When an Outsider Leads: The Perspectives of Consultants Facilitating Change in Human Service Agencies

Background/Purpose: According to the 2015 Survey of Enterprising and Informal Work Activities, individuals working as organizational consultants have increased substantially in recent years.  While trade magazines, particularly in business, provide guidance regarding hiring and use of consultants or best consulting practices, there is comparably little research from the vantage point of consultants.  This is particularly true in the social services literature, where focus on the consultant’s role in organizational change is negligible.   Yet consultants are very much involved in the human services sector.

The research reported here addresses these questions: (1) Why, how and in what capacities were consultants engaged by human service agencies; and (2) What do consultants identify as successes, failures and challenges when working with human service agencies?  Consultants who specialized in diversity initiatives, a particular kind of organizational development, provide their perspectives on these questions.

Methods: Findings are from a larger qualitative study on diversity initiatives in human services agencies.  For this research, 50 practitioners who facilitated these initiatives were interviewed.  These interviews revealed the involvement of consultants in most of the diversity efforts. To better understand their contributions, interviews were conducted with consultants whose primary work was organizational development in the human services with particular expertise in diversity efforts. 

Purposive and snowball sampling strategies were used.  The final sample was composed of 12 women and 10 men; 9 whites, 8 African Americans, 4 Latino/as, and 1 Asian; and all had a graduate-level degree.  Interviews focused on their diversity-related work with human service agencies; questions concerned how and why they were involved; roles and functions performed; descriptions of successes, failures and challenges; and advice for agency personnel.  Interviews were taped and transcribed.  The constant comparison method guided data coding and analysis. 

Results:  Consultants reported fulfilling a variety of roles with the most common being that of trainer.  They described mostly short-term forms of involvement, such as conducting cultural competency workshops or diversity trainings.  Analysis generated these themes that will be explained in the presentation: engagement and negotiation; concerns about organizational readiness; quick fixes and feeling “set-up;” limited vision of agency leaders; and being conflicted over lasting “good.”  Overall, the consultants suggested that agency personnel, particularly organizational elites, were reluctant to pursue more substantial transformation and offered explanations such as diversity backlash, history of agency conflict, and external factors including precarious funding situations or hostile political landscapes.  Success stories focused on the few agencies that encouraged comprehensive involvement and engaged in long-range strategic planning. 

Conclusions/Implications: Human service agencies often engage consultants to assist with various forms of organizational development including diversity issues.  Findings from this study suggest that consultants believe that they can perform a variety of roles and assist in numerous ways but often are confounded by the goals and actions of agency personnel.  Discussion centers on reasons why this might be, including the unique challenges generated by diversity work.  Consultants’ concerns about agency readiness, engagement and planning serve as cautionary messages for agencies that wish to contract with consultants for the purposes of organizational development.