last week’s #whiteboardwednesday was a little different, where we focused on asking ‘what is a consultant?’ and importantly, ‘what makes embracent different?’. ruby shares her top takeaways from the discussion.
Our senior leadership, who have many years of consulting experience, led a discussion about what they think makes a ‘good consultant’.
A large topic was the importance of emotional intelligence in consulting. How it is vital to understand the current environment and from that deciding the best approach to take. Aiding this is our communication and listening skills. Our job is problem solving and for that, it is key to be initiating the right conversations and correctly understanding the main pain points.
We then looked at embracent as a consultancy, talking about what makes us different. Our top takeaways were:
1. Our Approach
We take a pragmatic approach, delivering work based on the need of the client and not our own gain. We try our best to not lead anyone astray, remaining honest and setting realistic expectations.
2. Constant Improvement
We are focused on constantly expanding our knowledge. Part of the fun of our Whiteboard Wednesday sessions is that we spend time learning new skills and approaches from each other. We get insight into our colleague’s knowledge, experience and challenges faced.
3. Fitting the solution to the problem
We don’t make recommendations that are limited to our own skill set. We remain vendor and technology agnostic, finding the best resolution for the issue at hand.
4. Our relationships
We take pride in the relationships we have outside and inside embracent. We go above and beyond for our clients. We have offered pro-bono work to charitable and non-profit organisations and even took on the Yorkshire Three Peaks challenge to raise money for Ashgate Hospicecare.
In addition, we have a strong team ethos where hierarchy doesn’t limit how we work together. We concentrate on supporting one another through each project.
This session offered a new perspective of what we could get out of our Whiteboard Wednesday sessions. We won’t just be addressing different types of technology and business improvement techniques from now on, but also looking at the wider picture, learning about consultancy techniques and methods.
These are all aspects that make embracent great and which reflect in our recent growth as a company. We are excited for our next milestone of moving into our own offices in April, which many of us had the pleasure of seeing after last week’s session.