Consulting’s trust problem isn’t the one in the headlines

The easy conclusion from such scandals is that consulting has a trust problem. After a career in this work, I think this conclusion lets the wrong lesson stand. The problem is not that the profession cannot be trusted. The problem is that the largest firms have spent a long-time teaching clients to look for trust in all the wrong places.

They have taught potential clients to primarily look at the size of the firm. The longer the client list and the more familiar the name, the safer the choice is assumed to be. Big firms have sufficient assets for successful litigation, which is a key consideration when risk mitigation has become the driver of consultant selection. Yet size was never a reliable test. A large firm is no more trustworthy than a small one, nor a small firm more trustworthy than a large one. Size simply does not tell you what you need to know.

Trust in consulting lives in the person sitting across the table. That is not sentiment, it is structure. You cannot hold a corporate logo to a code of conduct, but you can hold a person to one. When an engagement goes wrong, you do not discipline a brand. You either hold an individual accountable to the standard they signed up to, or you discover there was no standard there to begin with.

This accountability is the whole reason that professional standards exist – it’s a fact worth stating plainly, because it tends to get lost. A certified consultant has agreed, in advance and in writing, to work to a defined standard of competence and ethics, and to answer for it when they fall short. There is no ambiguity when we have a clear international standard for how management consultancy should be delivered, ISO 20700, as well as a global body that maintains a certification competence framework. This standard is not merely a marketing badge. It is a commitment a client can verify before engaging you, and that someone outside your firm can enforce after they do so.

That last part is what the headlines keep exposing. A standard means little without someone independent to enforce it. Self-review is not accountability, however senior the people conducting it, because a firm assessing its own conduct is managing its own reputation rather than answering to anyone else. Accountability requires someone outside the firm with the standing to act. Clients understand this, and they will expect to see it more clearly from here on.

The useful thing about locating trust in the individual is that it does not depend on the size of their firm. A consultant in a global firm and a sole practitioner can both be held to the same professional standard, because the standard attaches to the person, not the letterhead. That is what makes it portable and fair. A client can ask the same question of anyone they are about to engage, whatever the name on the invoice, and a good consultant should welcome the question rather than rely on the brand behind them to speak for them.

So, what should a client take from another month of difficult headlines? The lesson is not that consultants cannot be trusted. Instead, it is to stop judging trustworthiness by the size of the firm and the familiarity of the name. Start asking what standard the individual advising you is actually held accountable to, and who can enforce this standard when it matters most. If the answer is a recognised professional standard with independent oversight, then you are on solid ground. If the answer is the firm’s own good name, then you are trusting a brand to police itself, and recent experience is not encouraging.

For those of us inside the profession, this moment asks something back. It asks us to stop treating our accountability as something taken for granted and to start making it visible. To say, without defensiveness, here is the standard I hold myself to, and here are those who can check me against it. This is not a weak position from which to argue, but rather the strongest position a consultant has.

Those firms in the headlines for all the wrong reasons will work through their crises, the way large institutions do, and the consulting profession will come through it. But it will come through because of the standard carried by individual practitioners who choose to be accountable, not because of the impressiveness of anyone’s letterhead. It is clear that small, well-led, flexible specialist teams provide higher-quality project outcomes than those firms relying on their brand to carry the load.

We would do well to stop confusing the two.