How to Be the Lead Consultant
Lead Consultant: From Master Builder to Project CEO
The construction industry has a habit of promoting its best designers into non-design jobs, whether they like it or not.
Architects in particular spend years learning to draw, to think spatially, to solve complex problems with material, structure and light. They get extremely good at it, so good that they start managing how other people do it. Then one day, they are submerged in schedules, contracts and unanswered emails. There’s no time for creative work. They’ve become the Lead Consultant.
It can feel like the end of an era; worthy of a moment of mourning, perhaps. But becoming the Lead Consultant is also an invitation; not to solve ever bigger problems, but to build the systems in which others can solve them. The more complex the project, the more impact the Lead Consultant can have – get it wrong and the whole thing unravels; get it right and your team will be flying.
We believe architects are some of the most suitably skilled people to take on this role. They know how to coordinate, innovate, and move from strategy to detail and back. So how does a design professional make the transition from designing the answers to creating the conditions for the right answers to emerge?
The Perception Gap
We find it helpful to think of the Lead Consultant not as the Master Builder, but as the Project CEO. To do the job well, architects need is to transition from ‘doing’ on the left to enabling ‘deciding’ by the parties on the right. And with that, they take responsibility for the performance of others on the team.
Architects are typically great at communicating what they are designing; the hard part is translating the vision into the language clients need; that of risk, opportunity, and decision. That’s the Lead Consultant’s role: not to design the project, but to make it navigable. So whether appointing the right specialist, choosing from design options or committing to a direction of travel, the Lead Consultant brings the strategic instinct, commercial awareness and stakeholder management to the process, on behalf of the client and the designers. Architectural training builds creative and technical rigour, often without this level of calculated objectivity. It is a different mode of thinking from the one that explores the creative potential of a project, but one architects are perfectly positioned to learn.
From the Client’s perspective, it is often helpful to see that there is a left and right hand, and they play different roles. One – The Lead Consultant – holds the purpose of the project, the ‘why’. They interface with the business case, the funding, the strategy and navigate the risks of the project. The other hand – the Lead Designer – holds the vision for the project, the ‘what’. They bring the creative direction, inspiration and response to context – crafting the vision that answers the client’s ‘why’. The two hands should mirror each other; using different tools and methods to come to the same answer.
Even if one brain could hold both realities at the same time, projects change, risks evolve and team dynamics shift. The Lead Consultant establishes the project’s strategic clarity, but they then maintain it, relentlessly, as the project evolves. This best Lead Consultants understand that schedules and registers aren’t an administrative overhead to the ‘real’ work; they are the architecture of a well-run project. Building them with rigour and clarity, to support both client and designer, is skilled work on par with anything done at the drawing board.
Leadership is a System
There’s a comfortable myth in architecture that leadership is mostly about personality. That if you’re charismatic enough, collaborative enough, present enough in the room, the project will follow.
Not always.
Good leadership is a system, designed deliberately and tailored to the needs of the project. Much like the design process itself, project environments are built; clear protocols, shared tools and structures, to make design information visible, digestible and negotiable. So when the Project Manager speaks in risk and programme, the client team speaks in budget and business case, and the design team speaks in ideas and iterations, then can all communicate with each other.
Leadership, at its core, is a design challenge, which sits on four pillars:
1. Strategic Scoping & Clear Roles
In an ideal world, the Lead Consultant is equipped with three key documents; a clear project brief, tangible objectives, and the contract, which should contain intentional deliverables. From here, design territory can be defined, gaps can be identified, behaviours can be established, and changes can be quantified. Creating scope split documents or a matrix of project tasks can help sustain clarity as the project evolves, too.
2. Systematic Communication
It’s human nature to want to know what everyone is saying, but rooms quickly get too big to function, then productivity collapses. Establishing a communication matrix at project inception ensures the right people are in the rooms, and no one is left out or over-exposed. We find a meeting strategy clarifies the decision-making path too; if the key decision holder isn’t in the room, the meeting likely doesn’t need to happen.
3. Proactive Programming & Tracking
One programme, one page, one version of the truth. Just the key dates, workflows and decision points. It’s crucial for teams to orientate themselves in the washing machine of a large project. No finger pointing, just an objective look at what impacts what, to help unstick the project.
4. Collaborative Change & Risk Management
Modern contracts acknowledge that change is inevitable, and enable teams to manage variation, rather than avoid it. We like to support this with an open-book record of decisions and change; non-adversarial tools for clarity and traceability help project teams to share insights and raise solutions in real time. This makes change part of normal project progress, rather than an ‘event’ to haggle over.
Of course, every project is different, and there is no single solution for everyone. Becoming the Project CEO requires acknowledgement that this is not a creative role, it is an infrastructural design role. Accepting this enables the Lead Consultant to focus on building the project environment, tool by tool, then maintaining the environment on both sides of the fence. With a solid foundation established by the Lead Consultant, the Lead Designer is free and supported to design at their best. Committing to the reality of these two distinct roles allows architects to reclaim their position as the Client’s trusted strategic and creative advisors.
