Consultancy
Our approach is to work with teams to help them form ideas giving them structure and options to do so.
Although it is no secret that culture is important to organisations, our experience is that many concentrate on related tasks or processes rather than the outcomes of these and the way these impact on day-to-day team work and communication.
We believe that a healthy culture is the basis for success so this is our starting point. Whilst every organisation needs a set of appropriate, meaningful structures, these ideally should be seen as enablers rather than the outcome. Therefore these should be regularly reviewed and updated with involvement of the people who use them.
We have defined a 4 step process which we have found to be the most effective way of being sure about the health of an organisation.
Discovery
Here, our attention is to gain insight into how an organisation works, from a people and systems perspective. How do teams communicate and how effective is this? What channels get work done – both formal and informal? What are the known and hidden dynamics? How do these promote or detract work progress? Vitally, we want to know what the organisation does to ensure organisational performance is understood and how current culture supports this.
We start with making an assessment of the current health of your organisation and report this back with recommendations for development. Our diagnostics are designed for each organisation through discussion and agreement with Directors. We typically use a mix of sample based interviews, observations, facilitated discussion and confidential surveys. Review of additional information may be useful, for example bench-marking, previous surveys or accreditation information and data.
Clients have found the diagnostic outcomes can be a very useful product in their own right. Our approach is to consider this as a stand-alone output which we can deliver or clients can use as a basis for other suppliers to fulfil.
Planning
Taking the findings from the Discovery stage, we carefully develop and agree a series of actions to be followed with clear indicators of impact and reflection. These typically involve a range of steps to be instigated by directors and managers, along with our interventions such as training facilitation, coaching, process mapping. Where we can offer relevant input we will discuss and propose ways that we can work with you. We regularly work with a network of professionals who can deliver expert content as appropriate. For example, we understand many aspects of HR but we are not HR professionals. It is important the people we work with share our values.
During the planning stage we need to be confident of the commitment from decision makers. This means there can be a need for further discussion, exploration and challenge. We believe effective planning, including high levels of clarity in expectations, is the cornerstone of successful implementation.
Delivery
This is taking the result of the planning phase into action and we would wish to determine the sequence, content and timing. Depending on the project, this may be one or more interactions. For example, we do offer off the shelf, skills based training. This would be a simple arrangement of booking, running and completing. Where we are looking at organisational change, which is our speciality, our interactions are likely to be staged and working in concert with activities to promote teams and individuals to incorporate change.
Review
This is always an important part of any work we undertake. We are dedicated to helping organisations improve and we use learning loops to understand and learn from the interactions we undertake. We also aim to encourage organisations to adopt an approach of a learning culture by facilitating this activity with decision makers and others. Our aim is to pass this practice on.
High performing organisations typically invest time in reflecting on what has worked well, what has not and why…
What to know more? Call us on 01787 224 816 or use the contact form.
