Reducing Anxiety for Frontline Consultants: Q&A with Morra Aarons-Mele

Morra Aarons-Mele

With continued downsizings at their consulting employers as well as tightened budgets at most of their biopharma clients, what are the top three recommendations to reduce anxiety for frontline consultants? Michael Wong discusses the topic with Morra Aarons-Mele, author and podcast host.

Michael Wong: Harvard Business School’s David Fubini recently pointed to “After nearly a decade of uninterrupted growth, strategic consulting firms are now facing one of their most challenging periods in memory, prompting widespread cutbacks in staff and changes to recruiting…In response to unprecedented client demand before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, strategy firms initiated a growth-driven hiring spree. However, as economies slowed, these firms faced a significant imbalance between their staffing “supply” and the declining demand for their consulting services.”¹ With the current state of the consulting industry, it is not surprising how one recent finding was that anxiety skyrocketed to the number one presenting issue among American workers seeking mental health assistance.² Based upon your engagement with consulting firms and Fortune 500s, how do you see this anxiety landscape changing in 2025?

Morra Aarons-Mele: Frankly, I don’t know for sure, and that is a key aspect of the problem…the uncertainty.

Indeed, the past few years have been extremely challenging for white-collar workers, especially consultants. When you don’t feel safe at work because of job security, your body feels that it is under threat. It is not fluffy feelings, it is real.

Wong: With the ever present anxiety of securing new deals for client partners and achieving billable utilization for front-line consultants, what are your top three recommendations to reduce anxiety?

Aarons-Mele: As I have been in professional services for nearly twenty years, I have empathy for your consultant readers! Post-covid with hybrid workplaces becoming the norm and the ever-changing digital transformations occurring at companies, boundaries between work and home have been broken so most employees, especially consultants, have a feeling of never being done with work. The good news, as I’ve explained in my podcast series³, is that there are practical steps to reducing anxiety.

First, build a locus of control for yourself. Locus of control refers to how we perceive the causes of events in our lives. It is based on the idea that people either believe they have control over their destiny, or that external forces do such as fate and/or luck.We can’t control other people, we can't control what stressors might come our way, and we can’t control what supervisors ask of us. However, we can control how we respond and how we manage the strong emotions that often accompany those feelings of lack of control. By focusing on what we can control, rewarding our efforts, and building strong support networks, we can develop the resilience needed to face anxiety.

• Second, understand your relationship with money. Of course we need money to pay for necessities like food and shelter and we need to be practical about our requirements and the people we need to support. Still, I cannot think of another concept where we embed so much of our self-worth, personal history, fears, hopes and dreams. Challenge yourself to figure out what is your “number” for financial happiness and it should not be the future number when you retire! By taking action and figuring out your number today, it can help facilitate a “so what?” exercise where you might ask yourself, if you did get fired, “so what?” By being willing to ask yourself “so what?” is the biggest negative result that could happen, you will be able to craft potential solutions and reduce the uncertainty as well as accompanying anxiety.
• Finally, reset expectations for yourself. As type-A personalities often do, we self-impose deadlines that might not truly reflect what other people need. So the next time that your supervisor or client asks you to follow-up on a request, first ask what good looks like in terms of expected response time and deliverables.

Morra Aarons-Mele is author of The Anxious Achiever: Turn Your Biggest Fears Into Your Leadership Superpower, one of Thinkers50 10 Best New Management Books for 2024. She is also host of the award-winning management podcast, The Anxious Achiever. In addition, Morra was named 2020 Entrepreneur of the Year at the Iris Awards, created to recognize excellence among digital content creators. She has worked with three US presidential candidates. Morra’s insights have been shared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review and TED. Morra earned degrees from the Harvard Kennedy School and Brown University.

Michael Wong is a Part-time Lecturer for the Wharton Communication Program at the University of Pennsylvania. As an Emeritus Co-President and board member of the Harvard Business School Healthcare Alumni Association as well as a Contributing Writer for the MIT Sloan Career Development Office, Michael’s ideas have been shared in the Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review.

Sources

1. Fubini, David, Are Management Consulting Firms Failing to Manage Themselves?, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, July 9, 2024
2. https://www.compsych.com/press-room/press-article?nodeId=9ab16c66-0c95-44d5-a455-9962b8e67398
3. https://morraam.com/podcast