Consulting
The goal of all our engagements is to partner with our clients to help them achieve their goals and shift behaviors such that the client no longer requires support. Rather, the process of partnering with us empowers them to move forward on their own.
Change Management: Essential Conversations has partnered with numerous organizations (including Muscular Dystrophy Association and the Archdiocese of Chicago) around a wide range of significant change initiatives. We bring a person-centered approach that builds a case for the change, engages leaders in modeling key behaviors, aligns strategic communications, and sets key milestones. Our approach also provides strategies for mitigating resistance and attention to the cultural impact of the change.
Strategic planning: All too often, many strategic planning processes exhaust the organization (leaving little energy for implementation). The Essential Conversations approach is a participatory process that provides key decision makers with relevant data to identify breakthrough strategies they will need without creating a plan that is too cumbersome to implement.
Leadership team development and off-sites: Essential Conversations shifts teams from silos and “reporting” models of interaction to becoming a team that focuses in-depth conversations about the strategic issues facing the team. We provide training in models of collaboration and communication that deepen the trust level of team members so they can speak openly and frankly. The team becomes one in which members share a common vision, focus on team (not individual) goals, and peer accountability.
Board retreats: These retreats address best practices for Boards—Board member engagement, optimal Board size, distinguishing between Board governance and management, identifying new Board members and setting Board members term limits. These retreats can vary in length from a half day to a full day or more, depending on the wishes of the client.
Coaching for executive directors and other leaders: Drawing upon over 20 years of experience, the EC approach to coaching is one that is both grounded in a focus on behavioral shifts. We have several certified coachwhose clients include university presidents, corporate CEOs and national religious leaders. Utilizing 360 feedback and other coaching tools, our coaches work with clients to achieve both behavioral shifts and personal growth as leaders.
Presentations
Leadership Development: This presentation begins with a focus on the most valuable resource the leader has – self-awareness. Understanding yourself, how others perceive you and your unique strengths and challenges is crucial. We then examine how the non-profit leader can move from this place to address challenges such as limited resources, working with key stakeholders, fundraising, crises, and disruptors that shift the external landscape.
Breaking through the “Culture of Nice”: Many organizations struggle with the “Culture of Nice” in which members strive for artificial harmony rather than name difficult challenges (with co-workers, organizational culture, etc.) and/or engage challenging opportunities. This session provides a model and tools for breaking through the “Culture of Nice” to allow for authentic conversations that allow the organization to address both its challenges and engage new opportunities for its future.
Change management: A review of the major models of change management from a practitioner’s point of view. Particular emphasis is given to integrating the change initiative within the organization’s ongoing activities, effective communication methods, identifying the drivers of change that motivate individuals, and the human side of change (the strategies for mitigating resistance and attention to the cultural impact of the change).
Breaking through your Organizations’ Immunity to Change: Most approaches to change assume that people simply need a compelling reason and they will change. Yet, getting people to change, both at the personal and group level, is much more difficult. Things may shift for a little while, but all too often people return to their habitual ways of relating, working and thinking. This workshop offers the Immunity to Change model, developed by Harvard professors Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, as a powerful tool that identifies the underlying “immunity to change” that blocks progress. Having diagnosed these barriers, participants can then develop successful change strategies, both at the personal and group level.
Building a Culture of Belonging: We are living in a world of almost unparalleled division, separation and tribalism. People are no longer disagreeing but disavowing each other’s rights to an opinion. What is driving this polarization and how can we overcome it in our daily lives? Drawing on the insights from Our Search for Belonging: How our Need to Connect is Tearing Us Apart by Howard Ross, this program examines this fractured landscape and finds a beacon of hope: the modern workplace. After all, we don’t choose who we work with. These relationships cut across race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, education levels and political perspectives. Building upon a foundation of cutting-edge research, best practices are provided from some of America’s most successful and admired companies as well as 8 pathways to creating a culture of belonging, including the specific behaviors that people in organizations can embrace in order to make them happen.
Leading multiple generations in the workplace: This program presents both the challenges and opportunities presented by the modern workplace in which five generations are often working side by side. Key challenges facing leaders are identified, as well as practical strategies for drawing upon the strengths of each generation and helping generational groups better appreciate each group’s unique strengths, while mitigating the inter-generational friction that can arise.