GM505 Unit 6 Consultant Contract Failure Reflection Example

A Fee, a Deadline and Nothing Else: Reflecting on Unit 6's Failed Consulting Contract

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GM505: Action Research and Consulting Skills

Unit 6 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The county, its public works department, the consultant and the classmates are composite; the sources cited are real.

The Case

A county public works director hired an outside consultant to study why road crews' overtime had doubled in three years. Their agreement was an email naming a fee of $18,000 and a report date. The consultant interviewed crew leads, reviewed timesheets and found that much of the overtime came from callouts for storm damage scheduled after regular hours, but also that a few crews logged overtime that their work orders did not support. Her draft report quoted one crew lead saying, "Some guys treat overtime like a second paycheck."

The director forwarded the draft to the county commission without telling the consultant. A commissioner read the quote aloud at a public meeting, and it appeared in the local paper the next day before any crew lead had seen the report. The crew leads stopped returning the consultant's calls, and the director ended the engagement after its second phase.

My First View

I arrived certain the director had betrayed the consultant. She had promised crew leads that their words would be reported as themes, and he had exposed one of them publicly. To me, that was the director's failure.

The First Shift

A classmate who works in city government defended the director. He had paid for the report, she said, and he answered to the commission. A public official sharing a consultant's draft with elected officials is not betrayal; it is accountability. Nothing in the email said the draft was confidential or limited its circulation. If the consultant wanted those protections, she should have asked for them.

That argument moved me. I had been judging the director by an agreement that did not exist. Peter Block argues that the contract is where the consultant and client settle not only deliverables but also wants and boundaries, and that problems later in an engagement usually trace back to what the contract left unsaid (Block, 2011). The email said nothing about who would see drafts, so the director had not broken any agreement. By the middle of the hour I thought the failure was mostly the consultant's, for not contracting.

I had been blaming the director for breaking a promise that no one had written down, which made the consultant's two-paragraph email the real problem.

The Second Shift

Then the instructor asked a question that moved me again. Whose interests did a two-paragraph email serve? The director had hired consultants before and knew how drafts traveled to the commission. The consultant was new to public sector work. An agreement that left circulation unspecified favored the person who knew how the system worked.

Edgar Schein describes the helping relationship as unequal from the start, with the client holding more power and the helper needing to manage that imbalance carefully (Schein, 1999). In this case the consultant failed to manage it, but the director also had knowledge he did not share. By the end of the hour I held both responsible: the consultant for not contracting, and the director for using a gap he understood and she did not.

Three Positions in the Room

By the end there were three positions. One group held the director fully responsible for exposing crew leads. A second, led by my classmate from city government, held the consultant responsible for a thin contract. A third, where I ended, held that both failed, in different ways, and that the crew leads paid the price for an agreement neither party had thought through.

Turning to My Own Agreement

The case made me reread my own agreement with the dean and the director. It covers staff confidentiality and says staff hear findings before the dean does. But it says nothing about what happens if the findings implicate the dean's own decisions. My diagnosis already points at her live-answer rule as a contributor to the phone problem. If my feedback report says so and she circulates it to the vice president before I can discuss it with her, I will be in something like the consultant's position.

Coghlan and Brannick single out a particular difficulty for insider researchers: findings that touch the people with authority over them, since the researcher keeps working for those people afterward (Coghlan & Brannick, 2014). I plan to propose a clause at my mid-term meeting with the dean: findings that concern the sponsor's decisions will be discussed with her privately before any report is circulated beyond the office.

What I Still Wonder

I do not yet know how to raise that clause without sounding as though I expect the dean to behave badly. The consultant in the case might have avoided asking for the same reason.

References

Block, P. (2011). Flawless consulting: A guide to getting your expertise used (3rd ed.). Pfeiffer.

Coghlan, D., & Brannick, T. (2014). Doing action research in your own organization (4th ed.). Sage.

Schein, E. H. (1999). Process consultation revisited: Building the helping relationship. Addison-Wesley.