No Room for “Jacket on the Chair” Ethics: Consulting Won’t Recover Without Real Integrity

Consulting won’t recover without real integrity

The consulting industry is operating with a depleted trust balance. Public scandals, PwC and Booz Allen Hamilton among them, have exposed serious ethical failures across advisory engagements, procurement processes and trusted advisor relationships. Governments are more sceptical, clients are more guarded, and the media is watching closely. If the profession wants to rebuild credibility, one truth needs to be clear. There is no room for behaviours that trade honesty for optics, no matter how small they look in a status update or a steering committee pack.

The real problem is not confined to the obvious breaches that make headlines. Those moments are usually the final act. Trust erodes much earlier, inside the day to day rhythms of consulting work, in small behaviours that go unchallenged, feel normal and are absorbed by early-career consultants before they even have the language to question them. Anyone who has sat through onboarding sessions on ethics, utilisation targets or time recording will recognise how quickly informal advice can outweigh formal training.

Early in my career, I watched a senior partner give a piece of advice to a group of consultants preparing for a demanding client engagement.

“Leave your jacket on the chair at the client site when you step out. It signals that you are nearby and available.”

On the surface, it sounded like a harmless professional tip, something you might hear between discussions on stakeholder management or delivery cadence. Yet it carried a quiet lesson. Looking present started to matter more than actually being present. It was not fraud, and it did not breach a clause in the contract. It was the kind of idea that seems clever in the moment, but slowly reshapes how people think about integrity in a bad way.

The slow slide

Most consultants do not set out to compromise their values. Some slide by degrees, guided by subtle cues rather than dramatic decisions. Each step feels reasonable. Temporary. Aligned to industry practice. A small adjustment to meet utilisation targets. A softer description in a progress report. A little more certainty in a client briefing than the evidence really supports. The initial discomfort fades and gets replaced by adaptation. Meanwhile, clients are rarely blind to this shift. They notice the difference between confidence and candour, between a delivery team that is present in substance and one that is present only in optics. What consultants call polish can easily be read by a client as insincerity.

This is one reason trust has thinned across the profession. Not only because of the large failures that draw scrutiny from regulators or parliamentary committees, but also because of the accumulation of smaller habits that signal that image outranks authenticity.

Every steering committee, every workshop, every milestone review becomes an opportunity either to reinforce credibility or to chip away at it.

The informal curriculum

The deeper risk is organisational. Culture is rarely shaped by policy documents or annual training modules. It is shaped by the informal curriculum that leaders pass down through behaviour, stories and casual advice. When a partner shares a tip that prioritises optics, it sends a signal about what success looks like. When teams laugh off shortcuts or quietly reward people who look busy rather than those who deliver value, that signal becomes embedded. Over time, the gap grows between the profession consulting claims to be and the one clients actually experience.

Consulting firms talk often about trusted advisor status, about building long term relationships and creating measurable outcomes. Those aspirations mean little if the everyday behaviours undermine them.

Integrity is not defined by a slide in your capability statement or mandatory annual ethics training.

Integrity shows up in little interactions: how time is recorded, how risks are communicated, how confidently a consultant says I do not know yet, and how leaders respond when someone raises a concern that feels small but significant.

What leaders can do

Repairing trust does not require grand gestures. It requires disciplined attention to the small things. Leaders can start by naming behaviours that feel normal but erode credibility over time. They can model presence rather than performance by being transparent about trade-offs and uncertainties during client conversations. Incentives matter too. Rewarding thoughtful delivery, honest escalation and meaningful outcomes sends a clearer signal than rewarding visible busyness or utilisation metrics alone. A simple test often helps.

If a behaviour cannot be explained plainly to a client sponsor, a new graduate or a future version of yourself, it probably deserves a second look.

Organisations also need safe escalation paths so that early career consultants can voice concerns without fear of being labelled difficult or naive.

A question for every consultant

Consulting is complex work carried out under real commercial pressure. Delivery timelines shift, stakeholders disagree, and expectations evolve. That reality makes clarity about standards even more important. Integrity that disappears when pressure rises is not integrity at all. It is branding. Clients are asking for more transparency. Regulators are asking for stronger governance. The profession needs to respond with actions that go beyond messaging.

For leaders, the rule is simple. Do not teach anything you would hesitate to defend openly in a client forum. For consultants, especially those early in their careers, the question is more personal.

Is this shaping me into someone I want to be?

The jacket on the chair was never the real issue. The issue is the lesson it carries about authenticity, honesty and the price we are willing to pay for convenience. If consulting wants a credible future, that price cannot be passed quietly down to the next generation.

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