Consulting Archives - Nicole Clark Consulting

17 Jun, 2026

How Social Workers Can Think Like a Consultant

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2026-06-17T10:08:55-04:00June 17th, 2026|Categories: Consulting|Tags: consulting, Social Work|0 Comments

A professional woman stands in a modern office with coworkers collaborating in the background. The image includes the title "How Social Workers Can Think Like a Consultant" and Nicole Clark Consulting branding. — Social workers already possess many of the skills needed to succeed as consultants.

A few years ago, I wrote a post about the social work skills that transfer well to consulting. At the time, I wanted social workers to recognize that they already possessed many of the skills needed to succeed as consultants. Relationship building, assessment, communication, problem-solving, facilitation, and evaluation are all skills that social workers use regularly.

While I still believe this, after ten years of consulting, I’ve realized there’s another piece of the conversation that’s worth exploring. Beyond transferable skills, social workers can benefit from understanding how consultants think.

We assume consulting requires an entirely different mindset than social work. In reality, I think the differences are smaller than they appear. What often changes is the lens through which we approach a problem.

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1 Jun, 2026

Ask Nicole: What I’ve Learned After 10 Years of Consulting

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2026-06-04T14:09:11-04:00June 1st, 2026|Categories: Consulting|Tags: Ask Nicole, Reflections|0 Comments

On June 1, 2016, I became a full time consultant after nearly 6 years at my old job.

At the time, I asked myself: Can I really do this? The answer wasn’t found in a single leap of faith. It came from years of relationship-building, preparation, and learning to trust that I could create opportunities for myself. A year later, that question had shifted to How do I survive and grow? My biggest lesson was that success required far more than technical expertise. It required adaptability, resilience, continuous learning, and a willingness to navigate uncertainty.

By my third year, I found myself asking a different question: How do I play bigger? I had proven that I could build a consulting practice. The challenge became expanding my vision, taking bigger risks, and pursuing opportunities that felt beyond my comfort zone. At the five-year mark, my attention shifted again. Instead of focusing on growth, I asked: What actually drives success? The answer surprised me. It wasn’t marketing, proposals, or business development strategies. It was relationships. The community I built over time led to many of the opportunities, referrals, collaborations, and growth I experienced.

When I reflected on eight years of consulting, the question became more personal: What kind of life am I building? By then, I had started thinking less about sustaining a business and more about ensuring the business aligned with my values, priorities, and the life I wanted to create.

Now, ten years in, I find myself asking an entirely different set of questions. I’m thinking less about how to build a consulting practice and more about how consulting fits into a larger vision for my work, my contributions to my professional fields and to reproductive justice, and the impact I hope to have over the next decade. I’m thinking about systems, organizational change, partnerships, legacy, and what it means to move from delivering services to building something that extends beyond billable hours.

The first decade of consulting was largely about proving to myself that I could build a successful practice. The next decade, I suspect, will be about deciding what I want that practice to become.

What happens when a social worker spends 10 years consulting and arrives at a different set of questions than the ones she started with? Here are ten reflections I’ve learned from ten years of full-time consulting:

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21 May, 2025

Try This: Get Aligned Before the Consultant Joins Your Team

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2025-05-21T08:34:11-04:00May 21st, 2025|Categories: Consulting|Tags: Group Exercises, Staff, staff capacity, Staff-Consultant Dynamics, Try This|0 Comments

Try this exercise before you hire a consultant.

Before the consultant joins your team, it’s important for staff to get aligned to avoid feeling off-balance.

When roles are unclear or expectations are vague, collaboration can feel more like competition.

That’s where this visual Team Map exercise comes in—giving staff the clarity they need before the consultant ever steps in.

This exercise helps staff clarify who’s doing what, where responsibilities intersect, and how to engage the consultant without feeling overshadowed or sidelined.

Objective:

To help staff clearly define the roles of internal team members and external consultants, while identifying shared responsibilities and collaboration zones before the consultant joins your team.

This is ideal for:

Programming staff who have to work with consultants
Staff overseeing consultant engagement
Staff responsible for hiring or managing consultants across teams

What you’ll need:

30–40 minutes (or longer) of uninterrupted time
A facilitator (internal staff member or team lead)
A quiet space (in-person or virtual)
Chart paper or virtual whiteboard
Sticky notes or digital text boxes
Markers or annotation tools

The steps:

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14 May, 2025

Ask Nicole: Why Staff Hate Working with Consultants

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2025-05-14T10:10:05-04:00May 14th, 2025|Categories: Consulting|Tags: Ask Nicole, consulting, staff capacity, Staff Dynamics|0 Comments

Have a question you’d like to be featured? Let me know.

Why do staff hate working with consultants? It’s a question many staff avoid asking directly, but it shows up in meeting side comments, disengaged participation, and sometimes open resistance.

And it’s not about staff being difficult. More often, it’s because no one told them what to expect—or how their work might shift.

As a consultant, I come in with only an external perception of the organization. Over the years, I’ve developed a practice of getting to know staff, particularly staff that are directly involved in the program/service, strategic planning, or research project I’m hired to work on.

After several projects, I noticed something: Staff may be welcoming to a consultant, but if given the opportunity, they probably wouldn’t work with one.

And it’s not because they’re unwilling to collaborate. It’s often due to:

Not being aware that a consultant is coming;
Not having a say in the consultant hiring process;
The consultant not understanding the organizational culture;
No expectations for how to interact with the consultant;
The consultant’s inability to understand context; and
Not clear plan for what to do next after the consultant leaves

A consultant is suddenly looped in, given access to meetings, projects, data, and strategy sessions—without staff ever being given context, clarity, or choice. That disconnect can feel frustrating and disempowering.

In many nonprofit and philanthropic spaces, consultants arrive as part of a strategic effort to fill gaps in capacity or lead big-picture projects. But what’s often missing is a critical heads-up to the staff who’ll be working alongside them.

In this month’s Ask Nicole, I’m unpacking some of the real reasons staff don’t like working with consultants. This post is for the program managers, coordinators, and team leads who are expected to engage with consultants but were never fully looped in. This post is also for the staff members who hire consultants.

Let’s talk about why this matters, what you can do when you find yourself in this situation, and how you can support your staff before the consultant shows up.

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7 Jun, 2024

Ask Nicole: Reflecting on 8 Years of Full Time Consulting

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2024-06-07T10:32:31-04:00June 7th, 2024|Categories: Consulting|Tags: Ask Nicole, consulting, Reflections|0 Comments

Have a question you’d like to be featured? Let me know.

Once upon a time, I wanted to be a professional violinist. Then I wanted to start a nonprofit.

Today, I’m reflecting on the journey of being a consultant, 8 years after leaving my full time job.

Social workers aren’t taught about self-employment or being consultants (at least this was the case during my MSW school years). If we are, it’s usually related to starting and running a therapy practice.

After 8 years, the lessons I learned after my first year as a consultant are still present, and I also feel the same as I did at the five year mark.

During the five-year mark, I wanted better work-life balance. Now, I realize what I really want is work-life alignment.

There’s various definitions of work-life alignment, but what this means to me is my work and my life are in harmony with each other, with my work being positioned to support the life I want.

This has me thinking about not only where I see my business at the 10 year mark, but also at the 20 year mark and beyond.

It makes me think of legacy.

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