How showing your vulnerability creates value in your professional (ànd in your private) life
The last few weeks there is quite some noise around the fact that both EY and Deloitte are considering separating their consulting-activities from their audit-activities. The main reason seems to be the potential conflict of interest between the two activities when at the same client…
In an ideal world where business ethics would be self-evident for every company - supplier and client - this would sound very counterintuitive. Both activities help companies to become a better version of themselves: auditing is more preventive, by regularly checking if the work methods and the KPIs are still what they should be, and thus avoiding problems; consulting is more curative, by looking for a solution when there is a real problem or challenge.
It got me thinking that a company is actually not that different from a person. If you ask people what defines them the most, what makes them the person they are today, in an honest answer they will often talk about a personal loss, a divorce, a serious health problem, a layoff. And most people will consider themselves a ‘better’ person now than before....
Of course, it is not the events themselves that are the reason for this. It is the journey we take to overcome that event that gets us there. That is what I like to call 'the power of the negative'.
To get on that 'healing' trajectory, and get something out of it, we often seek help or advice. We seek 'consulting': with a friend, a book or a seminar, a psychologist or a psychiatrist, etc. And we all think it is normal to seek that help when there is a burning platform, when there is an event that we could not foresee.
But there are certainly events that, if we are honest with ourselves, we might have foreseen.
A divorce is sometimes the unfortunate end of a marriage in which both partners have lost themselves or each other somewhere along the way; some serious health problems may be related to a lifestyle that involves smoking, drinking, unhealthy eating and too little exercise; and burnout rarely happens overnight.
What if we didn't wait for these problems to occur, but did some kind of audit of our personal lives on a regular basis? Would we be able to respond in time, with less pain or burden and perhaps more gain and quality of life? The power of the negative would be just as great, but would we equally value the help we would get from such a regular audit?
If we take back the parallel with business, and we look at the figures of EY and Deloitte, this is probably not the case. The consulting arm, where urgent problems or impending challenges are addressed, is much more profitable than the audit arm, where one is just trying to avoid those problems occurring....
We seem, both in business and on a more personal level, to value someone who solves the problem more than someone who helps us avoid the problem.
From an economic standpoint, this makes no sense (see graph - the perceived value is often as much an opportunity cost for not anticipating).
So what is it that causes this behavior? Why do we wait until it is (almost) too late before we take action? Could it be that we find it difficult to show our vulnerability? That we wait too long to ask for help?
I usually provide consulting services to companies or business leaders with a burning platform, and I love doing that. But it's just as enriching to discover how much value is created (or costs avoided) by a regular audit of your company or your leadership. All it takes is the courage to be vulnerable and the trust in "the power of the negative.
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