By Jill Mazur, Transformation Architect and Fractional Advisor
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LISTEN MORE THAN YOU SPEAK: THE SECRET TO MORE EFFECTIVE CONSULTING.
Fractional executives and senior consultants are usually brought into an organization for a reason: we’ve been around, we’ve seen things, we bring experience from other companies and situations, and we’re expected to use that experience to help solve a problem, lead an initiative or move the organization forward.
Which makes it very tempting to arrive with answers.
That may be exactly when we need to stop talking and start listening.
EXPERIENCE GIVES YOU PERSPECTIVE; IT DOESN’T GIVE YOU CONTEXT.
When you step into a fractional role, you may have a seat at the leadership table almost immediately, but that doesn’t mean the leadership table is the only place you should be listening. In fact, some of the most useful information may come from much deeper inside the organization.
Executives can tell you what they believe is happening; managers can tell you where things get difficult, and the people doing the work every day can tell you what actually happens; all three perspectives matter.
The person entering the same information into multiple systems knows where the data disconnects are; the manager who spends hours reconciling reports knows which numbers nobody quite trusts, and the employee maintaining the spreadsheet everyone wants to eliminate probably knows exactly why it exists and what will break if it disappears.
None of that is likely to appear in a board presentation.
This is one of the advantages of being fractional: you’re close enough to the organization to understand it, but far enough outside it to question things that insiders may no longer see. You haven’t lived through every reorganization, every failed initiative or every decision that led to the current state; you can ask why without carrying all the history that sometimes makes “why” difficult to ask.
But that advantage disappears if you come in assuming you already know the answer.
THE ORGANIZATION HAS THE PROXIMITY; YOU BRING THE PERSPECTIVE. GOOD CONSULTING REQUIRES BOTH.
Listening in a senior consulting role isn’t passive; it’s analytical. You’re comparing what you hear from leadership with what you hear from the people doing the work, looking for patterns, inconsistencies and gaps. If leadership believes a process is working and the people executing it have built twelve workarounds to keep it functioning, that tells you something. If five departments describe the same process differently, that tells you something too.
Experience helps you recognize those signals, but experience can also work against you. The more situations we’ve seen, the easier it becomes to believe we’ve seen this situation before; we start diagnosing too quickly, listening for confirmation rather than discovery, and fitting the organization into a solution before we fully understand the problem.
The best fractional leaders resist that temptation. They ask questions at the executive level and on the front lines; they listen to the people with authority and the people with institutional knowledge, and they understand that those are not always the same people.
Over time, the pieces begin to connect. What initially looked like a technology problem may actually be a process problem; what appeared to be resistance may be the result of a previous failed initiative, and what leadership sees as inefficiency may be employees compensating for a gap nobody has addressed.
That’s when outside experience becomes genuinely valuable, because you’re no longer applying what worked somewhere else; you’re applying what you’ve learned elsewhere to what you’ve taken the time to understand here.
A fractional title may give you a seat at the table, but it doesn't give you all the answers. The organization already holds many of those answers; your job is to listen carefully enough to find them, connect them and know what to do with them.
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