A student came in to office hours a couple of days before graduation to talk about how to approach her new job in consulting. She’s joining McKinsey in a couple months, the same firm I worked at. My main point to her: it’s difficult to tell whether or not you will ultimately enjoy a career in consulting (or any other advisory profession, like law or investment banking) based on the first couple of years. This is because the nature of the work—and more specifically, the skills needed to be successful—change drastically as you move up the hierarchy.

Climbing the Mountain

For junior people, the most important qualities are reliability, attention to detail, and a good attitude, as these are the building blocks of technical proficiency (the underlying skill needed for advancement).

This applies in most professional hierarchies—not just consulting. As a senior person in finance, if I ask my junior analyst to collect some research, the data need to be 1) accurate and 2) gathered quickly, as whatever market opportunity I am thinking about jumping into will be gone if my analyst takes two weeks to complete the assignment.

For junior people to climb up the mountain, they have to do what’s asked of them and do it quickly. The problem for my student, and really all of us when we started out, is that a junior person’s tasks are often rote, repetitive and boring. (The repetition is necessary to ultimately achieve mastery.)

Unfortunately, many people don’t have the willingness to stick with it through the boring parts and end up checking out, even though they would be good at the skill sets required of a senior person.

The View from the Summit

If the junior levels are about intelligence, the senior levels are about emotional intelligence.

The shift from IQ to EQ takes place because the responsibilities of junior people deal with tasks, while the responsibilities of senior people deal with people. Spreadsheets don’t get emotional. People do.

Emotional Skill: Sales

For example, in consulting, the main job of the partners is to bring new business into the firm. That’s sales, which is in my view, primarily an emotion-based skill.

Part of that selling process involves building relationships with people who are in a position to hire expensive consultants (e.g., CEOs of big companies). Some of those relationships are almost like being a friend or even a therapist—if a CEO has a problem within their company, it’s very possible they don’t feel comfortable talking to the Board of Directors, their direct reports, and certainly not their competitors. If they don’t want to bring the work problem home to the spouse, then who do they talk to? The consultant.

Emotional Skill: Management

The other main responsibility of a senior leader is overseeing the work of lower-ranking people.

Whether we call it “management” or “leadership,” senior-level work encompasses a range of emotion-centered tasks. We have to motivate—especially when the carrot of higher compensation isn’t available, we have to find other carrots or sticks that will resonate with people below us. We have to organize the work of our team, and then communicate what needs to be done. Finally, when people below us get blocked (usually because of an emotional issue), we have to figure out how to get them unblocked.

The Valley Between

The path up the mountain isn’t a straight line. Periodically, we have to climb down into “valleys” to learn the new skills needed to advance to the next level.

The tragedy in all this is there are many of us that would be great at being partners or senior consultants, but we never get there.

There are people who are naturally good at inspiring confidence in others or brilliant in sales. These people will never become senior consultants, bankers or law partners without demonstrating that they have the technical chops to be a consultant, banker or lawyer. Without demonstrated technical ability, nobody will take me seriously in a profession where the actual product I am selling is my expertise itself.

This leads to very difficult decision process for someone like my student—if she is great at building trust, reading a room, and inspiring confidence as a senior partner at McKinsey, how can she demonstrate that without grinding through the financial modeling, PowerPoints, and workstream management that a junior analyst has to do?

(One answer is to become an entrepreneur. Then we get to sell right away. But that’s not for everyone from a risk-tolerance perspective.)

The truth is, most of us have to be good at things that we don’t care about in order to be great at the things we do care about. It sucks, but welcome to life.

Exercise

Journal on the following or discuss with a friend.

1)      Dream

As I reflect on my career path, what do I want?

What you want can be a position or title, a set of responsibilities, a type of work, or a way of relating to people.

2)      Taking Stock

When I reflect on my desired career path, what are the types of skills and attributes that people in similar positions have?

You may already have a number of these skills and attributes.

At my current level, what are the skills that I have to master in order to move past my current position?

For most people, there will be a gap between the current skills and the future skills. For example, if you want to be a life coach, you may already be good at the relational skills needed to be a coach. But you probably aren’t good at the marketing skills which are required in order for you to demonstrate your acumen.

3)      Action

What is the smallest action I can take today that builds towards a habit of mastering the skills needed to advance beyond my current position?