I’ve spent my career in management consulting. My clients think I’m here to take their jobs (thanks, Office Space). My kids think I color for a living because I carry around my own whiteboard markers. My aunts and uncles think I talk to Fortune 500 CEOs and have enough pull to ensure their favorite products in stock. My parents wonder how taking clients to lunch is work. The truth is probably some portion of all of those perspectives. I have my own markers and have some insight into product placement and have eaten my share of steak salads, but that’s not all I do. I think.

For a long time, I wondered what I did. I got a job early in my career with a company whose name I couldn’t pronounce and was entirely unsure of what they did. I figured it out pretty quickly, then wondered what I was doing there. Turns out that once I worked through my existential crisis, I’m pretty good at it. I’ve since spent years traveling across the country as a professional Question Asker and Pattern Noticer. It looks odd on a resume.

My academic training gives me a healthy sense of how organizations should work and my professional experience tells me how organizations actually work. They are far too often very different things. Whether a large multi-national or a small nonprofit, organizations are groups of people brought together by a common purpose. The secret sauce, if there is any, in what I do helping marry how organizations are supposed to work with how they actually work. I tell clients regularly that if it doesn’t work here, it doesn’t work.

I sat with a client recently as we talked through a roadmap. At it simplest, a roadmap in business is similar to the document used to drive a car from Point A to Point B. This document provides an overview of the origin, the destination and the path between the two. It suggests a route, noting stops, challenges and other considerations. It does not illustrate how to drive a car or how to increase fuel efficiency. That’s not what it’s for.

As my client and I worked through this document, I found myself increasingly frustrated. She simply wasn’t ‘getting it’. Every question she asked was about how to drive a car and where the rest stops were. We’ve spent months doing this work together, showing her the document regularly. Now that there’s an integrated story, something wasn’t clicking. I found myself biting my lip when she noted confusion around a particular slide we built in direct response to a question she asked in our last meeting. We literally drew on the whiteboard, watched the ‘light bulb’ click, heard her acknowledgment and then put that into PowerPoint. Nothing.

Then it occurred to me on my calm down laps around the building that I was asking her to be something she was not. In my analogy, she’s a car driver. She’s not a logistics expert or a surveyor. All she knows and what she’s really good at is driving cars. I was asking her to be something she was not. I broke my own rule because the solution was ‘right,’ but it wasn’t working here — with her.

Fortunately, the PowerPoint solution was easy enough, but the work came in reframing how we engaged and what I expected of her.

I was asking her to be something she was not. That’s on me. Not her.