First and foremost, we listen to you and your people, look to see what’s really going on, learn what opportunities for improvement exist, and co-create with you a way forward to capture opportunities and minimise threats for ROI.
Here are some examples of services we have provided (after consulting with clients on their “journey” and co-creating optimal next steps for performance improvement).
All organisations today must embrace change to survive and prosper. Enlightened leaders know proactive change leadership, the "people performance" part of change management, helps employees deal constructively with shock, sadness, fear and change resistance, all natural human instinctive reactions. Prosper Consulting is helping people and teams, from high-level managers to front-line supervisors. Their attitudes and behaviours are critical to re-engaging workers (often shell-shocked, demotivated, fearful) and capturing discretionary effort for higher productivity, exactly when you need it most. We help leaders and workplace teams to move more rapidly through known, predictable stages of response, to become re-motivated, upskilled, and to "step up", sooner, to new challenges you need them to embrace. LEARN MORE.
Many companies today are confronting significant challenges, necessitating restructure-rationalisation, to survive tough times as sustainable businesses able to prosper again. Enlightened leaders know proactive change leadership can help the people you keep (especially managers and supervisors) deal constructively with shock, sadness, fear, "survivor syndrome" and change resistance, all natural human instinctive reactions. Prosper Consulting is helping people and teams, from high-level managers to front-line supervisors. Their attitudes and behaviours are critical to re-engaging workers (often shell-shocked, demotivated, fearful) and capturing discretionary effort for higher productivity, exactly when you need it most. We help leaders and workplace teams to move rapidly through known, predictable stages of response, to become re-motivated, re-energised, upskilled and to "step up", sooner, to new challenges you need them to embrace. LEARN MORE.
This “hard” numeric analysis creates “the helicopter view” of whole-of-business performance, long-term, past and future. It invariably provides “Aha” insights into the size, nature and urgency of the overall strategic challenge ahead. It also establishes a solid platform for subsequent analysis of strategic factors and development of sound strategies to prosper, long-term.
Businesses operating in accordance with a clearly articulated set of core values and conduct guidelines are better able to operate with integrity, in harmony with all their stakeholders, and thereby prosper. This collaborative process facilitates their development, articulation and promulgation.
Every business is unique. Each one’s strategic environment is unique to it. Only by taking proper account of the few most critically important organisational and external factors, and how they are changing, can any business be confident it is giving required attention to “what matters most” to survive and prosper. This process, conducted with the right people and appropriate supporting facts and data, enables leaders to develop sound, optimal, evidence-based strategies to prosper.
In order to prosper, most businesses must take account of the needs, wants and interests of several key stakeholder groups, including owners/shareholders, customers, employees, suppliers, regulatory authorities to name some major common sets. This exercise is often important to ensure the needs of each key group are sufficiently satisfied for the business to continue to prosper.
Determining the attractiveness of an industry is critical to strategy development. Ensuring all industry dynamics are understood for current and new markets is a cornerstone of devising strategic competitive advantages to generate exceptional returns in the chosen industry. This analysis provides those insights, systematically, methodically.
Before formulating strategies, it is essential to determine what the strategies should be about. That is, what are the few critical issues, good bad or otherwise, above all others, that we “absolutely must address effectively” to survive and prosper long-term? This exercise systematically identifies and prioritises those issues, to help us ensure our strategies address them first and foremost.
In environments of high uncertainty about the future, systematically developing different plausible “scenarios” that may unfold, then plotting strategies that position our business optimally to allow for any of them to actually unfold, along with a readiness to adapt our strategies further as uncertainties become realities, maximises our chances of success and minimises risk in the face of significant uncertainty.
For those privileged to be able to envision a future of their own choice, this creative “right-brain left-brain” exercise enables collaborative development of an exciting “aspirational” picture of a desired future. Specific, scientifically validated techniques are used to induce participants into a state of “relaxed alertness” where the brain can be at its most creative. Collaborative sharing and prioritising then synthesises participants’ vision elements into a cohesive whole to be tested and refined against practicality, relevance and other criteria.
Having agreed upon “what matters most”, i.e. the few critical issues, good bad or otherwise, above all others, that the business absolutely must address effectively to survive and prosper long-term, attention in this exercise is turned to answering the questions “How will we address those biggest issues/opportunities effectively? What should and will we do differently to prosper both short- and long-term?” The rigorous analytic effort invested in identifying the Key Strategic Issues pays rich rewards here by helping executive teams formulate strategies that take full and proper account of their strategic factors.
Having developed apparently appropriate strategies, the next step of a rigorous process involves qualitative evaluation, in which the proposed strategies are subjected to assessment against specific qualitative criteria for strategy soundness, and quantitative evaluation, in which the best-estimated impacts of the strategies are compared against the performance “gap” that needs to be closed by them. Strategies may all be qualitatively sound, yet (collectively) quantitatively insufficient, in which case more are needed (to “close the gap”).
With a clear collective understanding of “what matters most” and consequent strategic direction and priorities, developing or refining or updating a corporate mission statement can provide multiple benefits to various stakeholders, especially executives, managers and employees. A well-developed, well-articulated and well-communicated corporate mission statement can be inspirational, motivational, uniting, a rallying call, and provide a touchstone for day-to-day decisions and behaviours, as well as the foundation for divisional and departmental mission statements that can “cascade” the motivational benefits throughout the organisation.
Sadly, all too often, corporate strategy failures are simply failures to execute the strategies. Strategic Project Planning significantly reduces this risk by translating strategies – typically broad high-level statements of “what we will do” – into the “how we will get it done”. Using proven practical templates as tools, the “nitty gritty” of the specific sequence of activities is developed and mapped, taking careful account of the practicalities of strategy execution, such as “SMART” objectives, probable and possible obstacles, required precedences, resources required (physical, financial, human, IT, time) and the strategy’s ROI business case.
Another significant contribution to minimising the risk of failure to execute is the establishment of ongoing regular (Prosper Consulting recommends quarterly) accountability reviews integrated into the culture and normal business processes of the organisation. At such reviews, accountability is not just for “doing what we said we would do” (activities) but also, especially over time, for evidence of efficacy, i.e. impact on results. Over the longer term, such reviews eventually become assessments of the continuing relevance of the strategies themselves, as both the organisation and its environment continue to change and the premises upon which strategies were founded become outdated and less relevant. At this point, the value of the review is that it triggers recognition of the need to re-engage in strategic planning anew.
At the heart of business performance improvement is the personal effectiveness of its people: leaders, managers, supervisors, technicians, workers. A wealth of relevant performance-improvement knowledge, skills and relevant information are now deliverable to people at every level of the business. Prosper Consulting prides itself on what clients have called “connecting the classroom to the paddock” (workplace), i.e. applying such world-class knowledge, skills and information to real people in real jobs such that they can and do apply them to improve their personal performance.
For people in leadership roles (not just “the top team” but at every level to frontline supervisors and team leaders), a further range of world-class knowledge, skills, tools and coaching are available to strengthen them in their leadership roles.
To take just one simple (but common) example, most people in leadership roles tend to favour a particular leadership style or approach, be it “micro-manager”, “delegator” or something else. However, the best leaders (at any level, including front-line supervisors) learn to adapt their leadership style, approach and techniques to the different needs of different followers in the situations they (the followers) are in. Not only are different approaches most effective with different people but also with the same people in different situations.
To take another (also simple but common) example, many managers and supervisors frequently feel both frustrated and powerless in the face of undesirable (e.g. unproductive, ineffective, even sabotaging) behaviours of people reporting to them. With just a little analysis using a simple but potent technique, most can quickly identify exactly why their people are (mis-)behaving as they are, even recognise why those behaviours are perfectly rational (seen through the eyes of the misbehaver), and most importantly work out exactly what they need to do (usually without spending a cent) to influence them to change their behaviours to desirable ones.
Many business processes, projects, activities and tasks in organisations require the inter-dependent cooperation of different people, teams and departments for success. Often, however, some critically needed contributions “fall through the cracks” (don’t get done) while others inadvertently get duplicated. Bringing together the key players needed for a successful business process and using a simple but powerful communication process in a workshop format can easily eliminate misunderstandings, working at cross-purposes, frustrations and failure. Documenting and disseminating the outcomes of such a workshop clarifies everyone’s responsibilities and accountabilities, as well who needs to be consulted (two-way communication) and who informed (one-way communication) on every step in a business process, project, or set of activities or tasks. Transformation from chaos to synergy is enabled. “Aha” insights are also harnessed from the “picture” created by such an exercise.
Some people in some organisations still have unclear (or worse, no) job descriptions. Even for those with “clear” ones, however, the description is often only of tasks and activities, without clear articulation of the desired results of those tasks and activities, i.e. the job’s goals. The outcome is all too often “lose-lose”. The employee, “flying blind”, fails to deliver. Whether terminated or not, the business has lost and so has the employee: “lose-lose”. Performance-based job descriptions, co-created between the employee and his/her manager, make explicit the desired results (job goals), the guidelines in which the employee is expected to operate, the resources available to the employee to do the job (physical, financial, human, knowledge/IT, time), how the employee will be made accountable, and finally the consequences of both success and failure.
Enlightened leaders know “what gets measured gets managed”. A natural corollary of performance-based job descriptions is a practical tool by which to measure (and thereby manage) one’s performance. It involves: (1) identifying how the desired results (rather than the job’s activities or tasks) can best be measured; (2) refining those into meaningful Key Performance Indicators; (3) establishing the mechanisms/processes to measure and/or collect the required data; (4) creating simple, practical, powerful visual indicators for regular (e.g. monthly) performance tracking against relevant benchmarks and targets; (5) instituting regular collaborative performance-review processes in a culture of celebrating successes and helping each other solve problems impeding achievement of desired performance.
Success at work and in life depends in part on our “IQ” (Intelligence Quotient). As talented workers are promoted “up the ladder”, their “EQ” (Emotional Quotient) becomes more important and is more likely than IQ to be the “glass-ceiling” barrier to further promotion. EQ pertains to “Emotional Intelligence” about which much has been researched and discovered in recent decades, including “The Business Case for Emotional Intelligence”. We too can learn about it, understand it, know ourselves better in EQ terms and engage in specific developmental exercises to enhance our EQ. Some highly successful Prosper Consulting client executives have attributed their highest-level job promotions, in significant part, to their EQ development as a result of “confronting themselves” vis-à-vis EI.
This high-involvement structured experiential learning process, in a safe, supportive, yet challenging environment, provides highly practical, relevant skill-building for those difficult work “scenarios” that are typically the most challenging for participants, i.e. scenarios uniquely customised to each individual client’s own business. It’s yet another example of Prosper Consulting’s earned reputation with clients of “connecting the classroom to the paddock” (workplace). Dramatic personal growth in both competence and confidence delivers significant benefits to participants and the business (win-win).
When people come together to form a new department or for a new project, human nature dictates they typically progress through identifiable phases from so-called “forming”, through “storming” and “norming”, ultimately to “performing”. However, the progression is not guaranteed. Some groups never reach the “performing” phase, either becoming “stuck” or breaking down. Each phase has its characteristics, pros and cons, challenges and opportunities. Understanding them and taking specific measures to progress rapidly through the phases in a healthy way maximises a group’s opportunity to “perform” synergistically as quickly as possible.
Many existing “teams” (departments, work-groups/crews, whole divisions) are not teams at all. Many are sabotaged by dysfunctional attitudes and behaviours. The root causes of these dysfunctional attitudes and behaviours can be quickly and accurately diagnosed. Once understood, specific interventions can be instigated to address the root causes of dysfunction, build trust and cooperation, and help the group become truly a committed, accountable, high-performing team.
Many regard meetings as the bane of their lives. Yet the disciplined practice of some simple guidelines can transform meetings into meaningful, purposeful, value-adding activities that are also enjoyable and sources of continual learning.
Many Prosper Consulting client executives, managers and supervisors have benefited from the opportunity to participate in structured individual coaching sessions, with participant accountability for “doing as promised”. The underlying philosophy is non-directive, i.e. helping people solve their own problems rather than trying to solve them for them. The “GROW” model is often deployed in coaching sessions – an apt acronym considering how much participants really can grow from the experience.
