Navigating endings: what a consultancy closure reveals about organisations
Like many people receiving funding from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), I experienced an ending a couple of weeks ago - a rather abrupt one - to a research project I was working on.
We all experience endings in our work: a departure, the end of a project, a merger, an acquisition, the closure of a programme, even an entire organisation. Endings are a feature of organisational life. They are rarely easy. Like endings in life, they evoke a range of feelings - loss, resistance and the struggle to let go, amongst many others.
Yet, despite their significance, endings and their effects on teams and organisations are often overlooked. They are expected to move on and to adjust quickly in a context where society values moving forward: there is no time to pause and reflect.
As Francesca Cardona writes in Work Matters, endings also represent a beginning, regeneration, or a new stage of development. But an organisation’s capacity for this will depend on the extent to which endings are worked through. The end of a consultancy assignment is an important stage to navigate as the experience can help the organisation to negotiate other significant endings and transitions.
In this article, I weave together ideas about the nature of endings and what they might say about an organisation’s capacity to transition with examples from my experience of ending a consultancy assignment with the leadership team of an organisation.
Dependency, independence and power
Over time, leadership teams can come to rely on an external consultant—not just for insights, but as a stabilising presence. The end of an assignment can therefore elicit a fear of being abandoned. At the same time and somewhat paradoxically, endings may also prompt a desire for independence. Endings also bring up questions of power: who decides when the work is finished? Who gets to do the leaving? The organisation may assert its independence - sometimes by subtly (or not so subtly) pushing the consultant away before they can leave of their own accord as a way of covering over feelings of loss.
Endings are not just significant for the client - they affect the consultant, too. There is always a tension between knowing when to step away and wanting to stay to see things through. Consultants may find it hard to give up a piece of work that provides pleasure, validation, not to mention income and, like leaders, may fall into the trap of wanting to be indispensable. Can consultants accept their limits and leave space for others to continue the work if necessary?
Some of these dynamics appeared to be present in experience with an organisation I consulted to. Jill (not her real name) emailed on the morning of the final session of the consultancy to say she would join online but would leave early. Miles, the CEO, did the same, without offering a reason. It seemed like they were keeping their distance.
As I sat in a café before the meeting, reflecting on the dynamics that had emerged over the preceding months, I realised how much I was holding on behalf of the organisation - its emotional undercurrents, its unspoken struggles. The leadership team, by contrast, seemed keen to disengage, to avoid carrying this weight themselves.
When I arrived at the venue, I found the door to the CEO’s office (where we had been meeting) locked. When I went downstairs to get the key from John, he was talking to a colleague. He made eye contact with me but didn’t acknowledge me at first, continuing his conversation as if I wasn’t there. I felt a sense of exclusion. Was John reflecting back the organisation’s discomfort with endings? Was there an unspoken wish to reject me before I could leave?
There was also a racial dimension to consider. Being locked out, as a brown-skinned consultant, made me wonder about the organisation’s deeper patterns. Would they ever fully include someone like me in their leadership team? Or, like the client group they served, would diversity remain something they talked about but never truly embraced?
While Jill and Miles left the meeting early, Peter and John who remained, appeared to avoid acknowledging the end. When I asked them how they felt about concluding the consultancy, Peter insisted this was not an end but a new beginning. This seemed like a classic defence against loss - a refusal to acknowledge finality. Were they avoiding the discomfort of closure? Were they asserting independence - proving that they didn’t need me?
Elliott Jaques, in his work on mid-life crises, describes how endings force individuals to confront their own mortality​. Organisations have to face up to something similar. And they may resist doing so, as they symbolise a loss of control and a need to come to terms with unresolved issues. The challenge is to work through this process of loss without losing capacity for hope and desire.
Avoidance and denial
How an organisation manages closure can say something about how it manages its growth. Does it acknowledge the work done, reflect on what has been learned, and consider next steps? Or does it avoid the subject, brushing past the discomfort?
During earlier sessions we’d concluded that the SLT experienced some hesitancy in taking decisions given the uncertainty about how the wider staff group would react. However, when I reminded them about this, Miles dismissed this, framing the issue as one of time management and logistics. The SLT perhaps seemed too fragile to make sense of, and learn from, its vulnerabilities and imperfections.
Whether they recognised it or not, the way group ended our work together was likely to be the way they handled other transitions, too. The charity in question had never fully processed the departure of its previous leadership, and this unresolved loss appeared to have left it stuck, unable to transition into its next phase. The difficulty the group had in ending the consultancy perhaps reflected the organisation’s sense of omnipotence, hoping that it would be seen as essential and indispensable and have control over its circumstances.
The question of impact
As I walked out of the building for the last time, I felt a mix of emotions: disappointment, frustration, exhaustion, and relief. The relief I felt suggested something important. Perhaps it wasn’t just my own feeling - maybe it was the organisation’s, too. They had found this process difficult. They had been challenged to step outside their comfort zone. And now, with the consultancy over, they were free from that discomfort. They no longer had to engage with the vulnerability that thinking together required.
I wondered whether the work had made a difference, whether any of my questions and insights had landed. But there was no clear answer. There is great pressure to achieve ‘transformational change’. But the reality is that change and development is hard to achieve especially in short timeframes. Further, change when it happens, is often invisible in the moment.
Nevertheless, I had hoped that the group achieve more developmentally. But I realised the need to identify more modest results and acknowledge that it may have been ‘good enough’. In practice, this meant interrupting habitual processes before they got out of hand, facilitating a process where people were able to integrate their perceptions, strengthen existing relationships, develop new ones and express a curiosity about what was happening.
The significance of endings
The way an organisation ends a consultancy says a lot about its ability to evolve. Some endings are thoughtful and deliberate. Others are chaotic or avoidant. But endings, whether acknowledged or not, leave their mark. As Cardona notes, organisations, like individuals, must grieve their losses in order to move forward.
For me, this consultancy reinforced an important lesson: not all endings are neat. Not all endings feel satisfying. But if we can sit with the discomfort, if we can allow endings to be what they are - complex, messy, necessary - then we can also make space for what comes next. As Francesca Cardona says, not honouring endings deprive individuals and teams of understanding, of saying goodbye and of a more mature way of negotiating and taking a decision.