Accountability and Performance Feedback
It is our experience that local government employees lack the ability and/or willingness to hold supervisors, peers and employees accountable for their performance, behaviour and attendance. Frankly speaking, local government is brutally awful at holding people accountable. Stop obsessing about your performance review/development plan form. Performance feedback is not about a form: it is about having the courage to have difficult conversations right in the moment. Fortunately for you, we are here to help. We offer support for supervisors or colleagues who wish to deal with difficult situations and we also offer workshops on developing skills and scripts to assist.
Individual Coaching
We take a strengths-based approach to coaching. We do not believe you can fix people. We do not attempt to make timid people confrontational, nor can we turn blue sky thinkers into detail-oriented assessors. We work with employees to understand their strengths, preferences and motivations and help them leverage these talents to achieve their goals.
Team-building and Conflict Resolution
Whether supporting a team in its infancy or helping an existing team reach the next level, our role is to help teams get clarity about their purpose, priorities and goals and equally importantly, ensure the rules of engagement and accountability are well established.
Unfortunately, team performance can be de-railed by conflict between two or more team members. We have considerable experience supporting team leaders with interventions or leading these interventions ourselves. Until the tension and conflict is resolved it is not possible to build the trust necessary for a team to be highly functional.
Program/Service Assessments
Our continuous improvement assessments (CIA’s) take a deep dive into how a particular service or function is being delivered. This highly engaging process starts with interviewing the people who do the work and the people who are served by the work to get a clear understanding of the current state. We then review industry trends and practices to give us an ideal state and then make prioritized, actionable recommendations to improve the program or service.
Meeting facilitation
There are few things more frustrating than arriving at a meeting and having the leader of the meeting open proceedings by asking: “Okay, we’re here to talk about ‘X,’ how do we want to begin?” Not all meetings need facilitators but when strategy is being set, big decisions are being made, or critical feedback is solicited, a clear roadmap for how the session(s) will unfold is critical. We have successfully facilitated dozens of staff and staff/council meetings. Here’s an appetizer: our first question is always: “The session will be a success if . . . ?”
Leadership Workshops
We deliver custom, high-energy, highly engaging, fun workshops on a number of organizational health and leadership topics including:
- Linking the organizations vision to the employee’s work
- Working to strengths
- Team building
- Employee engagement
- Having difficult conversations
Workforce Planning
John played a critical role in developing succession programs in both Maple Ridge and Port Coquitlam. Our approach involves building broad organizational capacity in core leadership and business skills while simultaneously identifying high flight-risk positions and readying small pools of employees to compete for these positions.
Human Resources/Labour Relations Sounding Board
Practical advice is just a phone call away: with 31 years of experience leading and managing people every day, John has a wealth of experience with:
- collective bargaining
- collective agreement interpretation
- discipline investigations
- human resources policies, practices and programs
- job evaluation
- exempt compensation
- exempt terminations