Our Approach in Three Words:
“Make Work Visible”
Organizational success happens when the right work is done right at the right time to achieve the right goals. You can’t know if this is happening in your organization unless you first a) clarify what the organization’s end goals are, and b) make the work of your organization visible in order to observe and measure it. Our initial activity with a client aims to discover all of the above to see where there is alignment across the organization and where there isn’t.
Get teams to see the destination
Once you bring to light the work of your organization you’ll begin to observe how your employees might be struggling. Do they need more clarity in terms of goals? Better tools? More accountability? We’ll help determine what managers could be doing differently to get the most out of their teams—and then help them get there.
Beware of red herrings
Sometimes the “obvious” solutions to problems aren’t what they appear to be. It takes time to ask all the right questions so that organizations don’t go down any blind alleys.
It’s easy to scapegoat
Once in a great while there’s a single factor, or even a single employee, who is causing so much havoc behind the scenes that fixing that one thing fixes everything. But that is rare. Usually, there is a combination of issues to address. We won’t exaggerate problems, but neither will we over-simplify them.
Some of the Tools in Our Investigator’s Toolkit:
Flash Investigations
What are the real issues that are keeping your business from thriving, and what are only distractions that are sucking up your leadership and organization’s time and effort? Would you like to give your organization some intentional improvement? Engage an Organizational Detective to conduct a Flash Investigation and find the killers of effectiveness and efficiency at your company. A Flash Investigation is a light-touch, focused approach to gain powerful insights and develop a plan of action for your leadership team and your organization. Learn more about our Flash Investigations here.
Coaching
Organizations, at the end of the day, are only as effective as their leaders. That’s a huge burden to bear, but an executive doesn’t have to bear it alone. We will act as a confidential sounding board and someone who will challenge you in the right spirit. Every leader needs a sidekick.
Deep-Dive Workshops
Sometimes it’s only by bringing managers or teams together in the same room that you can tease out the dynamics of an organization. Where is work hitting a roadblock? Where does everyone see untapped potential? Workshops can uncover those issues while getting employees aligned on the things that matter, such as goals, values, procedures, and customer needs.
Assessments
Human behavior is complex. The only way to get a handle on it is to look for patterns and find a language that allows us to talk about those patterns. Assessments can help. Because human beings can surprise us, we can never rely entirely on assessments to guide all our decisions. Historical knowledge and experience—even “gut feelings”—have their place, too. One way that assessments can help is to provoke new questions that reveal hidden layers of complexity previously hidden from us.
Surveys
Surveys don’t have to take a long time to fill out, but they can be an efficient and more objective way to gain insight than through an interview alone. For example, we ask most of the leaders we work with to complete a Making Work Visible Survey to gain insight into the dynamics of the organization, plus a Leader Survey to better understand the specific challenges faced by the leader themselves. Surveying middle managers and even line staff can be especially illuminating. In order to get honest answers, we believe in keeping confidentiality and reporting results in the aggregate.