6. CONSULTANT ROLES When helping an individual, a group, an organization, or a larger social system, a consultant fulfills a number of roles that he or she judges to be appropriate for the client, the situation, and his or her own style. Argyris (1970) and Blake and Mouton (1976) clarified consultant roles in terms of the intervention strategies used. The intervention decisions are steered by the values and sensitivities of the consultant and the needs of the client. Bennis (1973) identified three roles for a change agent: training, consulting, and applied research. Although Bennis did not focus solely on consulting, he emphasized the roles of educator and fact finder. Preston (1988) agreed that in large systems change, management must be involved in power culture change. Through this process, power and politics will become part of organization development theory and methodology. Greiner (1988) discussed the factors involved in the development of a long-term, confidant-type relationship between a chief executive officer or senior executive and a consultant. The executive must perceive the qualities of trust and wisdom in the consultant before such a relationship can emerge. Consultants should share opinions and past experience but leave it to the executive to make a decision, and they should be prepared to find additional consultation sources as necessary. In their monograph, Lawrence and Lorsch (1969) proposed a three fold role for the OD specialist: educator, diagnostician, and consultant. They wrote: If an OD specialist is going to be effective at achieving both commitment to, and more sophisticated solutions for, organization development issues, he will have to clearly view his role as that of an educator and a diagnostician, as well as a consultant. That is, he will have to be able to develop techniques for identifying organization problems and analyzing their causes. He will have to be able to educate managers and other organization members in the use of concepts to conduct diagnoses and to plan action. Finally, he will have to act as a consultant in providing his own action proposals for the managers to consider. Menzel (1975) and Havelock (1973) added a fourth role of linker to the three indicated above. They presented the linker function as the awareness of resources and the linking of the needs of the client and relevant resources. In a provocative article, "Consultants and Detectives," Steele (1969) suggested that consultant roles are similar to those of fictional British detectives. Both roles share several attributes, as follows: * The temporary nature of involvement in a system; * The focus on gathering evidence and trying to solve the puzzles which it represents; * The potential for "dramatics"; * The potential action orientation and the excitement it contains; * The stance of "expert" in behavioral science; and * The stimulation of working on several "cases" at once. Steele pointed out several responsibilities that must be assumed by the consultant to prevent aforementioned satisfactions from getting out of hand: * Promoting consciousness of self; * Avoiding incorporation into the client system; * Arranging for some collaborator or "sounding board" with whom to check perceptions, ideas, feelings; * Using intuition as one means of generating ways to understand the situation; and * Being wary of the tendency to lump people into the oversimplified categories of "good" and "bad." These varied observations make it difficult to define one set of specific roles for a consultant. In a helpful model, Margulies and Raia (1972) divide consultative roles into "task- oriented" and "process-oriented" roles. Lippitt and Lippitt (1986) used the word "advocate" in the context of consulting. They believed that an advocate may be seen as: * A fighter; * A strong believer; * A provocateur; * One who is aggressive in attempting to influence others; * A person with guts; * A persuader; and * An expert with a highly directive posture. These descriptions evoke a strong image. The consultant as an advocate is seen as using power, influence, and an element of mobilizing force or a threat of consequences to impose his or her ideas and values. If however, the consultant is viewed in general as a person who attempts to help others solve problems, the advocate role can present some difficulties. It would seem that an advocate might make a practice of telling people what to do. However, all this research into the nature of the helping relationship suggests that dependence on the helper is usually not in the long-range interests of the client; clients must have an active role in the solution of their own problems. One method of sorting out this situation is to make a distinction between the content and process advocate consultant: * In the content or positional advocacy role, the consultant influences the client to choose or accept particular goals, values, or actions. * In the process or methodological advocacy role, the consultant influences the client to become active as a problem solver and to use certain methods of problem solving--but is careful not to become an advocate for any particular solution (Lippitt and Lippitt, 1986, p. 63). Another role is that of the information specialist who, through his or her knowledge, skill, and professional experience, is engaged as an internal or external consultant to provide special-knowledge services. The client is mainly responsible for defining the problem and the objectives of the consultation, and the consultant assumes a directive role until the client is comfortable with the particular approach recommended. In some cases, consultants never move out of this role as indicated by Steele (1969): I think the role of "expert" is a quite seductive one for the consultant--all the more so in behavioral sciences since the variables and their relationships are often quite fuzzy and complex. It can be quite personally gratifying to have others see me as someone who really "knows" what is going on or what should be done in a given situation. Besides personal gratification on the part of the consultant, another factor pushes him toward the stance of expert: the client's wish to see himself safely in the hands of an expert who is wise and able so that the anxiety over present or future difficulties can be reduced (p. 69). Some consultants feel that the role of process specialist is appropriate, but the role of content expert should be avoided. This position is espoused by Schein (1969), who stated that: [the] consultant should not withhold his expertise on matters of the learning process itself; but he should be very careful not to confuse being an expert on how to help an organization to learn with being an expert on the actual management problems which the organization is trying to solve. Lippitt and Lippitt (1986) maintained that it is essential that every internal and external consultant should be able to function in the role of trainer/educator. The consultant may be a creator of learning experiences or a direct teacher using the skills of a designer, leader, and evaluator of the learning process. The capacity to train and educate is essential to many helping situations, particularly when a specific learning process is indicated in order for the client system to acquire competence in certain areas. The authors observed that the implementation of new organizational methods, such as management by objectives (MBO), or strategic planning, often fails because the consultant and the organization's leaders do not give proper attention to the training process. If people in the organization are not skilled in one-to-one relationships, interviewing, and on-the-job observation, the procedures and forms and of an innovation will not work. The consultant might consider some form of training functions as part of the helping role when: * An organization wants to develop its own strategy for employee self-development and self-confidence and encourage authentic interpersonal competence in its staff; * A commitment has been made to re-educate staff members in human relations in order to alter their attitudes and behavior; * An organization wants to develop or cultivate the interpersonal skills of key individuals to increase the effectiveness of individual and group problem solving; * An organization wants to promote an adaptive style of interpersonal competence, focusing on the value and development of responsibility; esteem, and self- acceptance; or * A client system needs to develop new job skills or enrich current jobs for better performance (p. 65). When functioning as a trainer/educator, the consultant must be able to: * Assess the training needs related to the problem involved; * Develop and state measurable objectives for learning experiences; * Understand the learning and change process; * Design a learning experience; * Plan and design educational events; * Go beyond traditional training and use heuristic laboratory methods; * Employ multiple learning stimuli, including various kinds of media; * Serve as a group teacher or trainer; and * Help others to learn how to learn (p. 65). In the role of identifier of alternatives and linker to resources, the consultant must identify alternative solutions to problems and establish criteria for evaluating each alternative, determining its cause-and-effect relationships; assess the probable consequences of each alternative; and link the client with the internal and/or external resources that may be able to provide additional help in solving the problems (p. 66). Some people feel that the role of linker is separate from that of identifier. According to Havelock (1973), the linker is "someone who knows about resources, knows about the people's needs, and knows how to bring client and resource's together" (p. 18). The exceptional consultant does not limit the alternatives and resources to his or her own area of expertise. As French and Bell (1973) point out: In the future, organization development specialists must know more about such matters (i.e., the task, technical and structural aspects and their interdependencies) and must establish linkages with practitioners in such fields as management science, personnel and industrial psychology, operations research, and industrial engineering in order to provide a broader range of options for organizational intervention. It is essential that the consultant function as a process specialist. Schein (1969) defined this role as follows: Process consultation is a set of activities on the part of the consultant which help the client to better perceive, understand, and act upon process events which occur in the client's environment (p. 9). The process consultant works with the client to develop the client's diagnostic skills in addressing specific problems, focusing on "How Things Are Done" rather than what tests are performed. He or she helps the client to integrate interpersonal and group skills and events with task-oriented activities and to support the improvement of relationships. The role of consultant as objective observer consists of a series of consultant activities directed at stimulating the client toward some insights into growth, a discovery of more effective methods, a look at long-range change, and greater independence. this is the most nondirective of the consulting roles (Lippitt & Lippitt, 1986, p. 70). The role of objective observer requires some trade-offs that should be considered when using this approach. One trade off involves, on the one side, the consultant's commitment of time and flexibility, and on the other side, the client's acceptance and trust of the consultant. Two points can be made about the nondirective observer role: 1. When performing as an objective observer, the consultant must continue the role until the client reaches a decision. This somewhat reduces the consultant's degree of control over the time spent with the client. 2. This form of consultation tends to increase the levels of frustration within the client system. Although this heightened level of frustration usually precedes increased self-awareness on the part of the client, it may be unacceptable to a business organization or to an executive in a demanding environment (p. 71). This role, like all the others, is usually not carried out in a pure form; most consultants use multiple roles in working with a client. The determining factors in the consultant's choice of roles are his or her natural predilections and competencies. Personal style, as Walton (1969) pointed out, strongly conditions the roles and interventions of the consultant. Interpersonal competence, including self-awareness, is the first skill that Beckhard (1969) listed as a requirement for the OD consultant. Self-awareness that leads to interpersonal competence implies an acceptance of one's limitations. Therefore, role choice is likely affected by the consultant's view of the role in which he or she feels most effective and comfortable. The greater the versatility and the broader the role repertoire of the consultant, the more likely he or she is to succeed in a variety of settings. Preston (1988) suggested that the change agent must accept the role of the leader and move conflict in positive directions. Power and politics may be the key to organizational change, regardless of size. Unless the consultant takes into consideration these two dynamic and sometimes overwhelming forces, successful consultation is doomed. Examples abound regarding the shortsightedness of the consultant who failed to consider the forces affecting the client system.