When you work in a consulting firm the most valuable asset is the talent doing consulting work for your clients. There is a gigantic amount of knowledge that grows at every angle you look: industry, problem space, technology, enterprise, etc. The faster the organization grows the more difficult challenges you face when it comes to leading all these talented consultants.
Problem #1. Technology consultants: Engineers, Developers, Architects, you name them, they want to have fun with technology and that means that very few want to be involved in management activities. On the other hand, they want to have a Manager that shows them the way, that they can learn from, and that supports them during their journey. So you end up with a handuful of them trying to make the vast majority happy.
So why am I stating the above as Problem #1 when the title of the post refers to something totally different. Well, in an ideal world, you would be doing a project for a client, and these leaders would be allocated, say 50% of their time, so that they can be both Technologists and Managers. But what happens when you have many different clients, with different needs, and not all of them accept the model, whether because they need a project done ASAP and cannot affort partially assigned people or simply because they don’t want to share. Then you end up with the effect that some/many of the Managers end up assigned full time, at least temporarily.
So now we get to the problem. If you’re in charge of a Technology Practice (e.g., Cloud, Web, etc.), how do you move things forward when some/many of the leaders will not have the time to invest in the Practice? In the worst case scenario, when ALL your team is assigned full time in their projects, how do you create some sort of predictability on the agenda that the Company or the Practice sets? This is where the fun of being a Manager begins in a consulting firm.
This is where leadership styles come into play. The team must be empowered to make their own decisions and to set their own agenda. The leader really wears only 2 hats: being a servant for the rest of the managers and being there to align Company or Practice goals with the rest of the Managers. Similar to how a Scrum Master works in an Agile project, one of the biggest goals is to make the team self-sufficient. They should NOT need you to move things forward. You become the framework but they implement the solution the way they see fit.
This gets interesting through time, because then you start asking yourself, especially when the team is mature enough to fix the stuff they break on their own: am I providing value here? The answer is YES because despite the difficulties of not really having a team (because some/many of them are conulting with their clients), you’re there to be the glue between the Managers and the Organization goals, you’re there to elevate the next leaders of the organization and to foster a culture in which everybody receives opportunities. You are there to serve, period.