Our Approach
We walk alongside organizations to help them create effective, compelling, and lasting organizational improvement. Our approach focuses on creating positive change quickly and sustainably through full engagement of your team.
The Problem with Traditional Approaches
Too many organizations fall victim to change management and strategic planning processes led by executive leadership without the representation or engagement of the broader organization’s stakeholders. While well-intentioned, such processes are not grounded in organizational realities and miss nuances of which the broader organization is aware. As a result, typical leadership approaches lack the perspective and vitality to truly energize the organization and propel them toward exceptional results.
Since traditional strategic planning and change management processes are typically created without the opportunity for meaningful input from the very people who are being asked to enact these initiatives, employees tend to be unaware and/or apathetic towards them. As a result, implementation can take significantly longer than anticipated and fail to produce the desired results. Worse yet, in some cases the new and competing priorities drive confusion, resentment, or angst that actually result in worse, rather than better, organizational results.
There is a better way.
Ad Lucem Group takes a catalyzing approach to empower organizations as they journey through this process, not only addressing their immediate challenges, but also building capabilities that will stay with them long into the future. Our expertise centers on the process of unlocking and focusing the deep collective wisdom and capabilities that already reside within the organization.
We cultivate the positive core that already exists, and add our fresh perspective, deep expertise, and integrative know-how.
Our approach builds on an organization’s strengths and grows its capabilities. We tap into organizations’ strengths, utilizing methodologies rooted in decades of research and practice.
Our process helps to create a shared vision. We quickly establish a clear and direct path to success with wide-scale buy-in. This enables you to focus your efforts on undertaking the right strategic actions as efficiently and quickly as possible, accelerating the path toward a brighter future.
Our approach helps clients:
- Engage broadly and deeply with organizational and community stakeholders;
- Establish a clear vision and strategic path to achieving it;
- Identify innovative solutions to the organization’s most pressing challenges;
- Identify and target the most critical leverage points and opportunities;
- Lay the foundation for sustainable long-term growth;
- Build buy-in, commitment, and increase engagement while developing strategies and plans;
- Nurture work meaningfulness and a thriving culture while enacting change;
- Deliver positive results more effectively, quickly, and with less overall investment cost to the organization than other traditional strategic planning and organizational change methodologies that take a piecemeal approach.
Simply put, we help you to focus on the right things, in the right order, and in the right way so that you can realize the maximum benefit. We help you to best assess and manage these strategic planning initiatives while also tending to the current initiatives you have in flight.
Let us help you quickly execute successful change initiatives while building a positive culture and laying down extraordinary growth trajectories.
You can maintain the status quo or go with a traditional change approach that only produces marginal results and leaves you with a disengaged workforce.
Or, you could work with us to develop meaningful strategy that won’t just sit on a shelf — it will propel your organization forward, rapidly.
To get started, schedule a complimentary 30-minute Pre-Assessment call.
To start the conversation about what a change initiative might look like for your organization, book a complimentary 30-minute call with us by clicking the button below.
Traditional approaches often led by external consultants produce (at best) marginal results. They take a great deal of effort and are not effective at pushing through performance plateaus or achieving long-term objectives.
These problem-solving exercises, with top-down mandates for change, deliver limited results and frustrate rather than engage employees, leaving behind a sense of fatigue or hopelessness in their wake.
Our approach to transformation builds on an organization’s strengths to deliver unprecedented and sustainable results — This creates a virtuous cycle of growth that draws talent to it. We engage deeply with organizational stakeholders to identify innovative solutions to the organizations’ most pressing challenges and opportunities. Efforts target the most critical leverage points while building a groundswell of commitment, laying the foundation for sustainable, long-term growth.
Our clients realize positive results better, faster, and cheaper than other traditional strategic planning and organizational change methodologies.
FAQ
01. How is this different than other approaches?
Traditional approaches prioritize what is “broken” within an organization- focusing only on the weaknesses rather than leveraging the organization’s strengths to drive strategic advantage. These approaches are not necessarily wrong, but they achieve limited results and can actually worsen the challenges at hand by contributing to:
- communication breakdowns;
- turf-battles, power plays, and silos;
- excessive bureaucratic process;
- decreased employee engagement and increased burnout; and
- significant opportunity cost by focusing on sub-par solutions.
This would be tantamount to having an Olympic gymnast “fix” their lack of winter sports experience — they may gain skills in skiing, but it is not the strategic advantage that will ultimately help them win a gold medal.
In contrast, our approach focuses on the strengths of an organization which contributes to:
- accelerated learning;
- building new knowledge;
- increased potential for achievement; deeper insights;
- greater innovation and identification of solutions that otherwise go unnoticed;
- higher levels of cooperation, voice, empowerment, buy-in, and engagement.
In essence, it aligns the strengths and leverages them to get our clients to the podium and take gold.
02. How customized is the approach you are considering undertaking?
Our transformation summits are tailored very specifically to the needs of our clients. We could pull a canned offering off the shelf with less effort/cost. Many of our competitors will do just that. However, we know that we would be doing a disservice to our clients to do so in terms of the relative value that our clients will receive from a generic approach.
03. What are the methods being used?
As you well know, there are many methods out there. Our organizational transformation summit process is rooted in an appreciative inquiry summit approach. Based upon decades of research and practice, this appreciative strengths-based approach tends to eclipse other more traditional deficit-based methodologies. That said, we are acquainted with numerous methodologies (e.g., design thinking, lean, agile) and help integrate the best-of approaches from other methodologies used within organizations to ensure optimal adoption within the organization and traction to achieve the desired results.
04. How will I know this will work?
As you most likely have already learned for yourself, traditional methods can only get your business so far, and their benefits can sometimes take a real toll on the organizational culture, leaving behind a change-fatigued workforce that has lost its mojo.
We cherry-pick the best parts of traditional approaches and combine them with the core of positive organizational research and practice to create an approach that has delivered extraordinary performance to organizations that range from Fortune 500 companies to non-profits.
05. Won’t this take a lot of time?
While this effort will require an investment of time from both leadership and working levels of the organization, it replaces many of the activities you are already performing with a more effective approach. In short, this effort will produce better results, more quickly. Strategic planning, budgeting, and process improvement initiatives are already happening, but they are likely frustrating, time-intensive processes that take an inordinate amount of time and don’t produce significant forward momentum for the business.
Since these are often top-down efforts within organizations, management is often stuck with the arduous task of trying to create buy-in on the back-end from the rest of the organization. This is a recipe for disaster. If you already have efficient change management and strategic planning processes that do this effectively, then you probably don’t need us. If on the other hand, you long for a better way, our proven method allows you to embed buy-in as you develop the plan and utilize leadership time to get to the right solutions in place from the start.
So, yes, while it will take time, the reality is your investment of time will pay monumental dividends and will have better results than your current process.
06. What are the qualifications of the individuals performing the work?
Our profiles are steeped in both research and practice. We are certified practitioners of appreciative inquiry practitioners (as well as other methodologies) and have performed numerous successful large-scale transformation summits coupled with decades of more traditional consulting experience.
Explore how our change initiative approach will take your business to new heights.
Book a complimentary 30-minute call with us by clicking the button below.
