During my time in consulting, I developed a habit that sounds simple and is harder to maintain than it looks: I finished reports on Friday during onsite engagements so we could debrief with the client face-to-face before leaving. That meant working longer hours during the week: getting findings documented while they were fresh, writing the narrative while the context was still live in my head rather than reconstructing it back at the hotel on Sunday night. Clients appreciated it. The quality of the reporting conversation was different when you could walk through findings together in the room where the work had happened.
I also had a tendency to volunteer for accounts that other consultants avoided. Most of the difficult client relationships I inherited were not technical problems. They were communication problems: engagements where something had gone sideways in the expectation-setting process, or where a client had been left with a report they did not understand and no follow-up. Those situations are fixable. They just require being willing to sit in the discomfort of someone else's frustration and not take it personally.
The hardest situation I navigated in consulting was when a colleague produced substandard work on an engagement and it had to be redone.
I will not describe the colleague specifically or trace the chain of events that led to the situation. What matters is what the situation required: additional testing, direct engagement with the client, and a willingness to absorb the friction that comes with telling a client their engagement was not done to standard and that you are going to make it right. That conversation is uncomfortable in a different way than a difficult debrief. There is no technical win waiting at the end of it. The client is unhappy, they have cause to be unhappy, and your job is to earn back their confidence through actual work rather than words.
I did the additional testing. I found legitimate issues that had been missed the first time around. The quality of the final deliverable was meaningfully different from what had been submitted originally. The client relationship held.
The internal side required a different kind of directness. I gave detailed feedback to leadership about what I had observed, not to assign blame, but because the gaps I had seen needed to be visible to the people responsible for addressing them. Personnel issues do not resolve themselves, and vague feedback does not give leadership what they need to act. I described specifically what had been missing and what the impact had been, and I let them handle the rest.
The thing about going above and beyond in consulting is that it is mostly just a decision about where you draw your own floor. You can define your floor as delivering what the statement of work says, hitting the deadline, submitting the report. Or you can define it as leaving the client better off than you found them, being honest about quality problems when you see them, and treating your own name on a deliverable as a commitment. The second standard costs more. It is also the only one I know how to live with.