Too Close to Be Useful?
On independence, integration, and the consulting role
In the previous piece, I wrote about what happens when consultants spend long stretches fully embedded with a single client—and how, over time, their own consulting firm can quietly fade into the background. Fewer touchpoints, limited visibility, and a subtle shift in professional reference points are often the result.
Underneath that sits another, closely related tension. It is not really about employers or loyalty, but about the consulting role itself: the constant balancing act between integrating into the client’s team and keeping enough professional distance to remain useful.
This article looks at that balance.
Why Integration Is Necessary
Without integration at the client, consulting does not work. You need access, context, and relationships. You need to understand not just formal processes, but also the informal power structures, histories, and sensitivities. You need people to speak openly around you.
Being close to the client is not a flaw. It is a prerequisite.
This is why many consultants aim to become “one of the team.” It reduces friction, speeds things up, and makes everyday work easier. In many long-running assignments, full integration feels like the only realistic way to get anything done.
And often, at least for a while, it works exactly as intended.
Why Distance Is Also Needed
At the same time, consulting does not work without distance either. Not much of it, but enough.
Distance is what allows a consultant to notice things insiders no longer see. To ask questions that feel unnecessary—or even naive—to people who have lived with the system for years. To slow things down when everyone else is optimizing for speed and continuity.
Without some distance, it becomes hard to separate what is from what has simply always been. Structures, constraints, and trade-offs start to look natural and unavoidable, rather than chosen and therefore open to challenge.
This does not mean standing outside the organization or keeping people at arm’s length. It means having a role that is adjacent rather than fully internal. Close enough to participate, but not so close that perspective disappears.
Integration gives access. Distance preserves perspective. Consulting relies on both, even if only one of them is visible in daily work.
When Integration Starts to Erode the Role
Problems begin when integration turns into assimilation. At some point, the consultant stops being adjacent to the organization and starts being absorbed by it. Language shifts. Priorities align. Internal constraints begin to feel self-evident rather than questionable.
When you are fully “one of us,” certain things become harder—not because you suddenly lose honesty or courage, but because the cost of speaking up quietly changes.
Critical comments start to feel disruptive rather than helpful. Questioning long-standing practices means questioning decisions made by people you work with every day. Pointing out problems may sound like criticizing colleagues, not systems. And reminding the organization that your role is temporary can feel awkward when your calendar, identity, and social ties say otherwise.
None of this requires explicit pressure. The incentives are subtle but effective. You want to keep momentum. You want meetings to go smoothly. You want to avoid being seen as negative, theoretical, or “not getting how things really work here.” Over time, it becomes easier to adapt your message—or keep some observations to yourself. The role has not disappeared, but its edges have softened.
Distance Depends on the Role
It is also worth saying out loud that professional distance does not matter equally in all consulting roles.
In execution-oriented work—hands-on IT delivery, implementation, operational support—deep integration is often not just acceptable, but necessary. The value comes from getting things done efficiently inside the client’s setup. In those roles, blending in reduces friction and improves results.
The balance shifts in advisory, design, and strategic work. Here, value comes less from execution speed and more from judgment: framing problems, challenging assumptions, and helping the organization see trade-offs it would rather not look at. In those roles, full integration can quietly remove the very conditions that make that work possible.
Trouble often starts when the same integration model is applied across roles that rely on fundamentally different kinds of value. What enables delivery work can dilute advisory work.
Professional Distance Is Also Structural
This is not just a moral issue. And it is not mainly about backbone or honesty.
Professional distance is structural. It depends on how the role is defined, how success is evaluated, and where feedback comes from. When a consultant is deeply embedded, evaluated mainly by the client, and socially integrated into the team, distance does not disappear because of weakness. It disappears because the role no longer actively supports it.
In that setup, maintaining distance requires swimming against the current. Expecting individual consultants to do that consistently through sheer willpower is unrealistic.
If distance is needed for the role to work, it has to be built into the role itself.
Balancing Without Resolving the Tension
There is no clean solution here. Independence and integration pull in opposite directions, and neither can be maximized without weakening the other.
Too much distance, and you become irrelevant. Too much integration, and you become indistinguishable.
The point is not to resolve the tension, but to recognize it—and to stop pretending it does not exist. For consultants, managers, and consulting firms alike, that means being honest about what long-term embedded work does to roles, perspectives, and expectations.
That said, a few small, practical choices can make the “in-between” position slightly more sustainable:
One is being explicit about your role, at least occasionally. Not in every meeting, but at the right moments. Saying things like “from an external perspective” or “this may sound obvious from the inside” is not rhetorical fluff. It is a way of reintroducing distance without breaking trust.
Another is maintaining at least one regular touchpoint outside the client context. A manager, a colleague, or even a peer conversation where you can speak freely without adapting to the client’s internal logic. Not to complain, but to recalibrate.
A third is noticing what you stop saying. When certain observations keep getting postponed because “now is not the right time,” that is often a signal worth paying attention to. Not necessarily to act immediately, but to acknowledge internally.
None of these remove the tension. They just keep it visible.
The consultant’s job is not to stand outside and criticize. Nor is it to disappear inside the client organization. It is to operate in between. And that, by definition, is not a very stable place to stand.
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👨💻About the Author
Eetu Niemi is an enterprise architect, consultant, and author.
Follow him elsewhere: Homepage | LinkedIn | Substack (enterprise architecture ) | Medium (writing) | Homepage (FI)
Books: Enterprise Architecture | Technology Consultant Fast Track | Successful Technology Consulting | Kokonaisarkkitehtuuri (FI) | Pohjoisen tie (FI) | Little Cthulhu’s Breakfast Time
Web resources: Enterprise Architecture Info Package (FI)