Greg Baker, on March 19, 2014
There are seven critical elements you need to consider when planning your Consultant Development Program if you want to truly enhance the level and type of service your professional service employees provide to their clients. We refer to these elements as The Seven Pillars. Together they make up, and hold up, a complete approach to building effective consulting organizations.
No organizational structure is perfect, but many of them across business today could be a lot better. The challenge is that many structures out there breed unintentional conflict. Does yours? Perhaps it’s time to rethink your organizational structure.
In my recent blog article, A Solution for Managing Unintentional Conflict in Operations, I described how a client company resolved the “unintentional conflict” created by their contract processing operation. They resolved it by creating a “shared operational space” where work was accomplished with much greater harmony and efficiency. Their results were stunning – a near 300% improvement in contract cycle time. In this article I provide some “how-to’s” for you to align your business operations to manage conflict, and talk a little more about the importance of creating shared space in business operations to prevent conflict in the first place.
Greg Baker, on June 30, 2012
In my recent Advance Update article, Managing Unintentional Conflict in Business, I introduced a phenomenon at work in our businesses today that I have labeled “Unintentional Conflict.” I described how unintentional conflict shows up at the individual, operational, and organizational levels, and is quite prevalent in our business enterprises. In this blog I will focus on managing unintentional conflict in operations by resolving my example of unintentional conflict to create what we call operational “shared space”.
Greg Baker, on June 14, 2012
While the genesis of unintentional conflict is often obscured, the costly disruption and dysfunction that result from it are usually quite visible. Such was the case with our story about Jane and her client Sandy in our last Advance Update, Managing Unintentional Conflict in Business. Let’s revisit the story and then discuss how to resolve the issue, or in this case avoid it by acquiring the skills to manage unintentional conflict.
Jane is meeting with her new client, Sandy, to make some recommendations for how to address some pressing problems on their project. Jane loves to engage in small talk and storytelling with people, including clients, to build relationships. (more…)