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The state of an organization’s culture is critical to the success of any change effort — reorganization, Six Sigma, continuous improvement, or simply changing how people work with one another. Too often, the internal culture is overlooked. But if you address the state of the culture early and head-on—before you start a major effort or as you are beginning—your results are guaranteed to be much more substantial and sustainable.
Why? Everyone wants to be more influential at work. But just issuing orders won’t get results. Managers at all levels can no longer expect to assign tasks, divide work, and solve problems alone. They must depend on others to take initiative, deal directly with one another, and inform, stimulate and challenge managers.
In many organizations, people increasingly interact with others outside their department to obtain critical information, determine important needs, and design and implement new services/systems to make the organization more efficient or better able to serve customers. Conflicts must be resolved and close to the action.
How? We conduct working and coaching sessions that show that direct authentic attempts to discover what others want in order to cooperate, and respond appropriately by making a fair exchange, is the key to effective influencing not manipulation. Effective influencing begins with the way you think about those you want to influence—as a potential strategic ally or partner.
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Communication
Why? Communication is the backbone of all change initiatives. When you communicate you build connections among people, ranging from making people aware to gaining their support. Listening to concerns, as well as offering a new perspective, must be balanced for two-way effective communication to take place.
How? Matching the message’s purpose with the appropriate communication method is key. A good communication plan requires creating specific messages tailored to specific stakeholders, executed over a period of time. We provide facilitated workshops and templates to help you assess the recipients, message, vehicle, timing and frequency.
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Why? If you always do what you always did then you will always get what you always got! Do your people ask: Why is this important? What’s in it for me? How do these people know what the problems are? They haven’t bothered to ask us? Do they really think they can change the entire company at once? How much of our time and money will they sink into this thing?
How? Our approach to managing change is a process of determining an influencing strategy for each constituent and stakeholder group. The strategy must address the urgency for change; contain a strong link between the successful completion and execution of the business goals; create a guiding coalition to support the initiative; develop a clear vision and strategy for driving the change, communicating the vision, and anchoring the change into the organization’s culture by assessing support processes, policies, rewards, recognition, performance guidelines, training and development, staffing, organization design, etc. Such discussions explain what is necessary and the tools to help discover what to do to achieve it. We provide working sessions that can include assessments for change readiness, identifying key stakeholders and strategies for developing and delivering comprehensive influencing strategies.
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Team Management
Why? Achieving outstanding results is directly linked to the processes we use and the relationships we build with our teams—if you don’t pay attention to these, you’re not likely to achieve the desired results.
How? First, we define a team as a group of people working together toward specific objectives within a defined operational sphere. Then, we help you to think in terms of purpose and goal, location and fit, responsibilities and authority, plan and process and sponsorship and membership. Through facilitated workshops and templates you’ll assess the need for teams, establishing and evaluating a team’s progress, and budgeting and measuring the impact.
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Facilitation Skills
Why? Every organization needs to be able to develop practical skills and tools for tapping the creativity, experience and commitment of the people with whom they work.
How? Facilitators can empower people to work together to achieve a common goal. They make it easier for people to contribute their ideas, share their concerns and issues, take initiative, make decisions and share responsibility for success. We offer workshops and coaching to help you assess a facilitator’s capabilities, coach and train them.
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