Quick Answer:
What Mistakes Should You Avoid When Hiring a Performance Consultant?
The biggest mistakes when hiring a performance consultant are defining the solution before diagnosing the problem, cutting the diagnosis short, selecting a consultant based primarily on rate and availability, limiting access to key stakeholders and data, failing to define success measures, expecting the consultant to confirm your assumptions, and ending the engagement before recommendations are implemented and measured.
A strong performance consulting engagement starts with the business problem, protects time for diagnosis, gives the consultant access to the right people and data, and establishes how results will be measured before the work begins.
Hiring a performance consultant can help an organization get beyond the symptoms of a performance problem and identify what is actually getting in the way of results. But hiring the right consultant is only part of the equation. How the engagement is scoped, supported, and measured can have just as much impact on the outcome.
The mistakes below can undermine even a promising performance consulting engagement. Use them as a checklist before hiring a performance consultant and as a guide for setting the engagement up for success.
Mistake 1: Writing the Contract Around
a Deliverable Instead of a Business Problem
A statement of work can decide the outcome before the performance consultant ever begins. If the engagement is scoped around designing a specific learning solution, the consultant is being asked to validate or develop a predetermined solution rather than diagnose the problem. Nobody has asked whether training is the right intervention. Performance consulting starts one step earlier than that.
Avoid writing the contract around a deliverable by scoping the engagement around the business result you need, then letting the diagnosis determine what gets built or changed. If the diagnosis identifies a learning need, the next step may be to design and develop the appropriate learning solution. The performance consultant may have the instructional design expertise to do that work or may recommend bringing in an instructional designer to support the next phase.
If you are unsure which side of that line your situation falls on, start with not assuming your problem is a training issue before you write a single requirement.
Mistake 2: Cutting the Performance
Consulting Diagnosis to Protect the Timeline
When timelines are tight, the analysis phase can look like the easiest place to save time. But compressing the diagnosis can mean moving forward before the actual drivers of the performance problem have been identified. What appears to be a knowledge or skill gap may actually be caused by processes, systems, incentives, resources, management practices, or other factors that training cannot fix.
Avoid this mistake by treating diagnosis as the deliverable that protects every dollar downstream. A short, disciplined performance analysis phase is what separates business performance consulting from content production, and it is where a real performance gap gets separated from the symptom that caused someone to seek help in the first place.
Mistake 3: Selecting on Rate
and Availability Instead of Consulting Skill
Hourly rate, start date, and even authoring tool proficiency may be part of the selection process, but they don’t tell you whether someone has strong performance consulting judgment. A capable instructional designer or learning professional may be excellent at developing the solution they are given without having the experience—or mandate—to challenge whether it is the right solution.
Avoid this mistake by interviewing for the questions a candidate asks, not just the tools they know. Strong performance consultants push on business outcomes, baselines, and constraints before they discuss design, which is the pattern described in the [questions great performance consultants ask]. A learning and performance consultant who accepts the brief without examining it may not be the profile you need for this work.
What should you look for when hiring a performance consultant?
Look for someone who asks about business outcomes, baselines, constraints, stakeholders, and performance barriers before recommending a learning solution.
From Instructional Designer to Performance Consultant:
Mistake 4: Limiting the Consultant's Access
to Stakeholders and Data
Performance consulting depends on visibility into the systems that shape behavior, and much of that visibility may live outside L&D. If a consultant has access only to the L&D team, they may not be able to speak with the people closest to the problem or obtain the operational data needed to understand what is actually happening.
Avoid this mistake by giving the consultant access to the stakeholders, subject matter experts, systems, and data needed to understand the problem. That may include leaders outside L&D, employees doing the work, operational data, performance metrics, or the processes and systems that influence behavior. The value of performance consulting comes from looking beyond the initial request to understand the factors affecting performance..
Mistake 5: Launching Without
an Agreed Definition of Success
Success was never written down. In practice it defaulted to on time delivery and a satisfaction score, both of which the project achieved. Turnover was the reason the work was funded, but no baseline was captured, no target was set, and no one had agreed who owned the operational changes that would be required if the analysis pointed away from training.
Avoid this mistake by defining measures, owners, and implementation responsibilities before kickoff. Shared accountability is what keeps performance consulting services from being evaluated on the wrong scoreboard.
Performance Consulting and Results Contracts:
Mistake 6: Expecting the Performance Consultant
to Confirm Your Assumptions
Organizations rarely bring in a performance consultant without already having ideas about what is causing the problem. Leaders may believe managers need better skills, employees need more training, a process isn’t being followed, or a particular team is underperforming. Those assumptions are useful starting points, but they shouldn’t become conclusions before the analysis begins.
A strong performance consultant may confirm what you suspected. But they may also uncover a different cause—or several contributing factors that weren’t part of the original thinking. If stakeholders are invested in a particular explanation or solution, they can unintentionally limit the consultant’s ability to follow the evidence wherever it leads.
Avoid this mistake by treating your assumptions as hypotheses to be tested rather than conclusions to be validated. Give the performance consultant permission to challenge the original request, ask uncomfortable questions, and recommend solutions you may not have anticipated. If you’ve already decided what the problem is and what should be done about it, you’re missing much of the value a performance consultant brings.
Mistake 7: Failing to Plan for
What Happens After the Recommendations
A performance consulting engagement can produce excellent recommendations and still fail to improve performance if no one is prepared to act on them. The consultant may identify changes to processes, systems, management practices, job expectations, resources, or learning—but those recommendations may require different people and teams to implement them.
The performance consultant does not necessarily need to own implementation. Depending on the recommendations, the next phase might be handled by the consultant, an instructional designer, an internal L&D team, operational leaders, HR, IT, or another function. What matters is that ownership doesn’t become unclear once the diagnosis is complete.
Avoid this mistake by discussing implementation before the engagement ends. Identify who will own each recommendation, what resources or expertise will be needed, how decisions will be made, and how results will be measured. A strong diagnosis tells you what needs to change; a clear implementation plan helps ensure something actually does.
Performance Consultant Hiring Checklist
Before you sign the next statement of work, confirm all seven.
- Scope: Does the contract describe a business result rather than a predetermined deliverable?
- Diagnosis: Is sufficient time and budget protected for diagnosis?
- Selection: Did you select based on consulting judgment rather than primarily on rate and availability?
- Access: Will the consultant have access to the stakeholders, people, systems, and data needed to understand the problem?
- Measures: Are success measures, baselines, and owners documented before kickoff?
- Openness: Are stakeholders prepared for the consultant to challenge assumptions and identify causes or solutions they may not have anticipated?
- Next Steps: Is there a plan for who will own the recommendations, how they will be implemented, and how results will be measured?
Seven yes answers will not guarantee results. But performance consulting works best when the engagement is built to find the real problem and stay involved long enough to help address it.
Performance consulting rarely arrives as a standalone need. The same diagnosis that identifies a process or systems problem may also surface a curriculum gap, an onboarding redesign, or a facilitation need, which is why organizations engage performance consultants alongside instructional designers, eLearning developers, and other L&D roles.
The goal isn’t to suggest that one role is more valuable than another. Performance consultants, instructional designers, facilitators, and other L&D professionals each bring different expertise. The key is matching the consultant’s expertise to the business problem you’re trying to solve.
Comparing the Major Performance Consulting Models and the Evolving Role of Instructional Design
What to Read Next:
Still evaluating your need for a performance consultant?
These resources can help you determine whether the challenge you’re facing calls for performance consulting, training, or another type of intervention.
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Does your L&D team have more projects than people?
Many organizations in this position turn to contract performance consultants to analyze the need for performance initiatives without overloading internal teams. If you’re exploring options or comparing performance consulting companies, you should learn more about how organizations design and scale these solutions.
TrainingPros is a learning and development company that connects organizations with experienced instructional designers, eLearning developers, and performance consultants. We’ve been named a Top 20 Staffing Company by Training Industry and a Champion of Learning by the Association for Talent Development (ATD), recognition that reflects our commitment to delivering high-quality, tailored learning solutions.
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If your learning initiatives require additional support, whether for a single project or a large-scale rollout, our relationship managers can help you find the right expertise quickly and confidently.
When you have more projects than people™, let TrainingPros find the right consultant to start your project with confidence.
Frequently Asked Questions About
Hiring Performance Consultants
What does a performance consultant do?
A performance consultant helps an organization identify what is preventing people or teams from achieving desired business results. Rather than beginning with a predetermined solution, such as training, the consultant examines the performance gap and the factors contributing to it. Those factors may include knowledge and skills, processes, systems, resources, incentives, management practices, or other workplace conditions.
When should you hire a performance consultant?
Consider hiring a performance consultant when you know there is a business or performance problem but are not yet certain what is causing it or what intervention will address it. A performance consultant can be particularly valuable when a problem persists despite previous training or when multiple factors may be affecting performance.
What should you look for when hiring a performance consultant?
Look for someone who asks about business outcomes, current performance, baselines, stakeholders, constraints, and potential performance barriers before recommending a solution. Strong performance consulting requires the ability to investigate the problem, challenge assumptions, analyze evidence, and connect recommendations to business results—not simply expertise with a particular learning technology or deliverable.
Can a performance consultant determine that training is not the right solution?
Yes. That is one of the reasons to engage a performance consultant before committing to a particular intervention. The diagnosis may reveal that training is appropriate, but it may also identify issues involving processes, systems, resources, incentives, management practices, or a combination of factors.
