Write in detail a note on process consultation.
Answers
Process consultant
1. Process Consultation - Building the Helping Relationship by Edgar H. Schein describes how consultants can create a helpful relationship with a client. Edgar Schein is the Sloan Fellows Professor of Management Emeritus and senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. His first book on Process Consultation was written in 1969 and updated with Process Consultation - volume II in 1987.
2. Process Consultation Process Consultation (PC) is the creation of a relationship with the client that permits the client to perceive, understand and act on the process events that occur in the client’s internal and external environment in order to improve the situation as defined by the client.
3. Focus of Process Consultant 1. Build a Relationship:- • Permit the consultant and client to deal with reality • Remove the consultants areas of ignorance • Acknowledge the consultant’s behavior as being always an intervention • All of the above in the service of giving the client(s) insight into what is going on around them. 2. Help the client figure out what they should do about the situation:- • Clients must be helped to remain proactive • Clients must own the problems • Clients know the true complexity of their situation and they know what will work in the culture where they live.
4. Process Consultation Principles 1. Always try to be helpful 2. Always stay in touch with the current reality 3. Access your ignorance 4. Everything you do is an intervention 5. It is the client who owns the problem and solution 6. Go with the flow 7. Timing is crucial 8. Be constructively opportunistic with confrontive interventions 9. Everything is data: errors are inevitable – learn from them 10.When in doubt, share the problem
5. The Process Consultation Model •The client and consultant jointly diagnose the problem. •The consultant’s role is to train the client in using diagnostic and problem solving techniques. •The client has the major responsibility to develop his/her own solution and action plan to the problem. •Problem solving is more effective when the client identifies wheat processes need to be improved (e.g., reporting relationship, reward system, organizational structure). •The client has more knowledge and insight about what will work in the organization then does the consultant. •The client has more of a commitment for implementing the action plan if involved in the entire diagnostic problem solving phases.
6. The expert (or telling and selling) model of consultation assumes that the client purchases from the consultant some information or expert service that she is unable to provide for herself. The buyer, usually an individual manager or representative of some group in the organization, defines a need and concludes that the organization has neither the resources nor the time to fulfill that need. She will then look to a consultant to provide the information or the service.
7. 1. Whether or not the manager has correctly diagnosed his own needs . 2. Whether or not he has correctly communicated those needs to the consultant. 3. Whether or not he has accurately assessed the capabilities of the consultant to provide the information or the service. 4. Whether or not he has thought through the consequences of having the consultant gather such information or the consequences of implementing. the changes that the information implies or that may be recommended by the consultant. 5. Whether or not there is an external reality than can be objectively studied and reduced to knowledge that will be of use to the client.
8. The doctor-patient (or physician) model also has appropriate and inappropriate applications. In this model, the patient/client simply describes symptoms. Then the physician/consultant diagnoses the problem and decides on a solution. This model may be appropriate (in some cases required) when the patient/client has little or no knowledge to contribute to the physician/ consultant's decision.
9. 1. Whether or not the client has accurately identified which person, group, or department is, in fact, sick or in need of some kind of therapy . 2. Whether or not the patient is motivated to reveal accurate information. 3. Whether or not the patient accepts and believes the diagnosis that the doctor arrives at and accepts the prescription that the doctor recommends. 4. Whether or not the consequences of doing the diagnostic processes are accurately understood and accepted. 5. Whether or not the client is able to make the changes that are recommended.
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