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We Design Collaborative Change that Drives Client Action

Can a company build on the passions of its partners, meet its clients’ needs, and still be true to its values along the way? S&G Endeavors has existed for over 15 years, and just as our clients challenge themselves to take their work to the next level, we recently challenged ourselves to examine our work, build on our strengths, and unveil a better way of helping our clients understand, embrace, and use our expertise to help them gain competitive advantage.

The S&G Journey—We Evolve Just Like You

Organization Development comes in a variety of flavors: Change Management, strategic planning, teambuilding, Executive Coaching, skills improvement, Leadership Development, HR/Systems Consulting, and so many other ways that companies streamline and manage the work environment. Whether you are a small business executive, a nonprofit director, or the head of a government agency, you have used theories of change, facilitation methods, and techniques for process improvement. The goal is to gain a competitive advantage by increasing the effectiveness, efficiency, and overall positioning of your organization.

When John Spalding and Jeremy grandstaff formed S&G Endeavors (over 15 years ago), we were driven by a commitment to embrace collaborative processes in both our work with clients and on ourselves. At the time, we were still developing our own process and identifying what made us unique.

Our consulting process, the way we work with our clients, was originally influenced by Whole Systems Transformation, derived by process consulting guru Kathie Dannemiller & Dr. Steven H. Cady. Over the years, our own process has grown and became more whole, incorporating an approach today that blends the best collaborative change methods together into a customizable process that uniquely meets our clients’ needs, demographics, and ambitions.

One way that you might directly see the evolution of our process is to look at how S&G’s mission has evolved over time.

2002 S&G Mission	2018 S&G Mission
S&G Endeavors desires to bring about world change by maintaining unparalleled consulting relationships, creating lasting strategic alliances, having fun, and instilling an awareness of organizational development in the public.	At S & G Endeavors, we use collaboration to help our clients strengthen their overall success. Through our in-person and virtual approaches to consulting and training , our clients gain strategic advantage, achieving more together collectively and creatively.

The mission is a good indicator, as it helps you understand the overall purpose that we aim to accomplish with our work. Just as we ask our clients to make time to think about strategic focus of their company, S&G does the same thing every five years. This helps us stay focused on our clients and allows us to make sure we’re targeting client needs and embracing opportunities. Like our clients, S&G has learned what we were good at along the way and works to ensure our strategy reflects that. Our own clients can also see how that original value of collaboration, by which our partners are so driven, has become the core of our work and what makes our process unique and successful.

Engaged Change™-How S&G Helps You

The way we talk about and implement our approach toward helping organizations achieve their full potential became clearer over the past fifteen years, just like our mission. If you've ever been to one of our training courses, workshops, conferences, or planning summits, you will have learned that S&G Endeavors designs engaging conversations and that we help steer clients toward collaboratively creating change and taking action. Rather than being a subject matter expert or write you a cookie cutter strategic document, we instead create a customized process to get your “whole” organization on the same page and moving in the “right” direction. Our process, called Engaged Change™, empowers leaders to listen and understand the big picture in order to increase focus on action. It engages staff and other stakeholders directly in the “right” conversations, ensuring a better understanding of and commitment to change at all levels (or areas) of the company. The process also helps to create a clearer understanding of what is necessary to successfully implement change and action items that have been defined.

Rooted in a number of collaborative theories and approaches (including action research and Lewin's theory of change), Engaged Change™ includes four phases, which are customized to best meet clients’ needs right off the bat:

S&G doesn’t describe it as the “MEAT of Change process”, but it is an interesting coincidence. We call it Engaged Change because it reflects what we are doing when we work with your organization. For every organization’s unique situation, needs, and opportunities, we set out to give you our best designed approach that taps into the power of each phase to Engage your stakeholders and create that long-term change you seek.
The Engaged Change Process Roadmap further defines each phase, providing our clients with some insight into the S&G client experience:

1. Map the Process - S & G works with the client to identify the broad community or system for the organization. This helps to get the process started off on the right foot and identify the larger picture for where the organization wants to go.
2. Engage the Design Team - Identify a diverse mix of leaders that are a part of the organization and invite them to be on the design team. This cross-functional group will drive the planning process and create conditions to have a larger stakeholder meeting.
3. Accelerate the Change - S&G works with the client to design a stakeholder summit or accelerator meeting(s). This deepens the conversation & commitment toward the intended outcomes and action plan.
4. Transition into Action - The organization identifies potential leadership team members throughout the process. These folks help drive the action plan forward and work with S&G on transition planning. Implementing actual strategies and actions to take are often neglected in other change efforts. We leave you with an action plan that is ready to implement and we make sure you have the backing you need to implement it.

The process—Why It Helps? How You Can Tap In?

The process looks simple, but it is S&G’s ability to tap into the power of the customizable process and design unique, blended, collaborative experiences that will help you create those stories of client successes that we showcase on our blog. The Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, once said, “the only thing constant is change.” The best way to navigate your company or organization through the constant of change is to stay ahead of it. The only way to stay ahead of change (whether internal or external) is to plan for it.

There are several ways you can choose to plan for change. You can shift your human resources to cover these necessary actions. You can manage them internally, as we do, by using this process on a consistent basis. You can set the changes and actions from the top of the organization and hire change managers to help incorporate them into the departments and functional areas of the organization. Find a method that work for you and contact us to help you get started in the right direction.

Stay tuned to our Facebook and LinkedIn for information about the next S&G Connections, where we’ll further explore Engaged Change and talk about the accelerator change events, a key to making phase III most successful. Or, you could just call or email S&G Endeavors and let us help you navigate the constant of change, helping your company gain competitive advantage and, more importantly, helping you sleep better at night knowing that you have an ally to help you create your journey of change.

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Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://www.sgendeavors.com/engaged-change/

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