Directive Versus Collaborative UX Consulting

Consulting Styles

Consulting style follows leadership style. So, in directive consulting, we take the leadership role. We initiate all activities and tell the customer exactly what to do to be successful. This style of consulting can be very effective, but it is important to truly lead a customer that needs this style rather than making them feel as though you are pulling them in whatever direction you want them to take.

In a collaborative consulting environment, we provide information, best practices, and suggestions to a client, but it is up to them to decide how best to use the information we’ve provided—with our expert guidance, of course.

The most basic form of research, doing a Google search, quickly shows which style of consulting is more popular. Search for collaborative consulting, and you’ll get a great many hits. There are consulting companies with collaborative in their name and lots of articles on how to be more collaborative in your consulting approach.

Searching for directive consulting yields far fewer and less substantial results. In fact, you’d have to dig to find anything on the topic. When your leadership style and approach to consulting are directive, rather than your customers perceiving you as being supportive, they may perceive you as being someone who just tells other people or groups what to do, without explaining yourself or fostering consensus.

How the Maturity of User Experience Affects Your Leadership Style

There is now less and less need for the profession of user experience to prove its importance. User experience, as a practice, is at a critical juncture: an ever-widening audience is aware of its value—even if they don’t understand its value in depth. Thus, the thirst for UX leadership is growing. In the past, it was enough just to be collaborative in our consulting approach. We worked side by side with our customers and sometimes provided leadership to help them craft a successful user experience.

Now, as our customers increasingly are looking to us to lead, our leadership and consulting styles need to be more adaptive. Sometimes we need to be the leader. Sometimes we need to be the collaborator. At still other times, we need to be the participant. It all depends on the context—the situation that we find ourselves in.

Adapting our consulting style requires us to tap into the psychological side of user experience, which enables us to perceive which style of consulting a client really needs—even if the client is unable to ask for it specifically. The ability to be adaptive in our consulting style and use context as our guide has become critical to our overall success as consultants.