Organizational Development
Clarity. Synergy. Productivity.
Everyone in the room can be smart, capable and committed, and the organization can still get in its own way.
I’ve seen this happen in organizations all over the world.
The people aren’t the problem. Yet the same conversations repeat, decisions take too long, one department doesn’t know what another is doing, and a conflict everyone knows about becomes the thing nobody’s talking about.
You may have a detailed strategic plan that lays out objectives while daily operations flow quite differently. You have a great meeting where there’s agreement, and then everyone leaves with a different understanding of what was agreed upon.
People work harder, and even harder. But working harder inside a system that isn’t working particularly well doesn’t necessarily improve the system. Often it just produces very tired people.
That’s where I come in.
What Is Actually Happening Here?
Before we decide what needs to change, I want to understand what is actually happening. What appears to be a communication problem may actually be lack of clarity or of authority. What looks like resistance may be conflicting priorities, and a performance issue may reveal a structural problem. And recurring conflict may have very little to do with the people currently having it and everything to do with communication and relationship.
Everyone working extremely hard to solve a problem that hasn’t been accurately identified yet simply does not work.
So we look. We talk to people and distinguish what is actually known from what is being assumed. We explore how decisions are made, where information travels and where it gets stuck, what people believe their responsibilities are, and where the organization takes action that’s not aligned with what they say matters.
Then we can ask a more useful question: What does this organization actually need? And that answer determines our work.
Strategic Planning
Deciding what matters before deciding what to do.
Strategic planning as I facilitate it doesn’t produce a beautiful document that everyone promptly returns to being too busy to use. We create a living process that helps your organization think:
Where are we now? What’s changed? What are we actually trying to accomplish? What matters most? What are we not willing to do anymore? And how will the choices we’re making here support people to do what they do come Monday morning?
I facilitate strategic planning as a participatory decision-making process, bringing the right people and the right information into the conversation so an organization can make clear choices about where it’s going and how it can best get there.
To be clear: the strategic plan matters, but the process and quality of thinking that creates it matters even more.
Executive & Leadership Team Facilitation
Sometimes the people responsible for solving the problem are too close to it to facilitate the conversation themselves.
Leadership teams occasionally need a room in which everyone gets to participate rather than one person simultaneously trying to lead the meeting, contribute to the discussion, manage the personalities and somehow remain neutral about the outcome.
I facilitate leadership teams through complex conversations, strategic decisions, organizational transitions, competing priorities and those moments when everyone knows something needs to be talked about but nobody is quite sure how to begin.
My job isn’t to make the decision for you. It’s to create a process good enough for the intelligence that’s already in the room to become truly useful.
Collaboration
An organization can have excellent departments and still stumble in functioning as a whole.
Every team has its priorities, pressures, deadlines and expertise, usually with perfectly reasonable reasons for doing things the way it does. Then the work crosses a departmental boundary, and suddenly things get interesting.
Collaboration isn’t simply about people getting along. It requires clarity about purpose, roles, decision-making, accountability, and communication. It is the intentionality of how work moves between people and functions.
I help organizations see where that movement is breaking down and create practical ways of working together that make the whole organization more capable, not merely each part of it.
Conflict & Difficult Conversations
Conflict is information.
It tells us that something matters. But by the time conflict becomes visible in an organization, people may already be protecting their positions, avoiding conversations, assigning motives to others or recruiting other people to their side.
At that point, you’re no longer dealing only with the original issue. Now you’ve got a complex dynamic going on that’s not as easy to untangle.
As a certified mediator, I help people slow things down enough to understand what is actually happening. Sometimes that means facilitated dialogue, sometimes mediation, executive consultation, team intervention or simply helping people finally have the conversation everyone’s been avoiding.
The objective isn’t to eliminate disagreement. It’s to make disagreement useful again.
Organizational Culture
Culture is what emerges when nobody is talking about culture.
It’s the unspoken space between people that informs…
- Who can question a decision.
- If, and how, bad news travels upward.
- What happens after someone makes a mistake.
- Who gets included in important conversations.
- What behavior gets rewarded, and what doesn’t.
- The thing everyone knows but nobody says.
Culture isn’t created by a values statement, although that’s useful. It develops through clear intention, thousands of interactions, decisions and behaviors that teach people how things really work here.
A cohesive company is where the culture an organization intends and the culture people actually experience are aligned. When they diverge, trouble is inevitable. That’s when we examine that gap, without looking for someone to blame, and then decide what needs to change.
Leadership, Communication & Human Capacity
Sometimes the most useful organizational intervention isn’t another organizational initiative. It’s comes from helping people develop the capacity to lead, communicate, collaborate, make decisions and navigate conflict differently.
My executive education work includes relational leadership, collaborative excellence, communication, emotional regulation in high-conflict environments, strategic decision-making, human-centered strategic planning, difficult conversations and organizational culture.
Programs are participatory and can be offered as workshops, intensives, multi-session series, leadership retreats, executive education or customized organizational engagements.
Sometimes You Don’t Need a Program.
You need to figure out what’s going on.
This may be my favorite kind of call from a client: “Something isn’t working, and we’re not entirely sure what we need.”
Good. We don’t have to know what to do before we understand what’s going on. I work with corporations, government agencies, nonprofits, universities and leadership teams facing challenges that don’t necessarily fit neatly into a predetermined service. So, we begin with a conversation.
I listen to what’s happening, ask questions, help distinguish the presenting problem from what may be underneath it, and together we determine what kind of support would actually be useful.
It might be facilitation, organizational consulting, strategic planning, mediation, leadership development or a customized engagement. Or we may discover that you don’t need me at all.
The point isn’t to sell you a program. It’s to understand what your organization needs and see how I can support you best.
Working With Leezá
For over 25 years, I’ve worked across more than 35 cultures with corporations, government agencies, nonprofits, universities, community organizations and leaders navigating the places where people, purpose, strategy and complexity all meet. My humanistic approach, seasoned best practices, and years of consulting, facilitating and coaching in organizational development, strategic planning, leadership, communication and conflict resolution serve individuals and organizations around the world.
Despite all of that, I never walk into an organization seeking to apply what I know. I come in curious and ready to listen:
- What is happening here?
- What matters?
- What is getting in the way?
- And what would actually help?
That’s where we begin, and the results of that collaboration are usually exceptional.