We tell the
kind truth

Clarity without Silos

Once this climate of openness is established, we are able to create actionable clarity. The team has to clarify their specific role to deliver the strategy and make sure that each team member is fully committed to deliver their part of the common goal. Our experience shows that full commitment requires a truly open discussion and that strategy is often interpreted differently by different team members. Any small gap in alignment or interpretation at the leadership team level results in canyons of misalignment further down in the organization. This is why, to speed up execution, it is critical to create full clarity and eliminate any confusion, both at the top and throughout the whole organization.

Cascading Clarity

The next challenge is for top leaders to make sure that their own organization understands how their daily work needs to change to deliver the new strategy. Actionable clarity needs to be created at every level of the organization. We help create this clarity, and design internal communication plans for the very large organizations, using proven large scale communication strategies.

Mastering Meetings

The actual work of top leaders is done in meetings. The more productive meetings are, the faster the execution. We provide leaders with a proprietary methodology to secure fast progress on their clarity goals. It combines removing roadblocks from existing priorities with a systematic review of the team’s behaviours to nurture on-going collaboration without silos or politics.

CEO Support

It really is lonely at the top. Not just because CEOs don't have a lot of people they can share everything with. But because they live in a bubble, shielded from what is really going on in the organization. As we move up in the hierarchy, more and more people want to shine in front of us. They do this by presenting their work in a positive light - and by avoiding showing their weaknesses. This gives the CEO only a partial view of what happens in the organization. And this is why so many CEOs feel they only get bad news and surprises ... when it is no longer possible to hide them.

Just like it can be hard for information to flow up to the CEO, it can be hard for a CEO to reach throughout and across the entire organization. A CEO of a large company will not interact personally with the majority of the organization. She influences thousands of people through others. This means that her success is completely dependent on her direct reports and their teams. This requires a different approach from the CEO than when she could succeed by personally driving all key decisions and involving herself in all follow-up. This is an area where external support can make a real difference.

HR Support

HR often has the best view of what really happens in the organization. They are close to the CEO and understand her concerns and world view. The organization often speaks more openly with HR than with the CEO so HR also understands the situation from the view of the managers and employees. This can be a very difficult situation, balancing loyalties between everyone across the organization. Yet getting that balance right is necessary for the success of the company. We help HR address those topics, using our experience from many similar situations and the fact that we are outsiders, who can sometimes address topics more directly.

Teams

The starting point for any company transformation or breakthrough in business results is a high performance executive team. Whenever we ask the organization to get better at something that we don't master as an executive team (e.g. speed, agility, innovation, collaboration, etc.), we simply lose credibility and the transformation does not start.

The specific goal is to make the executive team more productive and effective than competition's executive team. It is not good enough to be just capable at collaboration, strategy clarity, execution, etc. If the executive team is only capable at this, the organization will not be able to beat competition.

Building a high performance team requires mastery of the fundamental skills mentioned above: Collaboration without Politics, Clarity without Silos, Cascading Clarity and Mastering Meetings.

Meetings

Do you have great meetings? Most people say that they don't. They say that they often waste time because the agenda was not right, we didn't make decisions, we didn't follow up on last week's decisions, the right people were not there, etc. They'd rather get out of the meeting and get back and do some real work.

The kind truth is that meetings is our real work - when we are leading people and organizations. We do not perform much of the work ourselves. We influence others to do it well. We do that nowadays in meetings - small or large. We therefore have to be outstanding at running meetings. It is our most fundamental tool as leaders.

Meetings are also where the rubber meets the road in terms of team performance. It is in meeting we see if you are a high performance team. Will you collaborate without politics? Will you have a healthy conflict to get to the best decisions? Will you get to true alignment, clarity and commitment to an action plan? Will you remove the most controversial issues which hold the organization back?

Based on the principles behind high performance teams, we help you make meetings as exciting as a 2-hour Hollywood Blockbuster Movie!

Coaching

We coach managers to make companies more effective and less dysfunctional – and to help managers become more fulfilled and less miserable. We believe that coaching should be:

• Relevant - driven by the real needs of the business and the manager,
• Practical - leading to tangible actions and noticeable improvements, and
• Fast - by tailor-making and adapting our approach to the individual.

We draw on our expertise in 3 areas to achieve this:

• Personality Insight: We help managers find in themselves the qualities and strengths which can help them grow as people and become more effective as leaders.
• Table Group Methodology: We help managers become better team players and better team leaders.
• Executive Experience: We use our own experience as executives in large companies to channel the managers' efforts into actions which directly drive business results.

Training

Traditional training has a reputation of achieving little change in the way people do their work after the training. As a result, it often does not pay out. Where training does pay out is as a supporting element in an overall transformation. Everything starts with the executive team mastering the necessary behaviours and skills and role modeling those in words and actions. As part of them cascading that to the rest of the organization, training comes in as a helpful way to provide managers with the skills they need to make their own journey.

We design and deliver training (virtual and face-to-face, large and small groups) as part of a company's transformation based on a clear analysis of the skills needed.

Organizational Research

When a deeper understanding of the organizational barriers and opportunities are needed, we do research to get to clear objectives and plans. This includes:

• Exploratory Research: It may sometimes be clear that an organization has for example a heritage of command and control (or issues with speed of execution, etc.), but it is not clear why. Or in other cases, interventions to address the issues have not worked and the company does not know why. In those cases, we do qualitative research to identify the root causes and recommend an action plan.
• Quantitative Research: Our Table Group Team Assessment Survey has been taken by over 50 000 teams and provide a very fast snapshot of how this team stacks up to other teams. In addition, we design ad hoc research to confirm hypotheses or track progress.

It’s about the business

All our work starts with an understanding of the business results you want to achieve. Our interventions are then focused on channelling the energy and productivity of the organization towards these business results. Because we know organizations from the inside – we know what works in the real world.

… and unleashing potential

In addition to our personal experience with leading people in large organizations, we use Lencioni's proven Organizational Health methodology to tap into the full potential of your organization. We draw on Lencioni's global Table Group Consulting practice and its database benchmarking the performance of over 50 000 teams.

We are certified as coaches and practitioners of psychological profiling, including MBTI, Insights Discovery, Hogan and the Enneagram.