Boosting leaders’ performance and key teams’ productivity can make a tremendous difference on an organization’s bottom line.

To achieve these outcomes, more and more organizations are bringing in specialist consultants to provide leadership coaching and to lead team dynamics efforts. Many enjoy transformative results, but others find themselves dissatisfied, with participating leaders and work teams showing little or no improvement in the long run.

What differentiates successes from failures? Often it comes down to whether you have the right consultants or the wrong consultants for your organization’s needs. If you’re considering bringing in external experts to support your leaders or work teams, be careful about whom you select. Following these seven keys will help you make the right choice.

1. Make Sure the Work Is Focused on YOUR Goals.
This might seem an obvious point, but too many companies make the mistake of investing in the wrong work—work that isn’t optimal for reaching their goals. Before spending a cent, identify the specific goals you want to accomplish, and when evaluating consultants, get clear, detailed answers from them on how the work they propose will enable you to achieve these same goals.

2. Insist on a Customized and Personalized Approach.
You’ll achieve better results from work that is adapted to your business needs than from a one-size-fits-all approach. Also, participants are much more likely to apply key lessons in a lasting fashion if those lessons are taught in a personalized manner.
For example, if leadership coaching efforts address real scenarios that your leaders face, your leaders are much more likely to understand the value of the strategies being taught, and to adopt them permanently.

3. Evaluate the Technologies That Will Be Used.
Technology can support and augment the work that consultants are doing, so it’s important to learn about the technologies that will be used—including how they will be used and to what extent. An absence of tools or an overreliance on tools is a cause for concern.
Click here to learn 4 more keys for choosing the right leadership and team dynamics consultants, via the Connect the Dots Consulting blog.