Many consultants and clients assume that the primary beneficiary of any evaluation is the client, for an evaluation is the way in which a consultant can be held accountable for her work. Thus, many consultants do not push for an evaluation, nor do they help to plan it. They assume that an evaluation is the client’s responsibility and should be initiated by the client.
An evaluation need not just serve the needs of the client. A consultant’s own needs can be expressed legitimately at this point in the consultation. Although these needs must be deferred during most of the previous stages of consultation, they become appropriate at this stage. The evaluation should be designed so that the consultant gains a maximum amount of insight about his own work with this client system. The client owes this to a consultant, for supposedly the client is already the beneficiary of insights gained by the consultant from evaluations of previous consultations.
Stage Ten: Exit
Any consultation should be viewed as a temporary arrangement between a client and consultant that continues to exist only as long as the consultant is doing for the client system that which the system cannot do for itself. A consultant should be working herself out of the job from the first day she meets with the client. During the final stage in the consulting process, the independence of the client should be kept at the forefront when decisions are made concerning the continuation of the consultation.
Strong arguments can be made for continuing a consultation that has been successful already. The consultant will have credibility. Her intentions and competence will already have the client’s and audience’s trust. She will have intimate knowledge of the client system and of the ways in which this system can best be served by a consultant. Yet, precisely because of her increased value to the client system, the consultant and client must be cautious about extending the consultation. If the consultant becomes indispensible to the client system, she will not be working in the best interests of the client, for the client will have become dependent on the consultant’s knowledge and skills rather than building knowledge and skills within his own system.
Many consultants prepare for exit by training people within the client system to take over the consultant role. A consultant might invite one or more members of the client system (or the client himself) to serve as an apprentice or assistant in conducting an intervention or in collecting and analyzing data. If the client is involved in all stages of the consultation, he already has gained a great deal of knowledge about the consulting process and is ready to incorporate many of the consultative practices into the daily life of the institution Information-oriented activities, for instance, might be incorporated into the continuing institutional research initiatives of the organization.
