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What Does an Engagement with Spiritus Look Like?
Our strength as a consulting firm is our unique credentials in people, communications, and leadership—and our ability to be agile to your culture and goals. We may be asked to:
- Execute change management over a long project and ensure that people remain clear and confident in the change.
- Identify root causes of employee engagement challenges.
- Sharpen a service-oriented focus, identifying gaps to fulfilling a service-oriented mission.
- Provide management training and coaching
- Create strategic communications and branding centered around the messages that matter most
- Advise on and oversee a re-organization or leadership change.
A True Story
“I don’t like consultants.” That’s a line we heard recently from a CEO of a multi-billion-dollar organization.
“We don’t either,” we explained. And after we told him why, he hired us.
Our reason: Many consulting firms offer “off the shelf” solutions for every client. They send in their top senior executives with impressive resumes and polished speeches to sell you on a big package, and then once you’ve signed, you can’t remember their names. In their place you receive junior consultants with templates who demand your time and money, and you get the feeling they are learning more from you than you are getting from them. It feels manipulative, we think.
We’re often hired after these consultants have been let go because their tools don’t fit the culture they are serving. We’re often told, “You fit in like you are one of us.”
The Spiritus Advantage
While templates and tools hold value, they can’t carry a cultural consulting engagement. An effective consultant needs to learn your culture inside out before plugging in solutions that won’t fit. And those solutions must constantly be measured against their results—and adjusted as necessary. This is a dynamic process.
Our process is straightforward: Discuss, Document, Discover, Deliver, and Debrief.
Discuss & Document: Targeting Your Priorities
Before any initiative, we learn about you and your needs. This happens through in-depth Discussions and often a survey. We Document your most important priorities and provide you with a detailed, written plan of proposed deliverables. We adjust our proposal to fit your specific timeline, objectives, measurables, and budget.
Discover: Cultural Strengths Assessment
Once the proposal and plan are approved, we focus on your cultural and business differentiators—as well as your potential liabilities. This is sort of like trying to look at the tip of your nose. It’s hard to do when it’s your own company, but as outsiders, we are trained in Discovering clues that paint a picture of a culture. This is done through a variety of means including:
- Interviews/surveys with leaders and project members
- Review of corporate documents (surveys, mission/values, strategic plans, etc.) and employee engagement surveys
- Focus groups with employees
- Assessment of branding, market reviews, competitors
At the end of the Discover phase, we know what makes your organization work at its best—and what can trip you up if you let it. We leverage stories that will engage your people based on the best parts of your culture.
Deliver: People Plan and Engagement
In this phase, we address your objectives with Delivery of a combination of the following:
- Training and development to sharpen leadership skills (often on a quarterly schedule)
- Executive coaching to address goals and challenges
- Targeted strategic communications across the right channels–internal and external
- Working with HR to implement recognition plans to reinforce the right behaviors
- On-call consulting for executive members of team
- Creating two-way improvement teams with front-line employees, so that you can be more sustainable
- Advising on and overseeing re-organization
This phase is often dynamic, changing as additional needs arise, but is kept within the framework of specific, measurable goals.
Debrief: Reinforcement and Measurement
The Spiritus Advantage is in our Debrief.
Our Debrief assures that throughout every phase, we check the results against your cultural needs and priorities, adjusting as needed. Throughout, we work to ensure that the work we’ve done sticks. This may include the following:
- Adjusting deliverables based on new needs that arise (for example, an unexpected leadership change, market shift, or HR concern)
- Revisiting new employee engagement surveys to monitor effectiveness of initiative
- Measuring results against our proposal’s stated objectives
- Training members of your team to sustain our efforts.
See our Areas of Focus page for more details, or Contact Us today to discuss how we might help you with your cultural initiative.