The glamorous trap of strategy consulting

Strategy consulting has a rather magnificent public image. It attracts clever people, ambitious people, people who have spent years proving that they are capable of difficult things, and it promises them proximity to the big decisions: CEOs, strategy, billion-euro companies, important rooms, important conversations. It is not entirely a lie. It is simply not the whole truth.

The first thing people often do not understand when they enter consulting is that this is not quite a normal career. In most industries, if you do your work well, remain useful, grow in competence and do not create unnecessary disasters, you can stay. You may change roles, gain responsibility, perhaps become slightly more tired and slightly better paid, but there is no permanent institutional message saying: move up, or make way.

Strategy consulting works differently. Its logic is built around movement upwards, through a pyramid that becomes narrower at every level. You progress, you are assessed for the next step, you progress again—or, at some point, you leave. For a while, this can feel energising. Later, for some people, it begins to feel like living on an escalator that does not have a pause button.

I spent more than two years at BCG as Head of HR and Staffing, which meant that I was not looking at consulting from the audience. I was involved in matching people to projects, speaking with partners about the teams they needed, and sitting in evaluation committees where promotions, next steps and, occasionally, difficult career decisions were discussed. Since then, for more than a decade, I have worked with people from BCG, McKinsey and Bain as clients. It gives one a rather particular view of the profession: how the system sees people from the inside, and what the people inside the system often cannot quite see about themselves.

Many young consultants arrive with images of presenting ideas to chief executives and helping to shape the future of great companies. This does happen, eventually, for some people. But the early years contain a less cinematic reality: analysis, research, models, revisions, and a great many slides. More slides than any reasonable adult should have to look at before midnight. The slides matter, of course. They are how thinking becomes visible, how a team finds its argument, and how a client is persuaded. But the work is not always glamorous, and it is worth knowing that before one starts to wonder whether one has somehow failed to become the person from the recruitment brochure.

What I found more interesting, over the years spent both inside and outside this world, was observing the precise point at which people’s careers began to change direction. At the beginning, consulting rewards precisely the people it is designed to recruit: bright, analytical, disciplined individuals who can handle numbers, structure a problem, work at speed and remain calm when the information is incomplete—which, in consulting, is nearly always. These qualities take people a long way.

Then they become project leaders, principals, or begin to move towards partnership, and the rules quietly change. At that stage, the ability to build a convincing model is no longer enough if you cannot lead a room, manage a difficult client, give feedback that another human being can actually hear, negotiate without becoming defensive, or understand why an intelligent person on your team is suddenly no longer functioning very well.

I have seen exceptionally capable consultants, people with extraordinary analytical minds and formidable work ethic, become stuck at precisely this point. Not because they were not clever enough, and certainly not because they were lazy, but because the skills that had brought them success until then were no longer the only skills that mattered. A brilliant analytical mind is an advantage in consulting. It is not, unfortunately, a complete career strategy.

The encouraging part is that communication, negotiation and people-management skills are not mystical qualities possessed only by the naturally charismatic. They can be learned. Often, they can be improved far more quickly than people expect, once the real issue has been identified—and once someone is prepared to say honestly what the next level is actually asking of them.

If you are at a point in your consulting career where the next step feels strangely difficult, it may be worth asking a more useful question than, ‘Am I good enough?’ Perhaps the question is: ‘What is this next stage actually asking of me?’