73. The BEST coaches and consultants wears these 8 Hats

The BEST coaches and consultants wears these 8 Hats [Everything Business Consulting Episode 73]

Want to be the best business consultant, coach, or advisor around? The 8- Hat technique could be the the secret you're looking for!

Welcome to episode 73 of Everything Business Consulting, where we're going to explore The 8 Hats of business consulting, coaching and advisory.

1. Consultant

2. Coach

3. Advisor

4. Confidant

5. Friend

6. Counsellor

7. Mentor

8. Psychologist

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Transcript:

Julius: Welcome to episode 73. Today we're going to be talking about the eight hats. Now the eight hats are a concept that we've had for a little while in terms of our community. David, how long have we had the eight hats? 

David: 15 years, probably 16.

Julius: Who conceived of these eight hats?

David: I think it was a famous author. He had a book called the five hats, but it wasn't how we're using it. We just got the idea, just got the name. He was talking about different types of personalities, but we've adapted it and increased it to work with consultants. 

Julius: Ah, so the eight hats, what they are is basically the different hats and the different roles you would need to play as a very well-equipped business consultant or business coach when you are working with a client. So these eight hats are an advisor, a psychologist, a mentor, consultant, friend, coach, confidant, and counselor. In today's episode, we're going to have a look at exactly what each of these eight hats do and give you some examples of when you might like to wear it. So the very first hat we're going to start with is the hat of a consultant.

David: Well, it's typically what you'd expect and the consultant hat is what you put on when you're figuring out how to solve problems. So you need to understand the business and the business's problems, and another important part of that is to analyze the performance of the business. Because if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. You then need to research solutions and improvements to the business and build them into a business plan that you can present back to the owner and then help them to implement it. 

Julius: So what this is really all about is figuring out how to solve problems. Can you give an example, David, of when you have used this personally in a business? 

David: Oh, when I was consulting in Australia a few years back, I had a very nice family business that I worked for and they made paving slabs, and they had nine people in the factory. And I was only with them for a month, then I thought why have they got nine people in the factory because they were struggling to make money. Well, anyway, for about $10,000, I went down the road and bought a whole lot of bits and pieces, and long story short, we eliminated five of those jobs by automating the concrete slab production factory, automating it. And it made better quality, less wastage, there's a whole lot of side benefits, but the big benefit was that it saved five jobs. And that went straight to the bottom line. 

Julius: So what that was doing then David, that was understanding the problem, which in that business was profitability, and then you analyze where that was coming from. That was coming from too many people, doing a job that didn't really require it. And then you came up with a solution and created a plan. So it sounds as perfectly like the role of a consultant in wearing that hat. Now, the second hat we're going to look at, the second hat to put on when you were working with the business owner would be the hat of a coach. 

Now, the idea about a coach is a coach helps to facilitate and guide the client to achieving their own personal goals. So in the sense of a business, normally you're helping direct the business owner to their business goals, although, sometimes you do need to give some personal coaching when it is required. The way that a coach would normally work as they would start by clarifying the objective, focusing in on whatever the goal is that the business owner or the coachee is looking at and looking to target.

They then kind of help to focus and keep the coachee accountable, there's a goal and then the coach keeps them on track so that they have someone else to help increase their level of focus. They also guide the client to develop their own solutions and make their own decisions. And this can be a positive and a negative of wearing the coach hat. You are giving the power to the person being coached, but you're also putting a lot of trust in them that they have the ability to make the right decision. 

And that's where sometimes you might want to wear one of these different hats during a coaching session, or when you're using the tools that are in coaching to ensure that you're advising them, well you're using your consulting hat, so that what they are making in terms of a decision, and the goal that they're looking to achieve is actually the right path of attack. Now the final piece of the coaching puzzle is as a coach, you are there to motivate and inspire and to really encourage the person being coached. 

So the third hat, which is in this case, more of a visor is the advisor visor. Now the purpose of an advisor is to provide specific advice. So you, as a business consultant will have prior business knowledge and professional knowledge, perhaps from other areas. Maybe you've been in HR in the past, maybe you're an ex-lawyer, or whatever it is the hat of an advisor is to provide very specific expertise and advice to your client.

So this gives you the ability to leverage any past expertise or any past profession that you may have had and inject that into your business consulting. 

David: A bit of an example on that would be, let's say you picked up a printing client that printed all sorts of things, and you were a printer by trade. So you'd know a heck of a lot about the printing industry, and you could if you wanted to set up a consulting firm where you just did printers. Or you could all mechanics as a good example as well. So, yes, you're acting as an advisor because you've got specialist knowledge in a particular area, Julius.

Julius: Just the dovetail on the back of that, once you've received or acquired one client in a specific industry, you're going to learn specific knowledge about those types of businesses and those types of industries, which is going to make you more valuable if you were to acquire a similar type of business in the same, or perhaps an adjacent industry. 

Now the fourth hat, David is the mentor hat. 

David: The mentor hat is really where you're providing professional guidance to a business owner. You'd be sharing a lot of information about your experiences over life. Like you might've had four or five different industries or professions that you worked in and you're able to guide the client through all those things that you did and the bad and the good things that you did.

So you're acting as a role model and hoping to motivate the business owner to aspire to the successes that you achieved, and you're providing guidance. In a lot of cases, you're stopping the client or the business owner from making mistakes, maybe even the same mistakes that you made, or you had come across in your business life. And of course, two very important part is to encourage them because somebody needs to be there on the sidelines, cheering for them, towards them achieving their own particular success. 

Julius: The way I like to think about a mentor, David is this is the person that's had a lot of experience and they are sharing their war stories. The stories about their experience with their mentee. 

David: Yep. 

Julius: The fifth hat is that of the confidant. Now, this is where your client sees you as a very trusted member of their inner circle, who they can share private matters with. To do this obviously you need to build a high level of trust and understanding, you need to be able to have very open discussions with your client without judgment. Now that's a very key part of this. You need to be able to have a disarming persona in this instance so that your clients and perhaps other people within the businesses you're working with feel like they can discuss things with you. 

Now, one key way to do that is simply to listen, listen, listen, give your client or whoever it is you're interacting with your full attention with your eyes and your ears and your body language and let them get it all out.

David: That's why God gave us two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak. So it's really important, I hate to give all these cliches, but probably another good cliche is that, a problem shared is a problem halved, and that only comes through the building of trust. 

Julius: Moving on from the confidant, the fifth hat is that of a counselor. Now the role of a counselor is to provide personal guidance, and you will notice by now that some of the hats do overlap a little bit, but there are key differences between most of them. Now the counselor focuses on personal difficulties, whereas most of the other hats have been more around a professional relationship. And the reason you need to look at these personal difficulties is because often what is happening in their business or the way that they are operating is related to something or can be related to something in their personal life. 

Now, the idea of this is that you help clients talk about their feelings in order to find ways for them to cope with them, to understand them, and then to develop solutions, which is really similar to consulting just on a personal level. You then discuss these changes that could help them to improve and basically help them implement them. You might have to do a little bit of research along the way so that you can help to provide some of the solutions to these specific problems. 

David: I have a well, had a client that was having a lot of difficulties in his marriage, and it all stemmed back to the fact that he was working six, six and a half days a week and 70 hours a week. And that will probably wreck any marriage, I would think. Anyways, so not only did I help him to get those hours and get him back to five working days, they were long days, but at least he had the weekends free. Not only that, but I was also able to suggest to him a marriage guidance counselor.

Because it was out of my league, I'm not a marriage counselor. Suggest to him to go to one of those, a very good lady, who I met at an Executive Alliance monthly meeting. And she was very, very good. So I was able to put them together and I'm happy to say that today they're still married and that's about 13 years later. So there's an example there Julius. 

Julius: That's a very good point you bring up David, whilst you should know about these different hats, these eight hats, and know when the right time to use them is, you shouldn't expect yourself or put the pressure on yourself to be an absolute expert at every single one of them. And if there is something that is beyond your expertise or beyond your pay grade, then that's the perfect time to get someone else in to help you out with that. Whether they're providing you the information or whether they're going direct to your client. 

David: It's cliche time again, a wise man doesn't know everything, but he knows who to go to, to get the answer.

Julius: The sixth hat is that of the friend. Now getting to know a client beyond a professional level is something that can be immensely valuable at not only building a very strong long-term relationship but also to develop a deeper understanding of your client and what makes them tick. Now, this ultimately is going to strengthen your relationship and make sure that it carries on for a very long time, but it's also going to give you an insight into exactly why they are in business, what they enjoy about it, what they don't enjoy so much and it also gives you when good things happen, it gives you a stronger bond that gives you the ability to share in the progress and great successes that you have as a team.

David, as you said, it really helps to build that team spirit and build your one-on-one relationship with the owner or the team as a whole. Now, the other side of that is when something negative happens, it gives you the ability to really show the business owner that you have a deep understanding on a personal level, and you almost feel this yourself, and it gives you the ability to be there and support them through it on another level as well.

So forming a personal bond with a client is something that I believe is very valuable. Now, I've done that with one of my clients, very, very well. And we actually met up when I was doing some travel through Europe. We met up in Germany and spent a couple of days together cause that's where he was from. He was, it just happened to be traveling at the same time, and we do a lot of, kind of just little social activities maybe once every three or four months just to maintain that strong level of friendship outside of our consulting relationship. 

The final hat to look at is that of the psychologist, the psychology hat. Now you're not expected to be a clinical level practicing psychologist, but there are some very important elements to recognize. David? 

David: Well, yeah, you sometimes find out that your client starts telling you things and discussing things that you don't really want to know. So you just need to be aware of that and don't be shocked or anything because you may need to get into a little bit of low-level psychology, to sort of help the client to solve whatever these problems are. As I mentioned earlier, organizing a marriage counselor for a client is one such example. We had one, I have one client who was bipolar, and I'm once again, I'm not a trained psychologist, but I did encourage them very strongly to find a good psychologist.

And I was able to help him, I got my doctor, it was in Auckland, I got my doctor to pass me on to somebody that he knew that was the other side of Auckland and got him sorted out there. So a bit of medication and he was greatly improved. So yeah, so you need to understand these things. Don't try and become a psychologist, but that you can go a long way to preventing the distress and the dysfunction of your particular client by encouraging them to go and see a professional if that's what you think is required. So, yeah, it's really important that you wear all these hats. 

Julius: That is the eight hats. Now, if you can figure out when to use each of these different hats and apply them at the right time, it's going to make you immensely valuable as not only as a consultant but as a someone who gives complete clarity and understanding and supports a business owner through every single situation and the business as a whole.

So, the first hat, just to remind you is a consultant and their job is to figure out and solve problems. The coach hat is someone who guides the client and the business to achieve their goals. The advisor is the ability to provide specific advice. The mentor hat provides professional guidance. The confidante becomes a trusted person who is able to have very personal matters, shared with them. The counselor provides personal guidance. The friend forms a personal bond. And finally, the psychologist seeks to understand what is going on inside a client's head. 

David: It's not as difficult as you think. What this is kind of based on is what we talked about before, two ears and one mouth. Let them do the talking because they'll tell you which of those hats that you need to be wearing. And everybody's capable of putting these hats on and, and doing a bit of low-level assistance to business owners. And if it gets out of your league and you need an outside specialist to come in and help, then you need to do that. So yeah, now once you can see the eight hats and you can see them all broken down into their various uses, we think that you'll find that very useful when you're in dialogue with your client and you'll find that it goes a long way to forming a very strong trusting relationship. 

Julius: Thank you very much for listening to episode 73 of Everything Business Consulting.

David: Thank you.