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The seven (actually nine) deadly sins of new performance consultants: the transition from trainer or OD specialist to performance consultant involves a lot of "lessons learned." Here''s a look at what a number of veteran HPI professionals have learned from their early experience and the most common mistakes they see being made by new performance consultants.

Article Excerpt
There's a story--perhaps apocryphal--about the late Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart and how he had managed to achieve so much professionally. A student is supposed to have asked "Mister Sam" how he got to be so rich and successful. "Easy," Walton said. "Lots of smart decisions." The student then asked how he managed to make so many smart decisions, to which Walton replied, "Easy. Lots of wisdom." The student then inquired how Walton had gotten to be so smart, to which Walton responded, "Easy. Lots of dumb decisions!"

That tale illustrates a key point for almost any successful professional: To be successful requires continual learning, and much of that learning occurs through the errors we make. We'd all like to avoid making mistakes, but that's impossible when starting out. In fact, screw-ups can be key learning opportunities when we evaluate them intelligently and learn the appropriate lessons from them. Yet, though we preach the value of learning organizations and importance of lifelong learning, we're sometimes unwilling to admit our own capacity to make mistakes and fail to recognize the learning opportunities.

Looking back on my own journey in the field of human performance improvement--and the many learning opportunities--I decided to query a host of trusted peers and performance notables for insights and the lessons learned from their own journeys. I asked two questions: What mistakes did you make starting out that you learned from? What are the most common mistakes you see new performance consultants making?

Let me share the nine common (and often deadly) sins of new performance consultants.

Deadly Sin 1: The Lone Ranger Syndrome. The tendency for many trainers and OD professionals is to take an assignment and run with it. That makes sense because trainers and ODers typically own that part of the work and are considered specialists in designing or delivering their particular interventions. But human performance improvement, or HPI, requires partnership with the client and other stakeholders because, typically, all aspects of the performance project will fall outside the authority and resources of the performance consultant. Mary Broad, co-author of Transfer of Training, says that a consistent shortcoming she has seen is the failure to partner. "One of the most critical competencies of the performance consultant, internal or external, is the ability to form constructive partnerships with key stakeholders in the organization," she says. When new performance consultants try to go it alone, they usually fail--especially with complex challenges.

Tom LaBonte, who wrote Building a New Performance Vision and is a facilitator for ASTD's HPI program (GO TO) http://www1.astd.org/HPI.Community, has noticed that even when new performance consultants do partner, they tend to aim too low. Says LaBonte, "One...