HOD – Powell Consulting Group

Human & Organizational Development HOD

All successful organizations have one thing in common – people act as owners of the business or enterprise. However, the interface of the people with your technical, structural, and mechanical systems can create a host of complex challenges that rob the entrepreneurial spirit from your most valuable resources. Combined with the multitude of challenges of people dealing with people, your organization can slip into unconscious processes that can sabotage your effectiveness and impair your ability to deliver the quality of results you seek. As your partner we will help you confront these challenges so that you will be able to optimize the effectiveness of the individuals and teams at every level.

The PCG Approach

Our approach to organization development is crafted to help you get to the root causes of organizational issues in order to generate solutions that are sustainable yet pliable enough to adjust to the pressures from internal and external forces. This systematic way of addressing organizational concerns has four (4) discreet stages

-Assessment, Planning, Intervention and Evaluation.

What Our Clients Say About Us

“Leonard and Michael are effective listeners with the unique ability to absorb volumes of information and quickly crystallize the data into a clear synopsis. They are vigilant about keeping stakeholders engaged in the change process, building consensus and constructing processes that lead to rich outcomes. They are respectful of multiple voices and able to establish a structure to spark thoughtful conversation while remaining flexible enough so as to respond to needs and concerns of multi-levels of the operating system. They have an unparalleled ability to pierce through the tangential clutter by asking the right questions in order to help us confront the “real truths” that either block us or free us to get better.”

Yvonne Manning | Director of Human Resources

Assessment: The actual assessment begins before we arrive. At some point, the voice of your processes will alert you to issues that cause you some concern. Rather than ignoring these issues in hopes that they will right themselves on their own, you may choose to engage our services. We will meet with you to dig deeper into your concerns and tease out the tentacles related to those concerns. Then, we launch our efforts to gain a richer understanding by collecting data that will help us get a picture of the root causes and impacts of the forces producing the issues of concern. These data can be collected through a number of channels including focus group interviews, individual interviews, surveys, observation, review of performance data, or action research. Afterwards, we use a systems approach to analyze these data to uncover themes and trends that are inherent in your culture and processes. When appropriate we prepare a comprehensive written summary of our findings. We will maintain close contact with you throughout the assessment process and alert you toward any situation we believe to require your immediate attention.

Planning: While the assessment is designed to increase your sensory and analytical awareness, the planning stage is designed to mobilize energy to address compelling concerns. Our first step in the planning process is a thorough review of the data and findings with you. This is done to allow you to reach conclusions on your own and compare them with conclusions that we have drawn. We will help identify the critical change questions, develop strategies for resolving them and the metrics that will let you know where things stand. Because we believe so strongly that people giving the information should be privy to the findings, we will join you in presenting the data to them in an appropriate forum. Most importantly, this planning stage allows us to join in shaping a tactical plan for interventions that provide a path forward toward building the relationships, processes, and mental models that get you to your strategic objectives. These interventions may or may not involve further engagements with us. Potentially our interventions could include the following interventions: teambuilding sessions, meeting facilitation, strategic planning, leadership development, executive coaching, conflict resolution, leveraging diversity training, climate assessments, customer service training, project management training and certification preparation, personal development, career planning, retirement planning, decision-making, or managing emotional intelligence.

Implementation: Once you have determined to engage us in your tactical plan for moving forward, we will mobilize our energy, talent and skill to provide services that meet the highest standards conduct, professionalism and competence. In all of our efforts, we will be dedicated to the highest levels of ethics, integrity and excellence. We will communicate openly and honestly and will not be afraid to confront the tough issues or directly deliver the truth. Our ability to think creatively and innovatively will be the soul of excellence. Since we believe that people are your organization’s most valuable asset, we will honor, respect, value their being in all of our interactions.

Evaluation: We’re not in the business of creating “feel good sessions”. While we want our clients to feel good about their engagement with us, we are more concerned that feeling good is a product of a consultancy that achieves specific objectives not just warm and fuzzy meetings. Accordingly, we want to build in the opportunity to gather data to juxtapose against the established metrics as a way of measuring change. If the data indicates, that the desired change isn’t occurring, we will help you determine why and will help you adjust the tactical strategy to continue moving forward. When we have determined that your objectives have been met, we will take great pride in withdrawing from your organization believing that we have served you well.

Specific HOD Offerings

Visioning

Everything starts with a dream. In organizations that dream, called a vision, is the crystallization of a desired future. It provides the landscape for what the organization intends to do, become, or create. Operating without a vision is much like taking a trip without a destination. We provide the expert facilitation that you need to frame your vision. Afterwards, we assist you in moving the vision down into each layer of your organization so that it inspires the collective imagination, energy and effort of leaders and contributors.

Strategic Planning

“Failing to plan is planning to fail.” Organizations that remain vibrant and successful are constantly comparing their present state with where they need to be in the future and updating their plans to close the gaps. We provide a framework for your environmental scanning, SWAT analysis, stakeholder analysis and creative thinking that is formulated into your strategic plan. Our expert facilitation keeps you from getting bogged down in nuances that have no strategic merit while managing a dialogue that sifts through the multitude of ideas that are generated. We help you to bring this process together into a single coherent plan with the level of complexity that is suited to your unique requirements.

Organizational Assessments

A fundamental challenge of leadership is creating an environment in which each individual contributor has an opportunity to use and develop their full potential and is willing to give the best they have. As with any other requirement, leaders need data that provide an objective gauge of performance. Our assessments provide such a gauge. We use systems’ models to synthesize empirical data acquired from surveys, anecdotal experiences from individual and focus group interviews with other climate data to provide a view of the strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for improving your culture. A written report and face-to-face review of our findings and recommendations provide sensible options useful in your decision making.

Enterprise Risk Management

In the aftermath of numerous high profile business scandals and failures, organizations across the world have increased their focus on risk management and corporate governance. Coupled with the passing of federal legislation that requires public companies to maintain effective systems of internal control, the need for a robust enterprise risk management strategy has never been clearer. PCG will help you holistically assess your organization’s risks. In an effort to help you align strategy with decision making, we will provide you with feedback about your organization’s operational, financial, strategic, compliance and reputation risks. This will enable you to better utilize your resources, limit the impact of catastrophic and unusual events, and promote a broader understanding of risks across the organization.

Managing Change

Change is the only constant in organizations, and it must be managed. The fluidity of challenges stemming finite resources, emerging technology, competition, customer demands, social and political environments and human interactions cause a constant unfreezing, remixing and refreezing of organizational processes and structures. We help you revisit existing paradigms that hold things together and move them from being fixed to being stable with the ability readjust to emerging demands. In doing so, we help you to manage paradoxes, overcome resistance, develop the disposition to thrive in ambiguity. We are adept in helping your individual contributors overcome their fears, align their efforts to new requirements and continue to act as owners even after they have let go of something of value.

Creating High Performing Teams

Team is a spirit by which individuals work together to secure shared interests, overcome common obstacles, bring out the best in each other and function seamlessly by using each other’s strengths to cover each others’ weaknesses. Team is much more than an organizational or physical arrangement that merely requires interaction of its members. We facilitate processes that allow members to build trust, embody straight talk, challenge each other to continuously improve, hold each other accountable for performance, to be vulnerable without being exposed and give each other appreciative feedback. Since team building is an ongoing process rather than a single event, we transfer the skills into your team that permits them to continually stretch beyond artificial limitations and resolve distractions as soon as they appear. In the end, we help teams to work as colleagues and friends who put the collective above self so as to be able to achieve results not possible by working in individual silos.

Executive Coaching

From time to time leaders need to reflect on how effective they are using themselves to move the organization forward. While self reflection and 360º feedback are valuable, leaders sometimes need an outside coach who can facilitate a reflective process, provide theoretical underpinnings that support new behavior and support a structure which leads to lasting change. Our coaching uses an action research model that identifies the improvement opportunities through ongoing dialogue and review. We avoid packaged methodologies that could provide insightful reflection but fail to tap the core issues that sustain the nonproductive behavior, attitude or thinking. We blend this with keen sensitivity, awareness and respect for our clients so that they see us as a safe port for their growth.

Performance Management

More and more we are finding that managers are struggling to manage the performance of employees who use intellectual capital and discretionary energy to produce work products and services rather than converting tangible objects into hard products using mechanical or repetitive processes. Compounding their difficulty is the new workplace that includes teaming, collaboration, flexible work schedules and remote worksites. When these complexities are overlaid by a multi-tier performance evaluation system, their dilemma can be overwhelming. We help managers analyze the performance requirements of each job, define the specifications for the terminal performance indicators and critical timeframes, and declare the expectations/standards for each level of performance. We help them to find language to include the standards for human interactions that power a collaborative workplace. All too often we have found that employees who want to game the system will produce draft expectations/standards that reward marginal performance when they believe that managers are struggling to articulate explicit standards.

Benchmarking

At some point you might be challenged to implement a new process, procedure or system and you are aware that other organizations have faced challenges similar to yours. Rather than taking the road less travelled, you could elect to benchmark the experiences and best practices of others who have travelled that same road prior to making your final decision. We can help you identify the target organizations, establish a relationship on your behalf, extrapolate their lessons learned and document their best practices so as to provide you with a recommendation for moving forward. Because we have no stake in the current state, our distance from the matter could provide the objectivity that you need to be confident in your go/no-go decision.

On-Boarding

We often say that leaders should “hit the ground running.” Unfortunately, that’s an exaggerated expectation because things generally aren’t always that simple.