Member-only story
I have a good friend who I recently had coffee with who used to be with one of the big four firms in the audit service line. She went to work in industry for a while and now is coming back to the same firm, but now in consulting. As I thought about her journey, I thought back to my experience in management consulting and what I wish I had known when I was just starting out. Here are some of the thing I wish I knew when I first started out:
The importance of setting expectations
Expectations are everything. It means the difference between you having an awful management consulting career and having the best career with rave reviews. If people know what to expect (managers, clients, your team mates) then they can actively plan around it or provide you with the feedback that that may not be sufficient. If you then deliver to those expectations, you are going to be successful.
Communication
A co-worker that I worked with asked me about something that I thought was quite trivial. I am normally a man of action but what my coworker said made me realize how important communication was — my coworker said that it’s much better to overcommunicate and make sure that everyone is on the same page. This makes a lot of sense and the reverse (of undercommunicating) is…
