Strategic Organization

Capitalize on the expertise of our management advisors, organizational development specialists, and organizational change facilitators. In negotiating the complexities of the external environment, contracting, pushing, and pulling your organization, your leaders and teams will benefit from our objective assessments, guidance, and best practices.

We help businesses reground and organize for success. Our in-depth assessments of how to move an organization forward sometimes lead in surprising directions.

A management competency assessment may uncover a gap in training and development. A leadership team may request assistance in enhancing accountability only to find during the initial evaluation that an unclear vision and strategy require immediate attention. An institution completing a merger may seek help in creating a new corporate culture, but the priority may shift to realigning the organizational structure. Our services and team are intentionally focused and flexible with the end purpose of sustaining a successful, healthy organization. The Strategic Organization of DDJ Myers supports:

  • Preparing individuals, teams, and organizations for growth
  • Giving your strategic planning process robust and meaningful practices
  • Inspiring individuals to bring their whole self to work
  • Evaluating the conditioned tendencies and patterns in your organization
  • Being deliberate in designing and living your culture
  • Creating opportunity for effective brainstorming
  • Developing knowledge to inform better decision making
  • Embodying leadership practices
  • Designing learning organizations
  • Assessing and supporting management competencies
  • Designing effective talent recruitment and retention practices

Strategic Planning

Would your organization benefit from implementing an innovative approach to strategic planning? Our process is exciting and actionable in its approach to create new energy and identify goals to support a healthy and sustain- able organization. This is not a cookie-cutter approach applied to every organization. Your enterprise is unique in its human and other resources, distinct value, aspirations and mission, and competitive challenges and opportunities. Your strategic response needs to be meaningful to every employee and customer.

Our process begins with the basics to ensure that the organization is financially sound and able to maintain reserves as stakeholders look forward and create a future narrative, identifying opportunities, threats, strengths, and weaknesses. The DDJ Myers strategic planning team works with your leaders to facilitate leveraging your current base of competencies to brainstorm, evaluate, and select strategies that empower and encourage every employee to utilize his or her competencies, gifts, and talents every day.

We are masterful at facilitating “crazy, sticky conversations” that threaten to derail the planning process. One tenet in successful strategic planning is that every voice is heard and everyone has a voice. Another is that the team walks out of the room with a full, shared commitment to action. Our goal as your strategic planning facilitator is to ensure that your organization commits to a plan that is viable and plausible and leverages your organization’s unique value. We support you in designing practices to realize your plan and support organizational learning integral to strategic planning.

The DDJ Myers team guides you in distinguishing between operational effectiveness (which can help maintain profitability but will not move a business forward) and strategy. Existing and emerging competitors can easily imitate your operational effectiveness. We notice many organizations improving production and operational tools in the past few years, neglecting their true value proposition. Too many managers are taking incremental steps and forsaking opportunities to solidify organizational strategy for success.

To reconnect with strategy and reenergize assets to produce a healthy and sustainable organization, contact Deedee Myers as the first step in defining a new vision for your organization.

Strategic Succession Planning

There is succession planning, and then there is strategic succession planning. When we ask organizations to share their approach to ensuring sustainable leadership, they often point to a box on the organization chart and say, “She is next in line” or “He has been here the longest.” Effective succession planning moves beyond an occasional conversation to become a critical and valued factor supporting organizational health and sustainability.

Framing succession planning in a strategic context increases the possibility of a smooth transition and delivers on a culture of continuous learning and development at all levels. Strategic succession planning is a critical success factor to fulfill long-term strategy, integrating employee development in strategic planning, in their everyday work, and in the corporate culture.

The DDJ Myers Strategic Succession Planning process includes:

  • Defining a strategic context for each role
  • Benchmarking each role to define and articulate required competencies
  • Assessing current role holders and potential successors
  • Developing a robust leadership development plan for each individual with milestones for success • Devising a dashboard highlighting short- and long-term gaps in leadership roles
  • Creating an emergency succession plan
  • Agreeing on a strategic succession plan policy

The DDJ Myers Strategic Succession Planning Team facilitates generative conversation to bring out unspoken needs, uncover hidden requirements, and ensure that your organization has an actionable plan that supports your strategic plan. Here are a few questions we ask clients:

  1. How do you know your strategic succession plan and employee development program have top management participation, involvement, and support? What observable actions support your assessment of management support?
  2. How does your strategic succession plan meet the unique needs of the organization?
  3. Does your plan extend to management and professional levels beyond top positions?
  4. What systematic process exists for carrying out the plan?
  5. How does present performance influence untapped potential of the future?
  6. Is strategic succession planning part of each executive’s performance goals?
  7. How does your internal development program support increasing capacity to create knowledge and learning?
  8. What internal programs accelerate learning in your organization?

Contact us to discuss Strategic Succession Planning and learn more about how we can support your needs.

Transformative Change

Are your results merely (or nearly) satisfactory, when you really want to get to “wow”? Have you implemented incremental changes with the goal of achieving desired results, only to be dissatisfied with the results or sustainability? Is organizing and interacting in old patterns a norm? Does a culture that served your organization well in the past seem increasingly out of step? Do merged organizations need transformation to a single culture?

Transformation is challenging and profound, necessitating meaningful commitment to embody new practices that support the organization you want. Transformation naturally challenges your embedded practices that once worked well but now need to be tested, assessed, and rethought. Changing how you do business is a transformation in leading, managing, and organizing. It involves new, even radical ways of generating customer satisfaction, innovating, inspiring a competitive advantage, and generating profits.

Our models make new leadership commitments and practices accessible, offer varied approaches, and support building competency in creating a learning environment. People become self-generative in their new leadership and capacity to self-observe, self-correct, and self-adapt.

Craft a new vision for your organization, embody practices to fulfill that vision, and increase awareness of what is possible. We look forward to conversing with you on transformative change.

Organization Assessment

Gauging the progress of your organization’s competency in achieving high performance is valuable information in supporting strategic initiatives and daily support functions. To achieve sustainable high performance means your employees and leaders have a shared understanding of the organization’s mission, primary stakeholders, and customers and a solid and mutual commitment to success. They also agree how to leverage organizational competency and to elevate underperforming areas and sources of untapped potential.

DDJ Myers develops custom surveys that create evidence-based information in an organization assessment to inform you where and how your employees and leaders agree or disagree on actions supporting espoused values, understanding quality measures of performance, and believing the boss and organization care about who they are as employees.

Our organization assessments provide meaningful data accompanied by dashboards of success factors and derailers, so you have accessible information for reflection, speculation, possible shifting, and action. We facilitate a thorough analysis in support of deploying resources effectively and creating opportunity for continual progress.

Call us about our inventory of surveys and organization assessments.

Organization Design, on Purpose

Improve the probability of creating and sustaining a healthy and successful organization. Businesses with people, information, and technology integrated and organized around a common vision and purpose have a higher probability of success. The deeper the organization, its individuals, and actions embody the same vision and purpose, the greater ease, flexibility, and resilience are accessible.

Your organization’s foundation—its reason for existence—drives actions, attitudes, and behaviors of your people. The design of the organization should support your unique vision and purpose in a way that sets it apart from others in the market offering similar products and services.

Connect with us to discuss how your organization design supports your strategy and fulfills your vision and purpose. Together, we can explore which design is appropriate: hierarchical, flat, functional, division, networking, or matrix. In exploring organizational design, we support you in deciding elements of organic and mechanistic structures foundational to your purpose. In addition, decision-making structures and levels of authority are important elements in identifying and implementing your most effective structure.

Call us for an exploratory conversation.

Organization Learning

Learning organizations inspire, encourage, and motivate individuals to be continuous learners. As a result, the organization is more flexible, resilient, and successful. Learning organizations embody a healthy response to negative external environmental changes rather than a reaction or impulsive response. They first look to sources of untapped potential and capacity within the organization, assess appetite for risk, and explore bold moves to increase the probability of success.

Becoming a learning organization is not an overnight phenomenon. Moving in this direction requires commitment, practice, and effective learning programs and opportunities embedded in the culture. As more individuals become learners, they model the positive impact for others. People who understand and observe how they learn have a greater capacity and competency to observe how others learn and are able to apply that relevancy to the entire organization.

Being a learner, as an individual or organization, creates and supports openness to ideas, conversations, and diversity. The world is in dire need of learning organizations with multitudes of individuals committed to taking appropriate action for continuous learning. Businesses are accountable for being learning organizations for the sake of creating a culture of learners within their organization and, by extension, in the communities where their employees live and work.

Meaningful learning is an active, iterative process. Learning organizations can revive the intrinsic learning nature that has fallen asleep in many of us. It is human nature to learn, but the desire and ability to learn may need reawakening. In developing your business to become a learning organization, DDJ Myers will work with you to explore:

  • Current learning programs and effectiveness
  • Possibilities for adding to your current learning programs
  • Creation of an internal Learning Institute
  • Feasibility of designing a coaching program
  • Value of an active reading group with suggested titles and discussion guides
  • Scenarios for an internal mentoring program
  • Advantage of joining the Friday Afternoon Leadership Conversation
  • Ideas relevant to the success of your learning organization

Contact us today to explore the learning organization possibilities for your business.

Organization Culture

Culture is paramount to organizational sustainability and health. In the culture conversation, we believe the following pieces are important:

  • Culture is a way of being, the why and the way people behave in the structure of the organization, the types of conversations in which they engage, and their responses to change or chaos.
  • The becoming of an organization is how its people, individually and collectively, learn and embody beliefs, values, and actions.
  • Each organization has a somatic shape cultivated over time that may or may not serve its current and future purpose.

Culture Study

DDJ Myers supports clients in understanding current culture, the way of being today, and the formation and support of culture. We facilitate conversation among leaders and staff with the intention to decide and act on your desired culture. Multiple modalities support this exploration, including facilitated conversations, surveys, on-site observations, interviews, and somatic assessments.

The word “somatic” comes from the Greek word soma, meaning the living body in its entirety—muscles, tissues, motions, breath, movement, thoughts, sensations, and language. An organization has its own version of a living body. We add the missing link, the human factor in organizations, through somatic assessments. Our subject matter experts assess the somatic shape of your organizational culture and guide you to a deeper understanding on how culture forms.

Culture Experts

DDJ Myers facilitators, coaches, and consultants are expertly trained and educated in theoretically sound organizational practices, offering a distinct advantage in providing assessments on the somatic shape of your organization. Explicitly and implicitly, an organization encourages employees to conform to its unique belief system, way of thinking and feeling, and use of language, embodying the organizational vision and purpose and being in leadership. These factors contribute to the creation and sustainability of the somatic shape of an organization and the perception of a culture being, for example, open, closed, rigid, flexible, forgiving, or not forgiving.

Unique Advantage

Our culture assessment process is unique because it goes beyond the typical culture survey and report to access the living body of your organization, collect and analyze this information, and leverage it to build a sustainable and healthy organization. This process offers a distinctive competitive edge for your business.

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