A Consultant's Dilemma: Speak Truth to Power or Cash the Paycheck?

I was told by a recent client, “Where most consultants would say just what they need to be helpful and get paid, you tend to be bold and direct with hard truths. You are betting that your clients want the truth, even if it’s painful, embarrassing, or hard to hear.”

This client gave me a contract extension when I told him hard truths about his negative (and positive) impacts on his own organization. He saw my impartial opinion as an asset. He values truth to inform effective change, even if it personally triggers shame.

That’s a brave entrepreneur and my favorite sort of client.

But it doesn’t always work out that way.

This winter I accepted a brand identity project for a professional association of niche academics.

After a robust discovery process, I had a choice: deliver the findings, the data, and my honest recommendations OR pull out the standard template and offer actionable ideas that aren’t going to address the underlying problems I’d revealed and confirmed.

Marketing isn’t like medicine. In medicine, if you find a brain tumor when treating a routine eye infection, you don’t just say, “Here are your eye drops.” You have a moral and legal obligation to speak up to save the patient’s life.

In marketing consulting, no one is going to die if I do a half-assed job at rebranding. If I see the client’s brand has cancer, I don’t have to tell them. I can treat the eye infection and be on my way, get paid, everyone’s happy. The cancer may go away, or it becomes someone else’s job to discover and treat it.

What do you do?

You can guess what I did.

I circled my wagons, checked in with one of my anti-oppression coaches, re-checked the findings, and delivered a diagnosis: In order to transform into an organization aligned with your stated values, you as individuals and as a body have to accept that you’re a racist, sexist, homophobic, white, elitist organization run very old, mostly cis-gendered straight white men and women.

My recommendation is to focus on acceptance of hard truths. That’s all. 

Build this next iteration of your brand around the process of accepting hard truths as a way to lead the discussion about systemic oppression in niche academic communities built on white supremacy culture. That alone is going to take a lot of work, and it’s perfectly aligned with your remit as an organization engaged in the study of the human condition.

The process of understanding and acceptance itself will feel authentic, triggering, emotional, and intellectually rigorous. 

Doesn’t that sound like perfect fun for a group of professionals focused on the capacity of the human ego to delude itself? Self-reflection and understanding of the self as it is! 

I proposed that this organization consider that there are 1,000s of volumes worth of study to be done on the white supremacist / ivory tower / elitist mind (individually, organizationally, and societally) as it continues to be complicit in its own self perpetuation via oppression. 

They could literally spend time doing the hardest work ever done in their field of academia - not pretend that they are an exception to this rule, examine the construct, legacy, and violence of their field, and use the introspective study as a path to finding their humanity as practitioners while helping spread this knowledge via their role as educators.  

They fired me. Immediately. 

The “powerful” in the intellectual, creative, philosophical, and religious classes continue to go through a cyclical, generational process of awareness, understanding, and acceptance of their own oppressionist history, legacy, construct, violence, withholding, and subjugation - yet as soon as the power structure itself is threatened and the powerful are asked to change, they use their privileges to exceptionalize, marginalize, judge, justify, or otherwise protect themselves.

The cycle continues. 

In the case of this group of academics, it was very Freudian that they refused to be curious about their organizational legacy of harm, likely because that legacy is directly connected to their individual identities as practitioners.

I’m no Freud, but it seems like there was a lot of shame lurking under their firing me. I showed them a mirror and instead of accepting a flawed reflection, they just gaslighted me and stole the mirror.

“YOU aren’t understanding us. YOU can’t tell us we are a racist or misogynist or elitist organization. How dare YOU. YOU are no one. WE are the degree-conferred elite. We have the diplomas and make the rules. We reject your opinion and will find someone else who will tell us what we want,” said the power structure invoking the privilege to ignore a person speaking truth to power. 

Since then, I’ve reflected on how I can do a better job at presenting hard truths so that clients aren’t triggered, but empowered. It would have been so much more fun to work alongside them as they saw this journey of discovery, liberation, and anti-oppression as joyously as I saw it.

Next time I will take smaller steps to the same end. That I am right and gave the best advice did nothing but re-entrench this organization in its delusion because of the way I delivered it.

We won’t change the world if the powerful aren’t in a place where they can receive the message, hear it, accept it and have self-compassion, perspective, and support through the rough waters.

My commitment is to the truth and to a gentler approach to helping support clients through the darker sides of that truth - so we can make change together.