The Most Overlooked Trait in IT Consulting: Flexibility

Why expertise is not enough—and what actually makes things work in practice

Mar 24, 2026

I was mentoring a consultant recently, and one thought kept coming back to me during that discussion. Not something new or surprising, something I had actually written down years ago when working on my second consulting book, but had not really thought about since.

Flexibility.

If I had to point out one of the main reasons things have worked out reasonably well in my consulting career, this would be somewhere near the top of the list. Not the only thing, but one of the few that seems to matter in almost every situation.

What made it interesting in that moment was how easily it gets overlooked. We tend to talk about other things instead.

Traditionally, when discussing what makes a good consultant, the focus is on expertise, structured thinking, communication skills, and familiarity with methods and frameworks. All of these matter, and in many cases they are the entry ticket to the profession. Without them, things become difficult quite quickly.

But they are not what carries you through the day-to-day reality of consulting work. For that, you need something else.

What Flexibility Actually Means in Practice

Flexibility is often interpreted in a fairly narrow way. Plans change, priorities shift, scope evolves, and the consultant is expected to adjust.

That is certainly part of the picture, but it is also the most visible and easiest form of flexibility. It usually comes with a clear signal: something has changed, and you react.

In practice, the more relevant situations are less explicit.

You walk into a meeting expecting to present a well-prepared solution, but quickly realize that the client team is not aligned at all. The discussion you had planned does not really make sense in that context. Or you prepare a structured workshop, only to notice that the participants are more interested in debating basic assumptions than following your agenda.

Nothing has officially changed. There is no new scope or revised timeline.

But the situation itself is different from what you expected.

Flexibility, in this sense, is the ability to notice that difference early enough and adjust your approach without making a big deal out of it. You quietly shift from presenting to facilitating, from leading to listening, or from abstract thinking to something more concrete.

The work continues, but in a slightly different form.

Adaptability as a Core Working Mode

This is where flexibility becomes more concrete. In practice, it shows up as adaptability—the ability to shift your role and way of working depending on the situation. In reality, it is closer to a default mode of operation than an occasional skill.

A consultant rarely operates in a single, stable role. During a single day, you may move from being an expert presenting recommendations, to facilitating a discussion, to structuring messy input into something usable, to doing fairly operational tasks just to keep things moving.

And if your job description looks anything like mine, you are not only shifting between roles, but also between different projects and clients—sometimes several times within the same day. Each of these contexts comes with its own expectations, dynamics, people, tools, and ways of working, and the transition between them needs to happen quickly and without much ceremony.

The value comes from switching between roles and contexts without friction and without making it look like a struggle.

The client does not necessarily notice that you changed your approach. They just experience that something tangible comes out of it. And that is usually enough.

Resilience as Continuous Adjustment

One aspect of flexibility that is easy to overlook is resilience. It is not only about dramatic situations or extraordinary endurance. More often, it is about the ability to continue working effectively when things are slightly off.

Plans change, sometimes repeatedly. The client may not be entirely sure what they want, or their internal alignment may shift during the project. The work itself may not be as clean or well-defined as you would prefer. Despite all this, progress still needs to be made.

Resilience, in this context, is the ability to absorb these small disruptions without losing momentum. You adjust, recalibrate, and continue. There is no need for visible effort or emphasis.

Over time, this quiet persistence tends to matter more than any individual insight or particularly successful meeting.

Managing Your Own Persona

This is where flexibility becomes slightly more personal and, perhaps, a bit uncomfortable to discuss openly.

A good consultant does not bring their personality into every situation in the same way. There is a certain amount of regulation involved.

It does not mean acting or pretending. But it does mean that you are aware of how you come across and what the situation requires.

There are moments where being direct and assertive is useful, especially when decisions need to be made or when the discussion lacks direction. There are also situations where a softer, more neutral approach works better, particularly when the client needs space to think or align internally.

And sometimes, the most effective contribution is surprisingly small. You ask a question, summarize a point, or simply help the group stay on track.

At the same time, there is a boundary that is worth stating quite plainly: consulting is a service profession. The client is paying for a service. That is the starting point.

From that perspective, your personal challenges, frustrations, or moods are not particularly relevant in the situation. They may be completely valid, but they are not what the client is there for. Similarly, your personality should not make the work harder. If your way of interacting creates friction, it reduces your effectiveness regardless of how strong your expertise is.

That said, the opposite extreme is not desirable either. No one enjoys working with someone who feels like a generic, personality-less operator. A certain level of authenticity and natural presence is still important. People trust people, not roles.

The balance is somewhere in between. You remain yourself, but you make sure that the way you show up supports the situation rather than dominates it.

What Flexibility Is Not

At this point, it is worth making one thing explicit, because this is where the idea of flexibility often gets misunderstood.

Flexibility does not mean that you agree to everything or that you simply go along with whatever the client suggests. It is not about being a yes-man, and it certainly does not mean giving up your professional judgment. In fact, that is usually where problems start.

A consultant who adapts to every situation without any internal anchor quickly becomes ineffective. If you do not have a clear view of what makes sense and what does not, there is nothing to adapt in the first place. You are just reacting.

Real flexibility works differently. You keep your direction, your standards, and your understanding of what should be done. What changes is how you get there. Sometimes you push more directly, sometimes you slow down and build alignment, and sometimes you take a step sideways to move things forward indirectly.

In that sense, flexibility is less about bending and more about controlled adjustment. You are not drifting with the situation. You are working with it, without losing your footing.

Why This Matters More Than It Seems

Looking back at different consulting situations over the years, many of the challenging ones were not primarily about complexity or lack of knowledge. They were about applying the wrong approach to the situation at hand.

Pushing too hard when alignment was missing. Holding back when direction was needed. Presenting a solution when the problem was still unclear.

These are not failures of expertise. They are mismatches between the situation and the way you respond to it.

Once you start to see that pattern, the role of flexibility becomes much more visible.

Not as a secondary skill or a nice-to-have quality, but as something that quietly enables everything else to work as intended.

📘 New Book: Why Good Consultants Often Stay Underpaid

I have recently written a short book called The Senior Expert Pay Playbook.

It continues the same structural perspective as The Senior Expert Career Playbook, but focuses specifically on how compensation actually forms in expert roles—especially in consulting environments where contribution is often indirect and distributed across projects, clients, and teams.

Many experienced consultants deliver strong work, build trust, and take on increasing responsibility, yet compensation develops more slowly than expected. Often the issue is not performance or negotiation skill, but structural positioning: how visible the contribution is, how close the role is to value creation, and how clearly the impact can be articulated.

The book looks at these questions from a practical perspective and describes how expert roles can gradually develop stronger economic leverage without requiring a move into management or sales.

The book will be published in early April, but it is already available in my Gumroad store.

A small launch discount is available with the code PAYSTRUCTURE22 (for The Senior Expert Pay Playbook) and EXPERTMODEL22 (for the bundle including both books).