Building Internal Strategic Capability: The New Normal for Strategy Consulting.
In the field of management consultancy, strategy for me is one of the most challenging and vital facets of consulting. Not only because of the importance of its effect on the individual or organization but also because of its “not so obvious” potential to contribute to the growth of an organization's human capital development.
In traditional strategy consultancy, the emphasis is typically tailored for short-term direct outcomes — “hitting the clients immediate objective” while any worthwhile long-term opportunity is swept under the rug.
In addition to helping the client accomplish its short-term objective of reaching a shared understanding of the organizational strategy, endorsing decisions, and promoting the engagement of clients employees and stakeholders to the decided strategy, I think it should also be about helping the client create a critical long-term value of “building internal strategic capability” — the capacity of a company to successfully generate and enforce a plan using its own human capital resources. This will entail a major compromise on the part of strategy consultants-to let go of the incentives in a traditional consultancy that keep the client from developing too strong a strategic capacity.
Aside from its key obligations, approaching strategy consulting as a leadership tool and an incentive to contribute to human capital growth brings greater benefit to companies and their employees, leads to a stronger workforce, and ultimately rewards the strategy consultant with a long-term value-adding brand.
To be continued…
