Work With Me

If your organization

– Struggles to take advantage of opportunities,
– Has lost its sense of direction or purpose,
– Can’t quite engage the enthusiasm and contributions of stakeholders,
– Feels misunderstood by clients or key audiences, or
– In some way is just not flourishing the way you’d like it to,

It’s time for us to work together.

Why We Should Work Together

Organizations fail to flourish when they are unclear about what makes them unique and how to use this uniqueness to develop distinctive services & products, establish a compelling sense of purpose, and create value for your stakeholders.

I can help you and your organization:

• Clarify your distinctive identity,
  Establish a compelling sense of purpose, and
  Develop a portfolio of signature actions to
  Expand your organization’s positive influence and help you create value.

• Connect members’ and stakeholders’ own identity, values, and purpose to those of your organization so that their work is individually and collectively more meaningful.

• Envision and create an influential presence for your organization within your larger industry, social, or cultural community.

• Understand and engage effectively with emerging organizational, business, cultural and social issues.

• Align your organization’s identity, purpose and actions so that your organization itself flourishes.

We can work together through:

Consulting

• Project-Oriented Engagements
• Conversations for Reframing Challenges

Targeted Learning Events

• Interactive Sessions
• Issue Briefings
• Speaking

What I Can Contribute

I offer short and longer term consulting services and targeted learning events (briefings, interactive classes, focused workshops, and keynote speaking), to help you and your organization understand where you are now, where you’d like to be, and what you can do to so that you flourish as an organization.

Email me at CVHarquail@AuthenticOrganizations.com to start a conversation about how we can work together to help your organization flourish.

Consulting

Project-Oriented Consulting Engagements

We can work together in a focused, in-depth way to address a particular organizational challenge. Project-oriented consulting engagements can include identifying, clarifying and quantifying an issue, learning activities to help stakeholders understand the issue and generate action plans to address it, group workshops, tracking and action-adjustment tools, and follow-up plans.

Depending on the extent of the project, I draw from a group of talented consulting colleagues to create a small team with the right array of expertise and insight. Read more about my approach to working with clients, here.

Conversations for Reframing Organizational Challenges

Sometimes you need a quick, focused conversation to help you understand a challenge and consider different ways that you might approach it. In a collaborative conversation (something like a coaching call), we can explore the issue, look at it from different perspectives and frames, and figure out an effective way for you to present it to others.

In a collaborative conversation, we’ll work to have you be deliberate, intentional and visionary in your choices. An hour or two spent considering how to frame the issue effectively can set you up to lead bigger conversations and make action planning more productive.

Targeted Learning Events

I can help the stakeholders in your system learn about issues that will make a real difference to your organization. I do this by working with groups, teams and organizations in interactive learning sessions, executive briefings, customized training programs, and keynote speaking.

Interactive Learning Sessions

I love to help people learn about cutting-edge issues in business, society, organizations and leadership. I draw on my years of MBA and ExecEd teaching to create interactive sessions that can include:

• A presentation to educate on the dynamics of the issue and understand their impact on your organization, your stakeholders and your members

• A discussion of case studies and real world examples (especially, ones drawn from your own organization) to see how the issue affects organizations like yours and industries like yours

• Question, Answer & Conversation sessions where we explore how the issues relate to your organization specifically

• An action-planning component that helps you identify steps you can take to put insights into action

In essence, I’ll create an Exec Ed/MBA class session for your organization, on a topic that’s of interest to you.

Issue Briefings

Often, the easiest way to get a group of organization members up to speed on issue is to create a topic-specific learning session, like an executive briefing. I can create learning-oriented, presentation-style briefings for your organization members that include a clear statement of the business, organizational or leadership problem, a synthesis of relevant research findings, a few conceptual models to organize the information and make it useful, and a set of application questions that help you figure out how this issue is relevant to your organization.

Topics that I frequently speak about include:

• Bridging Profit and Purpose, Authentically. Social entrepreneurs, non-profit managers, and purpose-driven leaders all aim to blend a social mission with making money. They have created a new category of mixed-motive, hybrid organization to ‘design in’ the tensions between profit and purpose as a way to manage them. Does this work? When, and why?

• Building a (More) Authentic Organization. What can an organization do to become more authentic? Once you understand that being authentic is an active process, and not a state to achieve, where do you start? What should you pay attention to, and who should participate? What does it feel like and look like as you become more authentic, and what other issues does moving towards authenticity trigger? How can an organization sustain its authenticity?

• Building a Strong, Authentic Brand That Employees and the Organization Share. Examine the power, the weakness, the distraction and the promise of getting your employees/members to ‘live the brand’ that the organization claims to have, and to develop an organizational brand that is authentic.

• Drawing Power from Clarity. Focus your stakeholders’ attention and drive collective  with a clearly defined, succinct description of your organizations identity, purpose and meaning. Learn how and why this clarity motivates individual and collective action, orients stakeholders’ expectations, and elicits commitment. And, take the first steps towards clarifying your organizational identity.

• Combining Progressive Movements for Holistic Organizational Change. Complex organizational & social change requires effort from many different directions. A broad array of organizational movements share similar values, and when we create alliances across these movements, we advance our own and each other’s goals more quickly, with a sustainable, holistic approach.

• What’s Really Going On With Women in Business? The full inclusion of women through out all levels of work organizations seems to be taking a long time. What are the remaining challenges, and what options do individuals and organizations have to make progress faster?

• Can Social Media Transform Your Organization, and Should You Let It? Introducing social media into your organization, through intranets, microblogs, blogs and more, triggers an array of new social and work dynamics. While organizations intend and plan for many of these dynamics, organizations are often caught off guard by how what seem to be ‘merely’ communication & technology improvements end up destabilizing patterns of relationships, work flow, knowledge, control, leadership, stakeholder influence, and meaning. Rather than accepting whatever changes come along with what you intend, organizations should be deliberate about incorporating social media so that it fuels understanding, engagement, responsibility, and helps the whole organization flourish.

I’m also happy to create a briefing or workshop to address any of the cases, situations, challenges and issues that I write about on AuthenticOrganizations.com.

Email me at CVHarquail@AuthenticOrganizations.com, and we can start a conversation about working together.