What Would An Intense Coaching Programme for Smart Young EU Political Consultants Look Like – and How To Provide It

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I was speaking with two smart young EU political consultants. It was interesting to hear what they thought they needed to know to be good at their job.
Lobbyists don’t go through the mandatory vocational training lawyers do, nor the apprenticeship.  That’s a shame. A friend went through the apprenticeship of a Magic Circle law firm and only then learned what being a good lawyer meant.
The case for leverage
As a political consultant, you have 40 hours in a week. You’ll get four focused hours of deep work on a good day. You produce added value for your clients/members in a short period.  I doubt few people can do more than 4.
What could you do if you only wanted to work those 4 hours but increase the value to clients/members?
So, unless you want to become an obsessed workaholic who believes a good life is joining what has all the hallmarks of a cult, you can coach your smart young colleagues to do your job as quickly as possible.
The easiest way to increase your productivity is a mixture of leveraging your team through knowledge work systems,
How To Teach Someone To Do Your Job As Quickly As Possible
This is my personal take.
You coach/train your smart young political consultant to do your job (or much of what you do).
What’s in it for them? They get to learn to do higher quality and more interesting work for a several months, rather than years. Of course, if they prefer doing monitoring reports and PowerPoints, then they can learn of decades.
You only have to teach them the systems you use to do your job.
For me, that system comes to down to 4 things:
  1. Process
  1. Skills
  1. People
  1. Politics

What Parts of Your Job Do You Need to Transfer

What’s below is incomplete and is just a snapshot, a first run-by. If you have suggestions, please send them to me.

These are just issues that come up in my job regularly. And, if I was being objective,  my job comes down to having the requisite knowledge (based on experience)  to answer these matters when they arise.

1. Process
It would be useful to know how to engage at a high level on the following.
How to Work with the European Commission
    1. How to influence the policy cycle and when
    2. When to step in and who to engage with
    3. What information to bring to the table
    4. How to engage in Inter-Service Consultation
    5. How to engage in the preparation of the Work Programme
    6. How to engage in their preparation of a proposal
    7. How to engage with the Services
    8. How to engage with the Cabinets
    9. How to engage with Commissioners
    10. How to engage with the RSB
How to Work with the European Parliament
    1. How to Work with the Political Groups
    2. How to Work with the Group Advisers
    3. How to Engage with MEPs
    4. How to Engage with Key Advisers
    5. How to Engage with the Secretariat
    6. How to find and interpret the voting list
    7. How to find draft reports and amendments
    8. When is the best time to engage with MEPs
    9. When to work with the Consistency and Political Leadership in the national capitals
    10. What votes do you need, and when
How to Work with the Member States
    1. How to Work with the attaches in the Working Party
    2. How to work with the national experts back in the National Capitals
    3. How to work with the Political leadership in the National Capitals
    4. How to Work with the Ambassadors
    5. When to step in to influence decisions
    6. What to bring to the table to influence decision
    7. How to keep informed on the progress of the file in the Council
    8. What votes do you need and when
    9. How to engage with the European Council (EU Leaders/EU Sherpas).
    10. How to work with the EU and national media to influence decisions.
How to get the most from the Ordinary Legislative Process
    1. When is best to engage
    2. Who to engage with and when –
    3. What to do when the Commission launch a proposal
    4. How to table an amendment
    5. How to find a voting list
    6. How to engage with the technical triologue
    7. How to engage with the trilogue
    8. What can you do after a political agreement has been reached
    9. What votes do you need
    10. Whose support do you want and not want
How to get the most from Secondary Legislation
  1. How to get the most from Implementing acts
  2. How to get the most from Delegated acts
  3. How to get the most from RPS Measures
  4. How to get the most in the switch over from RPS Measures
  5. How do you influence the choice of an implementing or delegated act?
  6. How to work with Member State Committee members
  7. How to work with Expert Groups members
  8. When do you need to step in, and what do you need to bring to the table
  9. How to keep informed about what is going on
  10. What votes do you need?
How to Work with the Specialist Agencies (e.g. ECHA, EFSA, etc)
    1. When to step in
    2. What information to bring to the table
    3. How to present your case to the competent authorities and expert committees
    4. How to coach your expert to make the case to the competent authorities and expert committees
    5. What to do when a process starts
    6. How to keep informed about the progress of a file
    7. What happens after an opinion/recommendation is made
    8. What to do get the matter re-examined
    9. How to influence the adoption of any opinion/recommendation
    10. How to respond to the adoption of any opinion/recommendation

      How to Work with the Legal Opportunities

      1. How to engage with the Ombudsman
      2. How to engage with the European Courts
      3. How to deploy legal counsel in the policy process
      4. How to deploy legal counsel in the legislative process
      5. How to deploy legal counsel in working with the Agencies
      6. How to choose your legal counsel
      7. How to ensure competition law compliance
      8. How to use TRIS
      9. How to use the WTO
      10. How to use specific legal systems (e.g. ECHA Board of Appeal)
How to Work With Third Countries
    1. Working with Third Countries who have a seat at the table
    2. Working with Other Third Countries
    3. How and when to engage with the WTO
Skills
Clear written communication
  1. How to write an issue note
  2. How to write a debate summary
  3. How to write a policy memo
  4. How to write a lobby plan
  5. How to write a summary of tabled amendments
  6. How to pitch a meeting request to the Commission, Member State, MEP
  7. How to write a position paper
  8. How to write a presentation for a public event
  9. How to write feedback for a public consultation
  10. How to write feedback to an Impact Assessment
Clear spoken communication
  1. How to make an elevator pitch to an official/politician
  2. How to make an elevator pitch to a journalist
  3. How to speak in a meeting with an official/politician
  4. How to present the issue in a public presentation
  5. How to present your issue to experts
  6. How to present your issue to non-experts.
  7. How to present the issue to your client/members
  8. How to speak persuasively in external meetings
  9. How you can m
Practical
  1. How to act in meetings with officials and politicians
  2. How not to piss people off in meetings
  3. How to get to the essence of the matter fast
  4. How to set up an external meeting
  5. How to listen in a meeting
  6. How to read a room
  7. What to do in advance and after a meeting
  8. How to work with the media
  9. How to build alliances
  10. How to manage the flow of information
  11. How to read a proposal
  12. How to find and use a RSB Opinion
  13. How to find and use an Impact Assessment
  14. How to find and read a Committee draft report
  15. How to bring get your amendment tabled in Committee and in plenary
Working with your Client/Member
  1. How to set up and manage expectations
  2. How to break good news and how to react in public
  3. How to break bad news and how to react in public
  4. How to work with specialist partners
  5. How to write straightforward emails
  6. How to organise internal meetings
  7. How to delegate downwards and upwards
  8. How to project manage
  9. How to manage your team
  10. How to work with your client/member
Internal
  1. How to coach colleagues
  2. How to manage deliverables – Asana
  3. How to manage information
  4. How to manage quality
  5. How to manage your ego
Learning
  1. How to learn an issue overnight
  2. How to keep up to date
3. People
  1. How to understand what makes people tick – how to use values
  2. How to research to get a good idea of where someone is coming from
  3. How to read people
  4. What should you do before and when you meet an official or politician
  5. How to learn to leave an issue alone and move on
  6. How to catch the unspoken alliances
  7. Why you should never insult someone in
  8. What to do if your client/member dislikes officials and politicians
  9. How to get on well with people you don’t necessarily agree with
  10. What can you do when you discover you are working with a narcissistic psycho.
4. Politics
  1. How to read a room
  2. How to understand what votes you need
  3. How to understand whose support you need
  4. How to research previous political votes on an issue
  5. How to understand whose support you don’t need
  6. How to build alliances across the political spectrum
  7. How to mirror your audience’s political/policy language
  8. How can you re-position your case so it speaks to a different political audience
  9. How to work back in the national capitals to influence the decision
  10. How to work with the national and EU media to influence the decision

 

How can You Hand over this information?

All this knowledge can be systemised and become accessible to colleagues and clients.

The idea is to get what is down in your head into a trainee’s head. You want the trainee to instinctively understand each part of your job so that you can hand it over to them, and they do the task as well, if not better than you.

Most training is based on accelerated osmosis or telepathy. The chances of it being successful are slim.

The only tested system that humanely works is the craftsman model, which relies on apprentice-based learning from a master craftsman nearby and receiving immediate feedback on their work. Blue circle law firms have a variation of this. Direct and immediate feedback from a partner ( a master craftsman) to the trainee (apprentice) and on-the-job training and exams. I’m curious if the 7:30 am breakfast meetings reviewing memos would be popular.

Inhumane versions do work. Communist dictatorships have long used forms of physical and emotional torture to produce excellent gymnasts.

A Training Model

The only effective system I can come up with is determining what specific skills and knowledge need to be learned. Please take a look at my suggestions above.

If you want someone to copy what you do to a sufficiently high quality, you can swap brains and memories, or  you can show them how to do it.

This is possible. This is what I would do.

  1. List out what you think needs to be known.
  2. For each item in the list, write down how you would do that task/produce that product.
  3. Turn that how-to note into a checklist and an  SOP (Standard Operating Procedure). Write it so that any reasonably intelligent person with little knowledge of the matter could do the task without supervision.
  4. Use that checklist/SOP to produce an example of what you think is a good product.
  5. Go through the final good poduct and annotate the steps you went through and why.
  6. Record yourself doing a short video producing the good product.
  7. Hand this over to the trainee and see if they can replicate what you produced.
  8. Get them to record what they are doing. See if you have missed some vital steps instinctively (which is normal).
  9.  Revise the material so that when the exercise is repeated, similar results come back.
  10. File the training package so everyone can access it: template, good version, transcript, checklist, SOP, annotated good version, and video.
  11. Ask the trainee to provide a real-world product, e.g. a client memo (whatever is in that specific training package).
  12. Provide immediate feedback on their work.
  13. Check back in at set intervals to see if refinements/improvements can be made.
  14. Get the trainee to produce an improved training package so that they can train new trainees.

This may seem like a lot of work. It is a lot more work to keep going back and correcting work, let alone getting complaints from colleagues/clients/members about sub-optimal or late work.

The plus is you get to hand over a lot more of your work to smart young people. You get to sleep at night knowing they are doing your job better than you. This is good. It lets you focus on the few things you can do better than anyone else.

That’s about 144 training packages – just under 3 a week.

Please let me know if there is a better way to pass on knowledge and skills.

If this has already been done or you have book recommendations, please send them over.

 

What About Issue Expertise?

The smart young lobbyists thought issue expertise was vital. I disagreed.

I think expertise can be learned and it can be learned quickly. There was a time when I knew little about air pollution, chemicals and fisheries policy.