Engagement. Alignment. Improvement. Success.
Our work transforms people and their places.
Strategic planning
We align people around a shared purpose and strategic vision that drives action:
- Understand your environment
- Define what you do, why you do it, and what you believe in
- Create a planning process tailored to your organization (no cookie cutter plans)
- Identify major goals
- Build strategies
- Commit to what you are going to do and when you are going to do it
- Measure results
Strategic planning success stories
Challenge:
How does a small non-profit scale up and increase reliability and impact in a growth period?
Solution:
Family Promise of the Verdugos, dedicated to reducing homelessness, grew from a $150,000 annual budget to $2.0 million while increasing staff from fewer than 5 to 14. When the pandemic hit, the community need for services provided by this non-profit grew significantly. By gathering key staff and board members in virtual strategy sessions, the organization created a road map that includes facility acquisition, staff development, and fundraising to meet the crucial needs of both the moment and the future.
Challenge:
How do you keep going when the world has seemingly come to a stop?
Solution:
When the pandemic hit, the need for social services soared. Our strategic planning work with the Fresno County Department of Social Services, in one of the most populated counties in California, took on even greater importance during 2020-2021 as leaders sought to ensure the well-being of residents in this ethnically and culturally diverse community. The final plan focuses on improving training and mentoring to reduce employee turnover and improve employee satisfaction, as well as building collaboration across the organization and within the community, to make for greater and more reliable impact.
Challenge:
How do you help organizations that help others?
Solution:
Community economic development (CED) changes lives for the better by tackling problems such as joblessness, affordable housing, and social services. While community action agencies lead the way at a local level, the organizations need help to develop an overarching framework to meet stakeholder needs. We worked with the California Community Economic Development Association, a statewide membership organization, to help them better understand and then meet their members’ needs. By providing practical, step-by-step expert advice (during the pandemic), we helped Californians who need the most help to get it.
Challenge:
How do you avoid complacency when things in your city are already so good?
Solution:
Glendale, CA, one of the largest cities in Los Angeles County, has built a reputation as a premier community where you live, work, and play. But city leaders knew that they couldn’t take their success for granted. Our task was to find out what city council members, the city’s executive team, and employees from across departments wanted from the future and create a plan that would move them confidently toward those goals. The resulting first-ever strategic plan sets out specific plans to build, house, move, and sustain the city in coming years.
Leadership development
We help to put purpose into action inside your organization. By honing each team member’s skills, you build a strong organization powered by people working toward a common goal.
- Leadership development
- Coaching/mentoring
- Organizational change
The focus and energy that leaders place on their people is crucial to long-term success, and the pandemic has made this more important than ever. We have the experience to help frontline workers, emerging leaders, and executives maximize their capabilities, reduce conflict, and move from a ‘survive’ to a ‘thrive’ mindset.
Leadership development success stories
Challenge:
How do police departments improve community relations?
Solution:
Police departments are more than sworn officers engaged in traditional law enforcement. There are hundreds of behind-the-scenes civilian staff who investigate crime scenes, enforce traffic laws, run the jail, and so forth. These staff members constantly interact with the public and often are not afforded the same respect as uniformed officers. We worked with civilian staff at police departments in Glendale and Burbank to explore the citizen experience and how it differs from traditional customer service. By focusing on both self-leadership and organizational culture, civilian employees learn how to more effectively serve constituents who are often in distress or requesting services that are not possible to deliver.
Challenge:
How can elected members of city councils work together as cohesive teams even though they may be political competitors?
Solution:
Our task was to give council members in the cities of Montebello and South Gate an objective view of their patterns of behavior and help them learn to more effectively interact with their council colleagues. Using proven assessment tools, we provided insights into how the groups function on critical elements of teamwork such as trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results. It’s tough yet delicate work, but the result is overcoming partisanship and working toward the common good.
Challenge:
How do younger employees develop a career perspective larger than their current job?
Solution:
The City of Azusa had a group of talented, young employees who needed to think long-term about their career aspirations and prepare for promotion. By combining behavioral assessment with individual coaching, we helped staff members identify their core strengths and better articulate their unique career value. The result was confident, capable early-career professionals with a clear sense of how they contribute and where they want to go.
Challenge:
How do you engage the next generation of leaders in city government?
Solution:
There are 88 cities in Los Angeles County, with thousands of employees whom constituents rely on for their daily way of life — from trash pickup to clean water to parks to fire services. We brought together groups of emerging and experienced leaders from cities across the county (Downey, Whittier, South Gate, Pico Rivera, Norwalk, South El Monte, San Gabriel, Rosemead) to learn how they can work smarter for residents by improving communication, reducing conflict, and focusing on self-leadership. These interactive sessions provided an opportunity for participants to learn from each other as well as draw upon our expertise in leadership. Participants also benefitted from the creation of new networks within the region, connecting with peers from other cities with common interests.
Workshops, retreats, training
Working together is hard. Gaining alignment to work together efficiently is harder. Our workshops, retreats, and training sessions bring together diverse members of your organization to drive breakthrough results that transform how you work and what you do.
Workshops that create breakthrough collaborations:
- DiSC behavioral assessment
- Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team
- Predictive Index behavioral assessment
- Leadership training
See what we can do for you.
Years of building trust, value, and impact.
We help to put purpose into action inside your organization. By honing each team member’s skills, you build a strong organization powered by people working toward a common goal.
- Strategic planning
- Leadership development
- Coaching/mentoring
- Organizational change