1 Performance Consulting: The Process

If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.

—W. Edwards Deming

What is performance consulting? We define it as a strategic process that produces business results by maximizing performance of people and organizations. The use of the word strategic is purposeful. Strategic work is critical to sustaining future business and organizational success. Performance consulting is a process used to partner with management on these types of initiatives. However, strategic work is not the only type of work we support. This chapter begins with a look at the types of work in which performance consultants engage and the people with whom they partner. It then describes the performance consulting process.