Career – Team – Organization

I work with leaders of purpose-absorbed organizations who want to get everyone on the same page with strategy and succession. The techniques I use were fine-tuned with each client success over the last 25 years: 

Careers First

After seven years as a professional minister, my calling to serve others and help them pursue their unique purpose led to my next role as an outplacement career coach. I helped executives and professionals facing a life-draining career change to manage their transition and develop a smart strategy to find their next life-giving career. My career coaching process consisted of guiding people to find answers to these three questions:

1) Who am I? 

2) Where is my place in the world? 

3) How do I find it?

Teams Next

When an executive I was working with in outplacement landed a CFO position, he asked me to help him get started on the right foot as he moved into his new organization. Step one of his moving-in strategy was getting his team on the same page as soon as possible. With advice from a few of my mentors, I was able to guide him to get his team members in the right seat, jell and then excel. The team consulting process I employed was again three questions, but adapted for team alignment: 1) Who are we? 2) Where is our best place of service in this organization? 3) How do we make that happen together?

Now Organizations

After a few years, this CFO became the CEO and asked me if I could do for the whole organization what I had done with his team. At this point I was working as a partner at a strategic planning firm and had additional resources to support this project. But even with these resources, this large project only made sense to me when I went back to three questions I used in career and team advising and saw that they could also apply to the strategic planning initiative. The questions became:

• Who are we? (purpose, mission, core values, stakeholders, objectives)
• Where is our place in the market? (internal examination, external scan, assumptions)
• How do we achieve this together? (strategic themes, strategy statements, projects)

I believe it takes team unity to create and execute a strategy and make a succession plan work. One thing I know for certain is that when the top leader feels she or he is in their life-giving career, amazing things happen. But if this leader does not love their role, everyone suffers, and the organization cannot thrive.

For the past ten years, consulting with organizational leadership through successful transitions has been my primary focus. Asking three timeless questions is the time-tested process that works for my clients. And it will work for you too.