Benefits of Consulting

One of the benefits of consulting is you get to learn from your clients.

Recently, I was working with a church; an interesting client as they have two congregations sharing the same church campus. One congregation is Mandarin Chinese speaking and the other is primarily second-generation Chinese, but English speaking. There is some overlap in the two congregations but they win the prize for logistics/facility management! My team was working with the Chinese side of the congregation evaluating church programs and building metrics and dashboards.

Using my typical consulting approach, I’m asking lots of questions about all the different activities and programs at the church, how they measure progress, how do they develop staff, what they should continue to invest in, what they should jettison, etc. I continue to probe and finally ask the pastor, “of all the programs that you have which one contributes the most to the success of your church?”

His response was priceless, “Shawn, we have a saying in China, it’s not the twentieth dumpling that makes you full.” Of course my puzzled look led him to explain more. “When you have a big meal, it’s not the last dumpling you eat that makes you feel full, it’s the combination of all of the dumplings. The last dumpling cannot boast that it did all the work.”

I guess the pastor thought I looked like I had eaten a lot of dumplings!

There’s really not much that needs to be added to this illustration, but think about this for a moment, because it applies to all leaders – and it likely applies to how you evaluate your business success.

Are you able to objectively step back and consider the whole? The elusive big picture that we like to talk about is really the sum of many smaller pictures, all correlated and interdependent. Obviously there is a time to drill down on each process, function, and person to measure their contributions or perhaps make a correction. But be careful that you don’t fall into the “twentieth dumpling trap,” attributing the success of many to a chosen few, or worse yet, to the last dumpling to arrive at the party.

And if you are that twentieth dumpling, well, there is no reason to boast about it!