Organizational Effectiveness Consulting for

Teams & Organizations

Helping you create an effective organization – where everyone knows what is expected of them, they have what they need to succeed, and everyone is working together to achieve the company’s short and long term goals.

Business Alignment

Painting a clear picture of your business

Whether you are starting a new company or need a reset to an existing one, having a shared understanding of what matters provides a unifying platform from which to set goals and launch strategies. Along with different perspectives and experiences come different opinions about what matters, where you should be going, and how best to move forward. Without a shared foundation, you can end up with vastly different directions for the company, divergent strategies, and/or people working at cross purposes.

There are clear benefits to having diverse backgrounds, experiences, talents, and perspectives on your team; however, as a leader, you must provide a clear destination point on the horizon. With this clarity, your team will establish more effective alignment in their decisions and choices as they allocate resources (time and money) to move toward the same destination.

To achieve this clarity and alignment, I will help you and your team work together to:

Assess, refine, and articulate your Business Model
Develop and convey your Vision and Values for the company
Identify and disseminate a clear direction (goals)
Create strategies to achieve the goals
Clarify and measure your key performance indicators

Change Management

Successfully navigating the waves of change

Changing course for your company – in direction (vision or goals) or in method (strategies or priorities) – can happen either through chaos or through intentional, coordinated efforts. Understanding why people resist change and how to help them overcome and work through this resistance will create a resilient and dynamic workforce able and willing to do whatever it takes to effectively anticipate and respond to change.

Even with clear direction and well-developed strategies, circumstances outside the company’s control will change – even the best strategists can’t predict the future. What is important is to learn to continually test the assumptions you use to build your strategies, frequently seek and then utilize new data and observations, and then make adjustments as needed to achieve results.

Change management requires managing myriad variables and mindsets. It requires shifting how you think about the issues and outcomes, willingness to make adjustments, communicating what matters, generating and assessing options, forming plans, re-organizing people and resources, and giving people what they need to succeed. Before you launch a change initiative, you will increase your success if you link efforts surrounding what you want from your team with understanding how your people think.

Through my approach to coaching your team, your leaders and managers will gain skills and practices to design and support a successful change initiative, including:

Facilitating and embracing change as a positive force for increasing opportunity
Anticipating resistance to change and how to address it
Assessing the current situation and the potential roadblocks within your systems and people
Considering how to adapt your approach to engage your people and address these roadblocks
Developing, communicating, and executing plans using a holistic and measurable approach

With a new approach, you and your team will more easily identify when current strategies and efforts are not getting the results you need and more quickly identify changes that need to be made.

Organizational Culture Development

Creating a shared approach to how you accomplish the work together

Your organizational culture sets the tone for all aspects of your company and is seen in how people behave as they complete their work – both in positive and negative ways. A positive culture demonstrates your values and naturally reinforces alignment to your business model. A negative culture can create unnecessary tension, inefficiencies, and factions, impacting cooperation and communication and adversarial competition for attention and resources. Clearly, this is all a waste of energy and resources that can impact the bottom line.

Culture is formed, demonstrated, and consistently reinforced by the leadership of the company. To create a positive culture, leaders have to be intentional and specific with their expectations for what is acceptable and what isn’t. Rather than re-negotiating how to organize and approach each initiative or effort in your company based on the dynamics of power struggles and personalities, your culture provides a shared framework for how successful members of this company behave and talk with one another to achieve the common purpose and goals.

New hires will learn of your organizational culture during the on-boarding process, which will short-cut their learning curve, help them understand how they can “fit-in”, and engage their talents and fresh perspective more quickly.

To strengthen your organizational culture, I will help you:

Develop and nurture a culture that is in alignment with your vision and values and effectively supports goals.
Foster leadership that consistently demonstrates the values of the company through their words and actions. This will reinforce that these values are real and they matter.
Ensure that the systems and practices of the organization are in alignment with these values.
Support your team members/employees to live these values in their day-to-day actions. You will know your desired culture is real when your team members tell stories that give evidence of these values in practice and how they help facilitate success.
Assess and redesign your company rituals to ensure they reinforce your values and help motivate your team members.
Strengthen relationships, both internal and external, which are guided and supported by these values.

Team Dynamics

Come together to achieve a common goal

You can create dynamic, cooperative, collaborative teams designed to make effective decisions and address emerging problems, while giving your teams the tools they need to work together effectively to achieve the goals. Through my coaching and support, team leaders will gain skills in understanding how to harness and leverage the different personalities and talents of team members in real-time and on real-world projects.

To create dynamic teams, I offer the following services:

Skill development for communication, decision-making, problem solving, and conflict resolution. Through a structured process of setting goals, assessing current practices in light of your desired culture, and engaging team members in increasing their awareness and understanding, I will offer specific skills for your team to put into practice in real-world situations. I will continue to support and offer feedback as these skills are being practiced until the team has achieved mastery and sees the desired results.
Assessments for team members to get a more complete picture of their strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots to give current and emerging leaders information to help them increase their effectiveness. We will work together to design which assessment would be the best fit based on your goals and desired outcomes. Assessments offered include: Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), Resolved360, or CliftonStrengths (formerly StrengthsFinder).
Meeting facilitation to help teams make the best use of their time as they address big issues, increase engagement of all team members, and reveal long-standing assumptions or practices that may be hindering the team’s progress.
Training to utilize skills and best practices to design more efficient meetings
Conflict resolution facilitation to resolve any ongoing conflicts within the team.