How We Work
Shown below are the kind of results our clients have reported. We also give you a sense of our guiding beliefs, approach to client projects, and how we’re different from other consulting firms.
EXPECTED RESULTS
When you work with us, you can expect to see a quantum leap in your organization’s performance — in other words, unprecedented results or breakthroughs. You and your people will be equipped to ongoingly create breakthroughs, so that unprecedented, sustained performance will also occur in both the short term and over time. Furthermore, breakthroughs will occur at multiple levels of the organization — financial results, team performance and individual performance. Our clients’ bottom line return on their investment over the past 10 years has averaged 600%.
Importantly, these results will occur with a lot less struggle and effort. People will hold themselves and each other accountable and treat each other with unprecedented decency and respect.
When you develop new strategies or large scale changes, implementation will occur in a near flawless manner. Our powerful, proven Collective Alignment Process will ensure all people, throughout the organization, understand and support the new strategy or change.
Your people will learn and implement a way of speaking and listening that characterizes a great company culture. Included here are conversations for creative thinking, for action, for handling breakdowns, for coaching and feedback, and for expressing appreciation to others.
OUR GUIDING BELIEFS
Our 22 years of consulting preceded by 18 years of corporate experience show that results and relationships are undeniably linked together. Many leaders tend to neglect the most important thing that gives them more than 50% of their results. Here is the key: Every company is about producing results. If they only focus on that, they undermine their success. We show leaders and teams how to dramatically improve their results through their dual commitment to both results and relationships, never compromising one for the other.
Most other consultants work on the business skills and tools one learns in school, in training or through experience on the job. We think that’s short-sighted and insufficient. We focus on both business skills/knowledge and relationships — breakthrough top and bottom line results occur, every time.
Another core belief of ours is that the gap between “understanding” and “doing” is larger than the gap between “ignorance” and “understanding”. We therefore design all of our work to not only ensure “understanding:, but to, most importantly, ensure participants get into action, that is, immediately apply what they learn to real problems they are facing. That gap between “understanding” and “doing” must be closed for true breakthroughs to occur.
Additionally, it doesn’t take 5 years and $5 million to change the culture of an organization. We have found that culture is truly a conversation — the way people speak and listen to each other. When co-workers learn and apply new, more effective conversational skills, breakthroughs occur in both results and relationships for all involved. And that takes several months to accomplish, not years.
OUR APPROACH
Above all, we are partners with you. We will, at the beginning, form a “Steering Team” to guide the entire program. The Steering Team typically consists of the CEO and 3 or 4 other participants. The team meets periodically with us throughout the program and is accountable, with us, for the results of the program. The Steering Team has several major accountabilities, including being our coach, and working with us in designing the process so that the work we’re generating is consistent with what is needed by the client. The Steering Team also assigns someone to be accountable, along with us, for documenting the results of the process.
We also always do an up-front assessment through interviewing each participant. This allows participants to become more familiar with our work and share their observations regarding the organization and its culture.
As part of the workshop we conduct, a critically important step is participants’ selection of 3 to 4 projects and project teams. This enables people to apply what they learned in the workshop, and for us to do on-the-job coaching. Importantly, the projects are not added work for the participants, but are something they are already committed to.
OUR UNIQUENESS
There are many leadership and team coaches and consultants. Why should you choose us?
We are the only provider of this powerful program. It is a difference-making program unlike any other.
We have walked in your shoes. I had a successful corporate leadership career before entering consulting. My partners all have a similar background. We understand the challenges you are facing.
We’ve been consulting for the past two decades. We know what works, what generates breakthrough results. And we know how to enable you and your people to learn and especially apply what we know.
Everything we do is in service of measurable results, in the areas you care about, including sales, earnings, costs and productivity.
Our learning methodology is experiential, using real issues you and your people are facing, not role plays.
We are committed to a permanent, sustained shift in your effectiveness, resulting in minimal need for ongoing consulting/coaching.
Through the Steering Team, we will be responsive to your needs, every step of the way.
We have found that certain principles of sports leadership work just as brilliantly in business. We’ve sat at the feet and decoded the leadership secrets of John Wooden, the great former basketball coach at UCLA. We will pass on his wisdom to you.