The Consultant-Client Relationship: Personal Autonomy and Development Through Dialogue

The two guiding principles in this chapter are: i) maximizing the awareness of clients’ values and minimizing the influence of consultants’ values, and ii) the issue of instrumentality, i.e assuring that we are doing what we wish to do. In order to obtain the first principle, implicit or explicit pitfalls of manipulating the “model-weak” person in the relationship will be emphasized. The “model-weak” part may be either the consultant or the client, but as a main rule I will see the client as the object of possible manipulation. The quality of relationship is the unit of analysis, and the research approaches the subject matter from an interdisciplinary point of view. The research should in particular be of interest to those interested in management, taking into consideration that the essence of management and leadership is to “manage” interpersonal relations.