Successive Governments shake ups of the public sector, the fashion for adopting private sector ways and the tendency to name and shame led to years of plenty for management consultants. The pace of change has not slowed in fact it has quickened but NHS Trusts, Local Authorities and other public sector organisation can no longer afford the help of management consultants. This is ironic as senior managers in new slimmer management structures could certainly do with some help and due to the large number of senior managers who have recently taken early retirement there are plenty who would fancy “a bit of consultancy work”.
If you’re a well established consultancy firm you feel the impact of the public sector cuts and you experience the influx of ex directors using their contacts to do a little consultancy work, probably at a knock down price, since this is just a hobby a bit of extra holiday money. This is not to say that these individuals don’t have a lot to offer after all management consultancies were happy to snap up former directors in the good times. Their recent experience made them very attractive as interim managers, useful additions to interview panels and well equipped to do a friendly review of your service prior to a major inspection.
Interim managers in the current financial climate may be considered a bit of a luxury cheaper to act someone up. Head hunters may have had their day in all but the most senior posts. After all HR are perfectly capable of running an assessment centre, doing some benchmarking to establish the right salary and coming up with an advert and recruitment pack that sells the organisation. Why pay all that money to have a recruitment consultant ring up managers to ask them if they have seen the advert or know anyone who might be interested? We know longer need someone independent or with an expertise to give the cabinet/board the business case for moving out of direct service provision they are telling us that’s what we are going to do. And we have become a bit immune to all those evangelists telling us that their model of customer care, quality assurance or business reengineering is the answer to all our problems.
Yes our managers could do with some support. We can’t afford to be sending them on expensive MBA’s. Management learning sets could offer peer group support and shared experience, mentoring could provide advice and replace some of that wisdom lost to the organisation through large scale early retirements and executive coaching could help senior managers gain insights and improve their people skills. This type of support has tended to be viewed as management development and part of the training budget, a budget that is an easy target for savings.
My advice would be invest some of those management consultancy saving into something managers would really appreciate.
Blair McPherson author of Equipping managers for an uncertain future published by Russell House. www.blairmcpherson.co.uk
