Services
Strategic Assessment
The challenge for many business owners and staff is that while they are industry experts, too often, there is limited experience and objectivity. Leadership alignment and focus are needed to discover objective business performance data. Unbiased data enables realistic plan development.
By design, our objective data-driven methodology considers organizational complexity, which helps the leadership team to discover profit, process, and people root causes that hinder results. Our proprietary assessment helps to identify and name the eight hidden agents that reduce organizational performance and leadership effectiveness. A strategic evaluation provides insights and knowledge to help owners and leaders transition from working on the business to mastering the business.
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Relationship Development
People problems, actual or perceived, manifest from conflicting needs, values, and interests between people working together. There can be overt jurisdictional disagreements among individuals, departments, and staff and management. There can also be conflicts involving rivalries, jealousies, personality clashes, role definitions, and struggles for power and favor. And individuals can be self-conflict – torn between competing needs and demands. When conflicts fester, tribalism and obfuscation can overtake a business’s ability to function effectively. We start with EEOC bias-free assessments to gauge relationship clarity. Our suite of leadership assessments provides objective data about conflict, team collaboration, and performance conversion. We use the results to educate and transform behavior. The results is a trust-based culture at all levels with enhanced purpose clarity, relationship clarity, work expectations clarity, and consistency of actions.
Leadership Advancement
Leaders and managers have a significant impact, far beyond what most realize, on the people around them and the culture of their organization. The effect can be deep-seated and ubiquitous, affecting not only performance but the very foundation of the business. Leadership development at all levels of ownership and management is, therefore, critical to positively changing cultural norms, increasing employee performance, and improving organizational problem solving and effectiveness. Our change solutions start with scientifically validated leadership assessments. These assessments guide the development of custom-designed tools and training to build leaders’ and managers’ understanding of the implications of their behavior within the organization — and guide them, enhancing their judgment capacity to take better actions to improve their influence.
Leardership Advancement
Conflict Transformation
For most people and many in leadership positions, avoidance is the preferred method for dealing with conflict. This “head-in-the-sand” approach actively attempts to circumvent confronting the issue at hand. There are other approaches to handling conflict, including Conflict Management, Conflict Resolution, and Conflict Transformation. Conflict Transformation seeks to exceed the goals of Conflict Management and Conflict Resolution by moving beyond the problems and toward the healthy development of relationships between individuals, teams, and organizations.
Conflict Transformation
Process Cultivation
Clearly defined work processes are essential for individual, team, and organization collaboration to produce predictable results. Work process clarity enables organizations to align business functions with customer needs and helps executives determine how to deploy, monitor, and measure company resources. When properly developed, process clarity is the ability to enhance efficiency and productivity, reduce costs, and minimize errors and risk, thereby optimizing results.
Mindset Orientation
An inward mindset is a focus on self, creating barriers between oneself and others. An outward mindset makes others equally important and opens oneself to the ideas and aspirations of others. In business, an outward mindset is the foundation for true collaboration and collective success. As such, a leader’s mindset – inward or outward – has a profound impact on leadership style, treatment of people, innovation, collaboration, team building, and overall business success. Bottom line, are you open to change, and are you available to the right change? Fundamental to our process is helping leaders identify and develop their outward mindset so they can influence the right changes. An outward mindset is the foundation for how we help leaders achieve sustainable growth and performance.
Mindset
Comprehensive Assessment
Most owners and managers are so focused on the day-to-day operations that it is challenging to take a step back and effectively understand the current attributes of the business to devise and implement foundational solutions that will help move the company to the next level. What is needed to overcome this challenge is a thorough “Current State” assessment and using the results as a basis for an improvement roadmap. The key is not only understanding your current condition but being able to prioritize problems and solutions objectively. We work one-on-one with key members of your management team and perform a deep dive into select areas of your business to help flush out areas of improvement. Our diagnostic approach includes a set of targeted assessments based on over 130 years of peer-reviewed research. These include:
Culture Enhancement
Culture is what binds your team into a common purpose, personal motivations, and purposeful actions that bring your strategy to life. Organizational culture and its impact on individuals and organizations are finally becoming a part of leadership team discussions at most organizations. As your company grows, shifts, and evolves, your culture needs to evolve with it. Changing mindsets and behaviors don’t happen all at once. Cultural transformation takes time and commitment from all levels of the organization. How you go about involving employees in an evolving culture says a lot about the type of culture you want to create. We work with the senior leadership team and various business functions to shape a familiar story about where the business is going and why, and then helped the business do the hard work of transforming the company culture towards positive outcomes.
Finance Profit Plan
The two critical activities a business must focus on to create a sustainable business model are increasing profits and decreasing costs. Yet these two fundamentals are the last rubrics a typical business owner thinks about when launching their business. In the beginning, it is all about the ‘owner’s vision and the ‘team’s excitement. Then reality gets in the way. While the concepts – increase profits, decrease costs – are self-evident, the process of integrating these rubrics into the fabric of the business is not as easy to achieve. What is needed is a profit plan, i.e., profit by design that focuses on gross profit, net profit, cost of goods sold, and cash flow. Further, the entire team, all employees, must understand how their work helps fuel profits, influence costs, and ultimately drives their paychecks.
Finance Profit Plan
Key Person Acquisition
Hiring the right employee matters more than most other decisions you or your management team will make. A bad hire can be downright destructive to a company, and a desperation hire will likely produce lackluster results. A great hire will lift team spirits as well as your profits. Knowing how to hire is as important as knowing your marketing, learning how to innovate, and knowing how to manage cash flow. The key to having low turnover as well as high-performing employees is in the methods that you use in selecting and interviewing candidates. We use a proprietary Position Benchmarking process that effectively targets a specific job, not the person in the job. To do this, we let the job talk through an interactive process and job assessment that build a target interview process and set of questions that better assess candidate fit.