We believe there are many ways to reach an organization’s development goals, and that the best way begins by building a partnership with clients. We have successfully established our consulting expertise by designing customized approaches to delivering results that exceed our customers’ expectations. Listening to our customers, assessing their needs, and creating effectively tailored processes, systems, and development programs, is our way of providing excellent service to our clients. Our consulting processes are as individual as the companies we work with. The results, however, are exactly what every company wants: a motivated workforce, satisfied customers, and a more productive, profitable business.
Strategy and Vision Development
The main role of building a vision and strategy is to chart the course of an organization in order for it to sail smoothly through its environment. Strategy promotes the coordination of activities. Without strategy to focus effort, chaos can ensue as individuals pull in different directions. Strategy defines the organization, and focuses the common effort. Strategy provides people with a shorthand way to understand their organization and to distinguish it from others. Strategy is needed to reduce ambiguity; to simplify and explain the world, and thereby facilitate action.We function best when we can take some things for granted, at least for a time. That is a major role of strategy in organizations: to resolve the big issues so that people can get on with the little details – for instance, targeting and serving customers instead of debating which markets are best. Even team leaders, most of the time, must get on with managing their organizations in a given context; they cannot constantly put that context into question.
In practice, we propose the best way to successfully implement a strategy is to have a team-based approach to the development of the strategy. Sheppard Partners Strategy and Vision Development is a process that will assist an organization in using the collective wisdom of its employees in the development of a strategy. This process creates alignment and dedication to the strategy as it is being developed.
Organizational Structure
Typically, the concept of organizational structure refers to organization-wide change as opposed to smaller changes such as adding a new person, modifying a program, etc. Examples of organization-wide change might include restructuring operations (e.g., restructuring to self-managed teams, layoffs, etc.), mergers, major collaborations, and “rightsizing.” Often, this term designates a fundamental and radical reorientation in the way the organization is structured in order to support a change in direction or strategy.
Change comes hard to a company’s culture. Certain patterns, rituals, and artifacts can become deeply rooted in the everyday life of the corporation. When change is necessary, the leaders often find a hard struggle ahead because team members resist in various ways, thus slowing the progress. Entrenched behaviors undermine any new structure from the beginning, robbing it of vital momentum and ensuring that implementation will fail. Building an action plan is necessary in order to minimize resistance, disorientation, and accompanying lost productivity as the company transitions to the new way of operating.
Hiring and Talent Acquisition
Recruiting the best employees for your organization is an ongoing challenge for every manager, supervisor, and human resources professional. If you are looking for solid, proven best practices and up-to-the-minute ideas in recruitment, interviewing, and selection, then Sheppard Partners can help you develop the right hiring strategy. You are what you hire. Your long-term financial success depends upon the quality of your employees, and finding quality employees requires a quality recruiting and hiring process. Traditional recruitment methods have the predictability and effectiveness of flipping a coin. If you say that your business can’t afford to sustain the systemic recruiting and hiring process needed to find qualified people, then you are not looking at the real dollar impact of a bad hire.
We propose designing a systemic approach to attracting, screening, interviewing, assessing and developing the personnel that will create a high performance culture. Few decisions are more important than who you hire and promote. If you have the right people, you will have success. It really does come down to people. The people that you hire will be the single most important determining factor of your organization’s success. With so much riding on the success of bringing on board the right people, it becomes imperative that organizations not leave this process to chance.
Integration Meetings
When new teams are formed through introductions of new leaders, mergers, and reorganizations, new team members generally experience fear and distrust. They also have many questions about who their new leader is and how the new team will operate. Our approach is to deal with fears and issues up front, then to create a shared understanding of team norms, leadership styles, and values. Alignment on these issues creates the foundation for strategic planning and effective action.
Our Team Integration process is unique in its design and delivery, and is based on an integration of several highly effective individual and organizational development systems. Each program includes pre-meeting interviews with participants and is customized to respond to the company’s environment and culture, as well as the specific needs of the team and team leader. Our process provides a dramatic springboard to a new level of success. The integration meeting process is designed to help you create your ideal corporate culture. It sets into motion the kinds of values and behaviors that create a high performance team. Team Integration creates trust, partnership, and a shared understanding between team members, which results in expedient, effective action.
The Team Alignment process develops communication skills that concentrate on the production of extraordinary relationships. These rare yet crucial relationships form the basis of extraordinary teams. Highly productive, flexible, innovative work teams are the key to a company’s survival and prosperity; enhancement of the relationships within those teams is the central focus of our process. We offer you a “field-tested” method of building extraordinary working relationships with your co-workers. The Team Alignment process creates a culture of understanding that leads to the creation of trust. The program provides you with an overall planning process, which includes action items that you can implement to develop, introduce, or integrate a new team, team member, or project leader. Each step is designed to guide the team leader through specific activities that will provide him or her with a depth of understanding of each team member. Together these processes enable leaders to create a long-term plan for creating and maintaining an extraordinary team.