Helping Your Organization Set and Achieve Its Goals

U-Solution’s initial work in this area will be an assessment of the management team members’ wants and needs. What is not happening that they want to happen and/or what is happening that they would like not to happen? This discussion would focus on both means (input) and ends (output), i.e., both behaviors and results.

Art will help the leadership of an organization perform a business cultural analysis to identify what the desired core values (non-negotiable values) of the organization are (usually about 5 to 7), and ensure that these core values are fully understood throughout the organization, that the organization uses a variety of ways to remind its members what the chosen values are, that there are reward and recognition systems set up to create organizational heroes and heroines (role models) of those associates who demonstrate living and working by the core values, and that there is a consistently enforced negative reinforcement system to deal with those associates who cannot or will not behave in harmony with the chosen values.

Art will help the leadership of an organization engage in a successful change management process that saves time and money getting changes installed in an organization. This process involves discovering what the trigger points/pain points are (for all) if members continue to engage in the current behaviors; what the vision is for a new and better state (for all); what the tasks are to get there (for all); what the payoffs are (for all) to ensure that the benefits outweigh the costs; and what the total costs are for making the change (not limited to financial considerations).

Training for improved leadership and management (they are not the same!) is one way to propel a company into a higher level of top-line revenue and bottom-line profit. Art will assist the leadership of a company in identifying specifically how they want leading and managing to manifest in the company, what results they expect these two processes to generate, and what they are not now experiencing that produced the felt need to address this condition.

When groups use models and frameworks for predictable recurring processes – like planning, problem solving, and decision making – that they learn together, the experience gives them a common set of language and operational skills. This shared set of consistent approaches produces more effective (doing the right thing) and efficient (doing the thing right) results than if they were to try to use multiple individual approaches that the group members do not understand or maybe even agree with.

Art can provide training in a body of knowledge known as “Quality of Thinking,” which addresses the idea that thinking produces behavior. Unfortunately, most of our thinking occurs at the unconscious level. And when it remains unconscious, we do not get to make choices for improvement. If one waits for behavior to begin an improvement process, there are only three choices: (1) reward it, (2) punish it, or (3) ignore it.

By getting leverage on behavior and moving the thinking to a conscious level, we can improve the processes that produce behavior before it occurs. Many businesspeople understand the “Input, Process, Output” formula: when the output is a product that is unacceptable, we first look at the manufacturing process. If there are no issues there, we look into the raw materials. The same approach is used when the “product” is behavior.