Consulting for a purpose

By Fiona Czerniawska.

Sometimes you really, really want to scream.

The consulting industry has one of the best value propositions of any industry in the world. What do consultants do? They make business better. So what do they say they do? They talk about how good they are at teaming, and at cross-border working. They tell us they’re more innovative than the next firm, better at implementing than the last. But do they tell us that they’re going to make our organisations better? As I said, in the deafening silence, you want to scream with frustration.

The result of this is all around us: yet again this year our client data points to a wide gap between perceptions of quality and value in consulting–a point we’ve made before in this blog.

So it’s been with particular interest that I’ve been following the evolution of EY’s claim that it’s “building a better working world”. We’ve all seen the adverts, but what does it mean in practice?

I’m not the only one to pose that question. “We used to have the strap line: quality in everything we do,” recalls Amy Brachio, who’s not only EY’s global advisory head of risk but also its purpose champion for Americas Advisory. “When we changed to ‘building a better working world’, it sounded really good, but what did it mean? I’d worked with large banks around customer protection so it was comparatively easy to align the type of work I personally did with this statement, but the challenge has been how to make it meaningful to everyone in our business, irrespective of the area they work in. ‘Building a better working world’ had to be part of what we do, not just simply something that we say.”

Having a brand that’s built around a purpose is very different to one that’s focused on a set of products, characteristics, or even values. As Simon Sinek–the mover and shaker in this field–says, it takes an organisation from thinking about what and how it does, to why it does it. But that poses real challenges for an industry that relies on people living the brand. “It’s crucial that we make ‘building a better working world’ personal to everyone involved,” says Brachio, “and a key part to this is story-telling. We’ve worked with Sinek to develop ‘why’ stories for different parts of our business– we’ve got an entire team of people trained in this now and we share stories on Yammer; we’re also sharing them externally for recruitment purposes. We’re getting new recruits to talk about their purpose as part of our on-boarding process. People need to choose their own ‘why’ story, because this is how they’ll connect to ‘building a better working world’. The more real we make ‘building a better working world’, the more effective it is at attracting new employees and strengthening our client relationships.”

Brachio asserts that having a clear, highly visible purpose has changed the relationship EY has with its clients: “It gives us a new dimension of alignment–we’re working with organisations who share our purpose. We’re working with a company where their CIO wants to make a positive effort to employ people with autism, and the fact our purpose is so central to what we’re doing creates a very different type of conversation.”

But what do clients say? “For us, ‘building a better working world’ sums up why we use EY,” says Char Suter, Director, Marketing Operations at Citi.  “It’s partly to do with the types of work we ask EY to work on, but it’s also to do with the way EY works.  Their team feels like our team, to a point where it’s not clear where one starts and the other finishes. When something goes well they don’t take the credit, but give it to our employees – just as a good manager would.” But “building a better working world” means more to Suter than that: “It suggests that we’re working together to think ahead – to anticipate and plan for the challenges and opportunities we’ll inevitably face in the future. I think it also resonates with the whole idea of transformation and of focusing on long-term growth rather than short-term opportunism.” By comparison, she says, the ways in which most other consulting firms talk about their business seems very tactical, even myopic.

For a consulting firm to talk about its values won’t be enough in the future: it needs to translate those into a specific goal that clients share at a personal, as well as corporate level. Values don’t create value: purpose could.