and overdelivering with extra tasks.
(You can frame your achievements this way, too: at the start of a project, always sneak a professional strength into the areas you are seeking to work on: in your review, the manager will perceive you as having improved over the course of the project.)
Confirm the relative importance of deliverables
If you have a long list of things to do, explicitly prioritise tasks (using your manager if necessary). The last few tasks on any list are usually ‘nice to haves’ and no one will worry if they are not completed. Building on the framing point above: you can use the prioritised list to highlight to your manager which tasks you think you’ll complete, priming them to expect one to two deliverables less than you think you’ll deliver.
Only create output when absolutely necessary
Making slides takes time and often adds little that couldn’t have been communicated more concisely. Slides should be created only as a last resort or final deliverable. Phone calls, short meetings, and emails are often sufficient within teams and for many clients.
Always have someone working for you
Top-tier consulting firms have graphics and research teams – learn how to get the most out of them, especially by building good relationships with key contacts. Any mundane task should be outsourced, such as typing up handwritten notes, transcribing, minor slide edits, formatting changes, et cetera. Support teams should be supporting your work around the clock, especially overnight.
Sam Smith worked in a top-tier management consulting firm for two years before taking time out for study. They write under a pseudonym to bring you honest reflections and insider information.
Image: Unsplash