How to Work With External Consultants: The Client-Consultant Relationship That Works

Some weeks ago, I was in a meeting with one of our clients — one of those small moments that reveals a lot about the client-consultant relationship.

We were discussing a specific topic in the project, and I asked whether we should clarify the roles and responsibilities around it.

It was a very normal question.

“You don’t need to worry about that. Soon I’m going to hire someone who will do your work.”

Maybe he didn’t mean anything by it.

But I remember thinking: Wow!

Not because I was worried about being replaced. If you work in consulting long enough, you know that projects start, projects finish, priorities change and eventually clients should be able to continue without you.

It was the way he described the relationship that stayed with me.

Someone who will do your work.

It made me think about the very different relationships I have seen between companies and external consultants throughout my career.

I have been on both sides of the table. I have worked inside large organizations managing consultants, and today I run a consulting business working with large industrial companies.

And I have experienced three very different models of the client-consultant relationship.

The servant. The guru. And the partner.

Only one of them, in my experience, creates sustainable value.

When Companies Treat External Consultants Like Servants

When I first arrived in Germany more than 15 years ago, I joined one of the largest automotive companies in the country as a consultant.

I was young, inexperienced and I was impressed by everything.

The buildings were enormous. The production centers were enormous. The projects and the budgets were enormous.

But something else surprised me.

There were external consultants everywhere.

Everyone knew it, and people even said it openly: for every internal employee, there were at least two external consultants working for them.

And the externals were doing a huge amount of the actual work.

They prepared analyses.
They created presentations.
They solved technical problems.
They prepared meetings.

And then, internal employees often presented the results.

What surprised me even more was the invisible line between the two groups.

Internals were internals.
Externals were externals.

And externals were sometimes treated almost like second-class employees, despite the fact that the organization depended heavily on their knowledge and capacity.

Of course, external consultants and employees have different roles. They have different contracts, responsibilities and incentives.

But there is an important difference between recognizing different roles and creating a hierarchy of human value.

When you treat consultants simply as extra pairs of hands, you also waste much of the reason for hiring external expertise in the first place.

You are not only buying hours.

You should be gaining experience, perspective, challenge and knowledge that you don’t currently have inside the organization.

And there is another risk.

If external consultants do all the work while internal employees simply manage and present it, the organization doesn’t necessarily become stronger.

It can become more dependent.

A good client-consultant relationship should leave the organization with more capability than it had before, not less.

When External Consultants Become Untouchable Gurus

A few years later, I experienced almost the exact opposite.

I joined a Finnish company and discovered an external consultant who had been working closely with the organization for some time.

But this consultant was definitely not treated as a servant.

He was treated like a guru.

His opinions carried enormous weight.
His recommendations were rarely challenged.
It felt as if everything he said immediately became the truth.

He was sitting in what I can only describe as an ivory tower.

And everyone was looking up.

I didn’t like that dynamic at all.

One of the first decisions I made was to stop working with him.

Not because I didn’t believe in external expertise.

But because I could see the effect this client-consultant relationship was having on the organization.

People had stopped challenging.

And consultants can sometimes become very good at making themselves indispensable.

They accumulate knowledge.
They know the people and the history.
They develop relationships with senior management.

Eventually, instead of asking:

What is the right decision for our organization?

People start asking:

What does the consultant think?

That is dangerous.

Because expertise should make an organization stronger.

It should not make an organization dependent on a single expert.

With AI, many organizations need external expertise more than ever.

But outsourcing expertise cannot mean outsourcing thinking.

You want consultants who challenge you and who can build your capabilities.

Being very clever and having a lot of knowledge doesn’t give anyone permission to become a diva.

What a Strong Client-Consultant Relationship Looks Like

Luckily, there is a third model.

Partnership.

We currently work with one client who has taught me a lot about what a great client-consultant relationship can look like.

They are one of our most important clients.

The people we work with are extremely experienced.

They are strong leaders.

They understand their business.

And perhaps because they are confident in their own expertise, they don’t seem threatened by ours.

They know what they know.

And they are comfortable admitting what they don’t know.

That creates a completely different relationship.

When we bring expertise, they respect it.

When they bring expertise, we respect it.

They challenge us, and we challenge them.

Sometimes we agree, sometimes we don’t.

But we are trying to solve the same problem together.

They include us in the team.

We don’t feel like outsiders arriving to deliver something and disappearing again.

At the same time, they don’t expect us simply to execute whatever they ask.

They expect us to bring something to the table.

There are experienced people sitting around the same table, each bringing something the others don’t have.

That, for me, is what a strategic consulting partnership should look like.

Why Strategic Consulting Partnerships Create Better Business Results

We sometimes talk about trust, respect and human relationships as if they were the “soft” side of business.

I think that is a mistake.

Partnership is a business strategy.

When I feel respected by a client, something very simple happens.

I want to give them my best.

I think about their problems outside the meeting.
I challenge my own assumptions.
I bring opportunities to them even when they haven’t asked for them.
I care about their success.

And when that relationship continues over years, the value compounds.

You understand the organization better.
You understand the people.
You know the history behind certain decisions.
You know what has been tried before and why it failed.

And eventually, you develop enough trust to have the difficult conversations.

That is why the best client-consultant relationships are not transactional.

They are collaborative and they are built for mutual success.

The Best Client-Consultant Relationships Are Built on Mutual Respect

After experiencing all three models, I know which one I want.

I don’t want to work for clients who see consultants simply as extra pairs of hands.

And I don’t want to become the consultant sitting in the ivory tower, convinced that my expertise makes me more important than everyone else.

I want the third relationship.

Partnership.

The best clients I have worked with don’t need to prove that they are smarter than their consultants.

And the best consultants don’t need to prove that they are smarter than their clients.

Both bring something different to the table.

The client understands the organization, its people, its history, its politics and its reality.

The consultant brings experience from the outside, different perspectives and expertise that might not exist internally.

Put those two things together and something much more valuable can happen.

That requires expertise, of course.

But it also requires humility.
Trust.
Curiosity.

And something surprisingly basic: knowing how to work with people. In the end, that is what knowing how to work with external consultants really means.

So perhaps, when choosing your next consultant, don’t only ask:

How clever are they?

And when choosing your next client, don’t only ask:

How big is the project?

Ask something else:

Can we create a relationship where both sides become better because we worked together?

Because after many years sitting on both sides of that table, that is the kind of consulting relationship I want to build.

Not servant.

Not guru.

Partner.

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