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Published
in Inside Careers, Management Consultants 1999
The
Sole Practitioner
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Tony Page helps people in organisations to manage change.
He left PA Consulting in 1988 and since then has been self-employed. In 1996 he
published Diary of a Change Agent (paperback, 1998, Gower, ISBN 0566 08093 1),
illustrating the diary method for personal growth and change. Married for 19
years to Helen, also a management consultant, they have two children.
Name:
Tony Page
Age: 44
Occupation:
Consultant specialising in the management of change
Qualifications:
FCMC, Chartered Psychologist, Member of Institute of Personnel & Development,
Fellow of Royal Society of Arts, Member of Strategic Planning Society, B.Sc (Hons) Occupational
Psychology.
Employer:
self-employed
Location:
What I
enjoy about my job: Never knowing what the next opportunity will be.
What I
don't enjoy: Never knowing what the next opportunity will be!
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It's a simple enough question - what are you doing on
Friday? But often I will be unable to answer it without peeking in my diary.
You learn to keep a lot of plates spinning. In this occupation, time is money
and, when you take holiday, you know you are giving up fee earning time. But
you know that if you didn't you would burn out, and what or who are you doing
this for anyway?
Take last week for instance. Sunday evening I was
preparing for a project kick-off meeting with a group of 5 senior civil
servants who are now getting serious about delivering reductions in crime. This
means working differently from the buck-passing Yes Minister tradition and
engaging in some (dreaded) new ways of working. It means coming out of the
ivory tower, talking with real people in the police, prisons and probation
about collaborating to deliver results. Working Sunday night isn't so great really.
You wonder sometimes what happened to the weekend. I'm passionate about this
project though, and perhaps I value it all the more since we only won it after
months of patient talking.
At the kick-off meeting on Monday, working with a
self-employed colleague called Fiona (ex Price Waterhouse), we used post-its
and flipcharts to create a shared view of
all the agencies involved in the reduction of crime, and of the
offenders journey through the system from cradle to grave. This helped us to
plan what has to happen over coming months: a series of one-to-one meetings and
workshops leading to defined roles, projects, programmes and measures,
that might stand a chance of making a difference.
I suppose this project underlines how, as consultants, we
no longer position ourselves as the outside experts: now we specialise in
engaging the people who need to be involved. We help clients to notice patterns
of ineffectiveness and resistance in their organisations and in them,
harnessing their resources, finding new ways of leading and engaging their
people to raise the intelligence of the whole system.
Tuesday was a day in the office clearing the desk. There
was a report to finish, bind and post. There is no army of support staff here. Helen,
my wife posted it on her way to a meeting as an NHS non-executive director. The
report describes some workshops we facilitated for Area Directors from
Also on Tuesday I collated evaluation forms from the
Relationship Management workshops I have been running for actuaries in a life
assurance company. The moment they most remember and value is when we bring a
few of their real life internal customers (managers from HR, Sales,
Strategy and Operations) into the room to practice having one-one meetings.
Scary at first, but the ice quickly melts and it becomes clear that 15 minutes
spent face to face with their key internal customers every month can remove
hours of frustration and time-wasting questions.
I also finished a proposal for
You get some great opportunities, but sporadically. This
can cause mood swings from grandiosity, to boredom and mild depression. For
example from Wednesday to Friday this week, I'm staying in a luxury hotel in
Switzerland, in a spa town beside Lake Neufchatel, working with my colleague
Didier, another self-employed consultant, to co-facilitate a workshop called
Navigating Change - Shaping the Future. It is difficult to explain to my
envious friends that this is an extremely tough assignment, working with some
change weary senior managers.
If you are considering this line of work, you need to
understand how it feels when the phone isn't ringing and you wonder when you'll
work again. You need to be ready for a decade-long struggle to build your
reputation and times of extreme pressure and financial instability. You need good
strong relationships around you, soul mates, who help you to express your
anxiety, to regain your objectivity, to learn, to renew your energy and
continually to reinvent your approach.
Looking back on my career, I left university in 1976 not
knowing what I wanted to do. 50 or so unsuccessful job applications suggested
that I was ill-prepared for earning a living in the big wide world. Still I
persisted and when I was offered my "first proper job" my priority
was to fit in. Over time I became quite expert at playing the career game:
getting jobs and fitting in, eventually getting totally absorbed in my work and
losing myself on the way. Only with the new responsibility of parenthood did I
notice a drift and one day, decisively, I resigned from PA and started down the
rocky road of self-employment. This decision taken 11 years ago seems to some
people to be brave, to others, foolish. I feel it was necessary for me to grow
and I suppose I was young and willing to take the risk. The alternative was a
life of compromise and suffocation.
If this sounds a bit dramatic or weird, why not ask
someone who has made a career change why they did it and how it felt? Career
shifting is not uncommon: most self-employed people have done it and it can
feel strange and lonely. At the same time, this step set me on a path towards
the fulfilment I feel today in my work, and since my work is helping people to
navigate change, it provides an invaluable source of real life experience to
draw from.
Tony Page
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