Facilitating For as long as I’ve been a consultant – going on 20 years – there has been background chatter about licensing consultants. The same words are always used when that discussion arises: “Anyone can hang out a shingle and say they are a consultant.”

And the fact is, that is completely true. One doesn’t have to go to school or get a degree or a license to consult.

If we DID go to school, though, our learning would fall into three areas:

1) Content: For Community Benefit Consultants, that might include governance or technology or planning or resource development or evaluation or social media or etc. and etc.

2) Business: Especially for independent consultants, there is the business side of our own bookkeeping and marketing and our own social media and planning…

3) Process: Often termed the “soft stuff,” this is the people side of our work. How do we actually interact with the client as we do our consulting work? How do we engage a client to want to learn? How do we encourage a client, get them excited to grow and change? How do we get clients to see possibility and reach for it?

There are books and classes and college degrees that provide information about the first two areas of this list.  But where do we learn about the process of consulting?

This will be the topic of this month’s Twitter chat.

How and where do we learn the being part of being a consultant?

• Where do we learn to translate content into learning and growth for our clients?
• How can we ensure our own culture of ongoing learning? From where? With whom?
• Where do we learn how to engage and inspire and encourage and teach and lead? Where do we learn whether to inspire or prescribe? Where do we learn how to model for our clients the kinds of actions and behaviors we hope to see in them and their communities?
• Where do we learn how to facilitate – and where do we practice that skill (or do we practice anywhere but with our clients?)?
• How can we learn from other consultants? What structures are best for facilitating that learning?

As we consider what ongoing learning might look like for consultants, Debra Beck has posted a Nonprofit Learning Manifesto that inspired this month’s chat. There is great food for thought here – how do we encourage the same learning for ourselves as we encourage for our clients?

This promises to be an engaging discussion. Please join us!
Tuesday, February 23 at 1pm US Pacific time.
See you there!