Management and strategy consulting is characterized by being challenging and having demanding teams that work to deliver exceptional results to their clients. To achieve these results, consulting firms look for “special” individuals, the “high achievers,” with great analytical capacity and strong interpersonal skills. Historically, they have managed to attract many of these “exceptional” talents, who seek rapid learning, accelerated careers, access to high-prestige companies and executives, to work on impactful projects, good salaries, and a certain glamour for working in an industry that employs “the most capable.” In turn, working in consulting was associated with a cost: intense work, travel, stress, and a constantly demanding environment…
In a job market dominated by large companies where the race to the top was intense, consulting was the showcase and access to successful subsequent careers, a seal of quality with unparalleled salaries. Thus, consulting could generate processes to recruit these “special” individuals. These special beings were perceived practically as heroes among their peers from school or university—just as Achilles, Hercules, or Lancelot were. And it was this same perception that began to limit applications to consulting—fewer and fewer people considered themselves “heroes.”
The complexity of business and the context has increased, making the demand for these “hero” profiles greater and greater. At the same time, consulting now has other “competitors” for the same talent, such as tech startups, which emerge with a greater sense of purpose than consulting firms (“transform the world” vs. “prepare yourself to be an exceptional executive”?). On the other hand, today’s young professionals are very different from 20 years ago; their pursuit of balance between happiness and career is much more present, so the most talented do not tolerate work demands that lean toward imbalance, changing the fundamental conditions of the work relationship. It is then a utopia for consulting firms to maintain the same model of seeking “the perfect people, who can quickly do and know everything.”
This change in talent forces us to rethink our value creation model: What allows us to achieve exceptional results? Is the “hero teams” response still valid? Is there another way to support our clients in achieving exceptional results in their increasingly complex business challenges?
When we started 13 years ago, we already had questions of this type and developed various models and analyses to, for example, understand if there is an ideal consultant profile. The conclusion? There is no single successful profile; in a world of management governed by adaptive problems, different styles can produce excellent results. But all these styles had something in common: an active and insatiable intellectual curiosity, a great work capacity, and the sense of team, along with the client, to produce these results.
None of our projects were successful for the work of a single consultant, was the contribution of each consultant usually in different areas, that made the project a success. So, why keep looking for heroes? It was then that we realized we were unconsciously building