Client Contact Process
Seeking Accord Leadership Consulting
What happens when you place a phone call to me?
First, know that I keep everything you discuss with me in strict confidence.
I will ask you to introduce yourself and your agency/company/organization, and to briefly describe the situation you are calling about. If I think this is something I might be able to help with, I will let you know.
If I don’t think I’m the right person for you, I will let you know that right away as well.
I will answer any questions you have about me, my background, my experience, my qualifications, my approach, etc. If that’s all the information you need or would like right now—if you are in the process of contacting several possible consultants, or if you need to check with higher management before proceeding—we can leave it at that for our initial contact.
If you think I am someone who might be able to meet your needs, and who you believe you would be comfortable working with, we can continue discussing your situation in a bit more detail. I can give you a very initial assessment of your situation and outline how I might envision proceeding, should you decide to hire me.
Once we have entered into a working agreement, the next steps will of course depend on your specific situation. If you are wanting team development, a team tune-up, or group collaborative problem solving, I will likely want to interview each of your team members to get their perspectives on the situation. If you would like a written analysis and recommendations from that initial climate assessment, I can provide that.
Or, I can provide my informal assessment to you verbally and discuss options for moving forward to address the situation.
Often when a leader/manager contacts me for assistance, he or she does not really know what they need. You may believe you need some type of group intervention, when in fact the root of the problem is a conflict between two individual team members, and mediation will go a long way toward bringing harmony to the entire team.
Or you may come to me looking for a mediator, when in fact it appears to me that the problem goes well beyond a single two-party conflict. If many members of the team share common concerns, a group intervention may be more appropriate. Or perhaps team members are lacking in constructive conflict resolution behaviors, and some basic training, or a refresher, in communication and conflict resolution skills is all that is needed.
Or, while it is clear that your entire team is suffering, the root cause may in fact be an abrasive leader or manager who is doing the best they can to accomplish your organization’s mission, but in doing so, is causing enough emotional distress in co-workers as to disrupt organizational functioning. In such a case, executive coaching may well be the most successful approach to get everyone back on track.
Alternatively, you may have a leadership team whose lack of effectiveness stems from an inability to make durable, collaborative decisions where everyone’s voice is heard and everyone supports the decision, and who could benefit greatly from Collaborative Leadership training.
Sometimes a combination of the above is called for. I will help you sort this all out, so that we don’t just put on a band aid fix, don’t just solve the apparent surface problem, but use a comprehensive approach to solve the true, underlying root problem or problems so that they are unlikely to arise again.