Choosing Your Consultant Stance

Definition

Drawing on Ed Schein, Block names three distinct postures a consultant (or any specialist advising someone with authority) can take toward the person they're helping: the expert (given a free hand and full technical control), the pair of hands (executing a plan the client has already made), and the collaborator (jointly diagnosing and deciding with the client, sharing responsibility for the outcome). These are not stages or a hierarchy — they are alternatives, each appropriate to some situations and each with a characteristic failure mode.

In the Book

Block walks through each role's mechanics using a running example — a corporate benefits website redesign. As expert, the web designer gets full authority ("You're the expert; find out what's wrong and fix it") but risks acting on distorted data, since "problems that are purely technical are rare" and people withhold the human part of the story from someone positioned as judge. As pair of hands, the manager keeps control and hands the consultant a pre-built plan; the risk flips — if the manager's own diagnosis was wrong, the consultant becomes "a convenient scapegoat," and asking to verify the plan can be read as insubordination. As collaborator, "the consultant and the manager work to become interdependent," sharing data collection, decisions, and outcome responsibility — but this takes more time and can be misread by managers who expected either full delegation or full compliance as "indifference or foot dragging." Block's point is that the choice should be conscious rather than a reflexive default, since each stance produces a different kind of commitment: only the collaborative stance leaves the client able to "solve it" themselves "the next time a similar problem arises."

Why It Matters

This gives a vocabulary for a failure mode that otherwise looks like personal incompatibility: an advisor and a decision-maker disagreeing about what the relationship even is. Any advisory relationship — consultant, doctor, lawyer, internal specialist, even a senior engineer advising a junior one — implicitly picks one of these three stances, and mismatched expectations about which one is in play (the client wants a pair of hands, the advisor is trying to collaborate) produces friction that looks like resistance but is actually a disagreement about roles.