Interview with Kate Smith, strategist and facilitator

Strategist, facilitator & progress maker

I first met Kate in late 2018, when the engagement agency I worked for then were developing an operational and fundraising strategy for the Arts Foundation. As part of that process, the Arts Foundation team requested we contract Kate to the strategy team.

A situation like that isn’t always an automatic recipe for joyous collaboration. Things coulda got edgy, with too many strategic egos in one room.

But that’s not what happened.

Instead, Kate arrived bringing her calm, measured expertise. She shone light on knotty topics, asked incisive questions, and gently added value.

It must have been an interesting exercise for her, accustomed as she is to being key facilitator in such strategic situations, but not for one moment did she indicate unease or impatience. In short, she was an exemplary and essential member of the team.

Fast forward 15 months to March 2020.

The Covid shit hit the fan, and NZ went into lockdown.

My baby business pipeline spasmed like a goosed sphincter muscle and dried up overnight.

And I wasn’t alone. Wherever I looked, people were panicking.

After 24 hours of my own private freak out fest, I decided to turn the situation to my advantage, and take the opportunity to do essential strategic work I hadn’t yet done.

By this stage, I was also aware that if I wanted to step off the classic consultant hamster wheel of trading time for money, I’d need to develop products and services, like group coaching, that allowed me to maximise impact and revenue.

So, I thought, why not combine the two? Why not do my strategy work with a group of other consultants, and dip my toes into coaching at the same time?

I threw together a one pager inviting consultants and freelancers to embark on a free four-week business strategy reset, chucked it up on Facebook and LinkedIn, and waited to see what would happen.

Among the people who emailed me, was Kate.

Cue my knees knocking and galloping imposter syndrome.

“She’s worked for Saatchi’s and she’s been a strategic consultant for 20 years, and her client list is terrifying. What can I teach her?” I wailed at my poor long-suffering partner.

“Well, she clearly thinks you’ve got something worth sharing” he replied.

Four weeks of daily 40-minute Zoom calls later (I was too cheap to spring for the paid version), we’d talked through our dream clients, our services, content marketing, and the essential ingredients of a consultant’s website.

But far more valuable than the exercises I shared each day, were the insights from the wider group. And perhaps most valuable of all was Kate’s poise and perception. So, when it came to shortlisting consultants to interview about their businesses, her name was the first I jotted down. Take it away Kate.

Stripping barnacles off the boat

I help senior leadership teams get unstuck and make progress.

The idea of progress is important to me. The older I get, the more I hate doing work which doesn't lead to productive change.

Generally, when people come to me, they're a bit stuck. They know what they're trying to achieve, but they're not sure how to go about it. So, they need an outside perspective.

I'm agnostic when it comes to industry. I've worked with some of New Zealand's biggest corporates, such as Z Energy, Fonterra, and Southern Cross, smaller local businesses like Coupland's Bakeries, and Harraways, and export led businesses like Kono. I’ve also worked with DOC and the Ministry of Education, and local government, particularly in the tourism area. I love the variety of working across sectors.

But while I don’t have an industry niche, the issues I solve for organisations are quite similar.

They either haven't got a strategy. Or, more often, they've got a strategy which isn’t working. And usually, their strategy isn’t working for one of three reasons. It doesn't make sense to the people trying to implement it, they're unable to implement it, or they're implementing it but it's not getting the results that they want.

I also run senior leadership team strategy retreats. We review their strategy. What worked? What didn't work? What's changed since we last met? What do we need to focus on now?

I’ve done that with one client for five consecutive years. The great thing about that, is you develop a level of fluency, not just with the strategy, but also with the people. So, the dynamic in the room is quite exciting. I enjoy those sessions because we pull things apart and get right down into the nitty gritty of why we’re doing things and why things work and fail. I get a really good feel for what is going on inside a business.

I also help organisations get a shared understanding of what progress looks like because sometimes that doesn't exist. Senior leaders may believe everyone knows what an organization is trying to do. But often when I talk to people individually, there's no shared understanding of progress at all.

And sometimes it's about helping teams to accelerate. They may already be heading in the right direction, but how do they go faster? How do we take the barnacles off the boat to build more momentum?

The delicate dance of consultancy

The pathway that led me to my strategic work goes back to my time working for Saatchi.

In the mid-1990s through to the early 2000s I was the National Strategic Planning Director for Saatchi New Zealand. At that time Saatchi was by far the largest ad agency in NZ. It was a time when agencies really were true business partners to their clients. So, we got to sit at the top table and have strategic discussions about what was going on with a business and how we, as their agency, could help.

I worked with and learned from thinkers and leaders from companies like Telecom, Toyota, and Westpac Trust, as it then was. We worked with the Retirement Commission on the launch of Sorted. We developed the Stuff brand for INL. We worked with the Rugby Union and adidas on their global rugby and All Black’s sponsorship.

Being in those rooms as head of strategy for Saatchi, I needed to earn my keep and perform. But, looking back, and this is a tribute to my colleagues and the culture of the agency at the time, I never felt as if I had to know it all. I was always very aware of being in those rooms to learn, as much as pontificate about what I thought the right thing to do might be.

Saatchi had fantastically good strategists when I was there. James Hall and Peter Cullinane are both great. Kim Thorp (who was Executive Creative Director) and Howard Greive are also brilliant strategists. I asked Kim one day, "Why do you need me? You can do all this stuff I do." He laughed and said, "Well, I probably couldn't. But even if I could, I don't want to, and I don't have the time." So, I had wonderful mentors, and massive learning opportunities, and I learned how to conduct myself working with senior people.

When I set out on my own, I could draw on all that. I once read that as a consultant, you have to tread the line between being authoritative and not appearing to know it all because you're always learning your client’s business. They know their business, but at the same time, you have to create a sense of reassurance that you know what the hell you’re doing. That can be quite a tricky dance at the beginning of a client relationship.

If you feel you need to behave as if you know it all you end up looking dumb. I've sat in meetings, particularly with agency people, where I wanted to say: “Look, these people have been working in their business for a decade. They know their stuff. Don’t treat them like they're stupid. You’re not here because you’re smarter than they are”.

A consultant’s job is to bring an outside perspective. You come in not knowing a business, and you can ask what Adam Morgan calls intelligently naive questions. You can ask, "Why do you do this that way?” “How do you think about the business you’re in?” “How are you serving these customers?" “What do they value about what you do?” The key thing is to ask from a place of genuine curiosity, and not to sound as if you’re being critical.

Working well with senior executives

Recently, I was listening to a podcast where Brené Brown was talking with Jim Collins. Jim said, the first thing to remember is that senior executives are just people. They’re not strange beings who sit on pedestals. They do the same stuff we all do.

My advice is, be your authentic self, try not to put on a performance. And as part of that, be honest. If someone asks you something you don't know, then say you don't know. Don't fudge it and pretend you're a genius in an area that you don't really know anything about.

One of the things I really like about my business is that I have clients who change jobs or companies and come back and work with me again, and that's because we’ve built up a relationship of trust and respect. So, always respect the person you're talking to, however wrong you think they may be. You need to be able to listen to them, understand where they're coming from and what they're trying to achieve.

As a consultant, you’re often uncovering aspects of an organization that may not be working that well. And that's a position of vulnerability for a CEO or leader. So, you have to understand where they're coming from, and know the appropriate time to have sensitive conversations.

One example is, quite often new clients will explain what they think they need, and we go through the process of scoping and quoting. Then I start work, and it becomes obvious within the first few weeks that our original goal is not what we really need to do.

Then I have a conversation with my client and explain: "Look, we said we’d do this, but what I'm finding is this … therefore we should think about changing direction.” That's a critical point in the relationship. When that conversation goes well, I heave a sigh of relief because now we can get down to the real work.

One of my eatbigfish consulting colleagues and mates who works in California, always says: "Try to look expensive." I think maybe status is more important in the US. But whenever I'm getting ready to meet clients, I always think about Mark saying that, and smile. And he’s right, to the degree that turning up looking shambolic is probably not that reassuring.

Kate … taking her friend Mark’s advice and looking very chic (and reassuringly expensive).

On not joining the educational product scramble

I offer two different services, but they overlap. On one hand there’s strategy development.

I resist slapping rigid process around strategy. The principles are simple. You're trying to work out where you are now, where you're trying to get to, and how you get from where you are now to your goal. It’s very common sense, but working through the process can be quite complex. It involves asking questions like: “Are we thinking about our business in the right way?” “Do we have all of the capabilities in place that we need to deliver a particular strategy?” Even: “Do our people believe in this strategy?” I’ve been in the situation where I’ve started talking about strategy with a senior leadership team and it becomes obvious that half the people in the room are sitting there thinking, this just isn't right.

The other part of my business is facilitation. Of course, a lot of the strategy development work I do involves facilitation, but I also do facilitation where I'm not part of the strategy development process. So, I will help groups structure their conversation when they need to talk through complex issues or make tough decisions.

The problem facing many business owners and senior executives is they know their business inside out. But they're working their butts off every single day and they don't have the time or space to lift their heads up and ask: "I wonder what we could be doing differently? I wonder if we could do this better?" By having the right conversations, I help them with that process. Everyone can strategise, but bringing someone in from outside can bring a fresh perspective and create some space to think strategically.

I’ve thought about teaching people how to do what I do by themselves. I can see all the benefits of doing that, and some of those benefits are quite attractive, like moving away from trading money for time. But something in me doesn't want to do it. I think it's because the part of the process I really enjoy is the human part of it. I like sitting down with people and really understanding what's going on, why things are happening that way, and helping facilitate a conversation about options to make things better.

The other reason I resist is because there are so many productized strategy products already. The clients I enjoy working with most are CEOs, senior executives, and boards. They're not interested in off the shelf products, they want someone to come in and help them. Off the peg strategy products are more for smaller business operators in DIY mode, and there are lots of consultants out there serving those people. I don't need to join that particular scramble.

Knowing why people choose you

When I decided I was going to work for myself, I had a bit of a crisis of confidence because I'd always worked in agency teams. At Saatchi we had drummed into us that there was no ‘I’ in team. So, I really had no clear sense of my specific contribution.

I went to visit Kim Thorp, and his wife Bron, in the Hawke's Bay. I asked him what I do that is valuable. He said to me: “You’re able to take things that are complex and make them simple, but without dumbing them down. Then you're able to take a leap from there to what a solution might look like. And most people can't do that.”

As a consultant it can be hard to identify your strengths yourself. You may do something so natural to you that you don't see it as having any value, but it is often the most valuable thing to your clients.

When I finish a project, I generally do a debrief, and ask how things have gone. As part of that I ask why people chose me, and the most valuable thing I did for them. And often it’s about people skills. I try to show empathy, build trust, and yet still push people forward, and help them to have difficult conversations.

Kate doing what she does best, facilitating a workshop and helping people get unstuck

Helping people have hard conversations

An example of this happened last year. I was working with a business and it was obvious that there was major dysfunction within the team. But it was also obvious that for me to name that dysfunction was not going to help.

I was running a session about setting a new direction for the future. It became clear that one person in the room was feeling really frustrated, lots of heavy sighing, pencils being thrown down, and arms folded. I let this go on for a little bit. And then I said: “Steve (not his real name), you're obviously not the biggest fan of what we're doing. What's going on?"

He said: "Look, this is all completely fucking irrelevant, because we're talking as if we're all one happy team and we're all trying to work out how we’re going to walk forward together. And it's not true. There’s no respect in this team for other people. We need to have a totally different conversation."

I could see people going: "Oh, shit!" in their heads.

And someone said: "Oh my God, this workshop is about to go majorly off the rails."

My response was: "No, this is exactly the conversation we need to have, so let's have it."

The temptation in those situations, particularly if you're a less experienced facilitator, is to think: "Oh my God. What about our agenda? This guy has just thrown a major curve ball. Everyone's getting agitated, how do I get this meeting back on track?"

Whereas, when you've been facilitating for as long as I have, you're almost trying to engineer those situations because you know those are the real conversations that need to be had. There's a strong, emotional intelligence aspect to consulting and facilitating. You have to understand the dynamics going on and be able to respond to them. But you have to do that in a way that’s constructive. It might be uncomfortable, but it has to be constructive.

I couldn't allow Steve’s outburst to blow up the whole process. We had to have the tough conversation, come to a resolution about how we were going to manage the situation and move forward, before I could let everybody go, otherwise it would have been damaging. I never want anyone to come out of a workshop I've run and to feel that they’ve been demeaned or not listened to. I always try to listen to everybody and hear everything that everybody has to say.

The similarities between improv and business

An old London friend called Rob Poynton had a chance encounter with an improv artist called Gary Hirsch in Portland, Oregon. And Rob became really fascinated by the application of improv to business. So they ended up setting up a business called On Your Feet to solve business issues creatively, and Rob has written several books, one of which is called Everything's an Offer.

One of the tenets of improv is that everything is an offer. An offer is an invitation or some kind of signal. Some offers will be positive, and some will be negative, and you can either choose to respond or not respond to an offer.

In the situation I described, Steve was giving me an offer because he was sending me a strong signal saying: "I am not happy with what's going on here." Now I could either choose to accept that offer or ignore it. I chose to accept it. If I hadn’t, that would have sent a signal to everyone that we were going to avoid the hard issues.

Subsequently the CEO sponsoring the meeting could have said to me: “That was inappropriate behaviour on Steve’s part, that’s not what I wanted to happen”. But I asked Steve the question and he answered it, he was doing exactly what I asked him to do. Now that didn't happen because in this case, the CEO wanted that conversation to happen, and I knew that.

I love the idea that people are making you offers with their body language, whether they are sitting forward, sitting back, whether they're engaged or not, and you can choose to accept those offers or not. But if you don't accept them, that then sends a signal to the group, which is, we are not going to have an authentic conversation here, we are going to pretend, and that never ends well. A good meeting to me isn’t one where there is no conflict. It’s where conflict can be aired and resolved.

Reputation, the art of listening & self belief

This year, I’ve been running my own business for 17 years, which is nearly twice as long as I've worked for anybody else.

I've always been really careful with my reputation. I try to be punctual, helpful, do what I say, always be kind, and treat people with respect. Even if a project hasn't gone well, I want people to think I did my best, that's really important to me. My business has grown on word of mouth alone. Ironically, over the years I've done no other marketing.

I try to be a good listener. Listening is a hugely undervalued and important skill. Some people think they're listening, but they're not taking in what others are saying, they’re just waiting to talk. The corollary to listening is the ability to ask good questions. To be a good consultant, you have to be curious about life, people, and what goes on behind the scenes in business.

I wanted to be a journalist when I left university, and a number of the skills I use now are journalistic skills - ask good questions, understand what's going on, and be able to summarize a situation concisely.

I’ve also been guilty of taking on clients that weren't a particularly good fit. I've had my fair share of those. I think we probably all have. But as you get more experienced, you develop a bit of a sixth sense about difficult clients. Sometimes I've pitched for work, not got it, and been relieved, because I felt in my gut it wasn’t my gig.

If I could go back 17 years and talk to myself when I was starting my business, the first thing I'd say would be believe in yourself. Because my belief in myself was not high. My whole work persona was so entangled with my career at Saatchi. A counselor once said to me: “There's Kate and there's Saatchi Kate, and they're not the same person”.

The process of untangling myself from Saatchi Kate and understanding who I really am and what I do was painful and difficult. So, I would say to myself, don't underestimate the journey you have to go on, but know you’re way more than Saatchi Kate.

And I guess the other thing I’d say is trust that good things are going to happen. Work hard, do the stuff that you've always done, and trust that good people and interesting work are out there. And it will be okay.

I am a great believer in serendipity. Things happen because they're supposed to happen. You will meet people. Work will come in. That doesn't look very good on a marketing plan, but it has worked for me.

Swimming in a mountain river after a steep climb on a hot day

The vagaries of pricing and business growth

After I have paid tax and GST and my overheads, I make between $100,000 and $120,000 a year. Work can be choppy. I’m almost always quiet over summer. I’ve never analysed my income month by month, but if I did map it out, it would be very lumpy across the year.

I don't set myself any targets at all because I don't know what I’d do with them. I think all they would do is stress me. If I get stressed about cashflow, my accountant says: "If you look back at your year-on-year revenue, it does not deviate very much. So, there's no reason to think it’s all going to dry up.” I’ve worked with her nearly the whole time I’ve been in business, and she's very comforting.

The thing I struggle with most is pricing. I constantly under-quote because I’m an optimist and think I can get something done in less time than it takes. I'm trying to move towards more value-based pricing. Asking myself the value of what I'm being asked to do, then estimating the time it will take, and hoping that those two figures align. But if someone could review my business and tell me how I should charge, and what I should charge, that would be gold. I think many consultants are in the same boat.

I don't have a plan for business growth, which is a bold thing to admit as a strategist.

At times I’ve thought I should take on some staff. But I've had a couple of attempts at managing people and I'm not very good at it. I find it really stressful. I'm going to be 60 this year. I want to be doing stuff I enjoy. I don't want to be grafting away doing stuff that I hate.

There are only so many hours I can work, and there are only so many hours I want to work. And there’s a limit to how high I will raise my prices. I always ask clients: "Do you believe that you've got value for money?" because I want to deliver value for money, that’s something I'm really passionate about.

So, I’m probably not far from maxing out what I’m able to earn given the time I want to spend working, the amount I’m willing to charge for my services, and the fact that I don’t want to productise my services. But my priority is not money. Yes, I want to be earning decent money for the value I'm creating, and I get cross with myself if I feel I’ve significantly underpriced something. But the priority for me now is more on doing the work I find interesting with people that I enjoy working with.

On websites and the pointlessness of pitching

My business has grown through word of mouth, and I’ve done no marketing, to the point that I only started building a website for my business in 2020. So, I'm not the right person to advise people on how to do the website thing. The difficult thing about building a website is that you're trying to talk about yourself and what you do. It's hard to do that in a way that feels authentic.

I think I made the mistake of reading too much about what makes a good website. I do a lot of research when I know I'm about to do something challenging. Sometimes that's helpful because it gets your juices going. And other times it's not helpful because you've got too much stuff flying around in your head to try and make sense of.

So, my website became quite paralyzing. I was grappling with it at the end of last year, and I was getting tired and frustrated. I put it aside over Christmas. It’s nearly done, but not quite ready for its debut, so watch this space.

One of my resolutions this year is not to do any pitching. I've a tendency to get overexcited about interesting projects and find myself in pitches as a result. Recently I put myself into a pitch situation where I had to put together a full proposal, provide detailed case studies and fly up and present to the pitch panel at my own cost. Then they came back and said’ “we decided against you because you're a one-woman operation and we think we need a team.”

My take on that was, well, I was a one-woman operation when we started the process, so either that's a bullshit excuse, or you put me through all of this expense and time-wasting for nothing, when I was never going to get the job in the first place. While that was a particularly bad example, that sort of behaviour is rife in pitches. So, I decided no more.

As a result, one purpose of my website is that you should be able to look at my services, read what I write, and have a good sense of whether I'm someone you want to work with or not.

The other thing I want to get into is more content creation. I really enjoy writing and although I do write a lot, it’s often reports and strategy documents. I would like to do to do more writing where I share strategy principles, advice, and ideas. Articles that are not only helpful tools, but also help to provide some background to my approach.

Kate’s a huge believer in doing the work that lights you up

Do the stuff that makes you excited

Make sure you understand the value that you give to your clients. The only way to do that is to talk to your clients. Make a discipline out of going back to them after projects. And I always stress to the people I work with that I don't want comforting fluff. If things didn't go well, or there were things I could have done better, I want to hear that as well.

Do the stuff that makes you excited. Work with people you like and do projects you enjoy. For me, it’s really important to do projects where I’m going to learn. When you're doing those rewarding projects, you're doing your best work. It's hard to do good work on something that you're not enjoying, with people that you don't like.

Years ago, I did a project for my friends Mark and Adam from eatbigfish, working with a group of merchant bankers in San Francisco. It was a big three-stage project, and eatbigfish needed someone who could be the thread all the way through, so that was me.

Mark and I turned up to the first workshop. Mark’s a fantastic guy, super smart, and a brilliant facilitator. But it quickly became obvious that all was not going well. The bankers were a group of men in suits, sitting in their big, fancy boardroom with their Blackberries out, disinterested and disengaged, and none of them would even make eye contact with me.

We got to the morning break and the guy running the workshop for the bank came up to Mark and said "This isn't working. I think maybe the problem is that you're not used to working with people who are as smart as we are."

Mark said: ‘Look, we were clear about the process. You bought the process. But we can't do much if your people won’t play ball. So, we can either close it down now and give you your money back or we can continue. But your team needs to engage with the process.”

So, we continued, but it was awful. We stumbled our way through this horrible workshop, hating every minute of it.

Afterwards, we got on a phone call with Adam, and he asked: "How'd it go?"

Mark said: "It was a disaster."

Adam said: “Oh, come on. It can't have been that bad.”

And I said, "No It really was. And we've got a big problem. I'm supposed to be holding this whole thing together, but the group wouldn't look at me, let alone engage with me. I had no authority in that room. The bigger problem is that not only do I not want to help these people succeed. I actively want them to fail.”

Now whenever I get tempted to do something which doesn't feel right, I remember sitting in that San Francisco boardroom and how that felt. I don't need to do that to myself. So, as a consultant, be your authentic self and follow what feeds you, what you can learn from and what makes you excited.

Work with Kate

Kate is a strategist, facilitator and progress maker. She helps senior leadership teams get unstuck and make progress. Learn more about Kate at ksconsulting.nz or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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