Training course
How People Work
Consulting skills, for people who aren’t consultants.
What is this?
It’s an intensive, hands-on, four-week coached program for teams at technology and digital service vendors.
Over eight sessions of three hours each, we take cohorts through group teaching, then follow-up with collaborative, group feedback exercises. All based on your real work to practice applying what you’ve learned.
Who this is for
It’s for teams working on complex and complicated technology projects for clients, from digital transformation to legacy modernization, from discovery to big-bang implementations.
For teams whose clients are hitting all the growing pains of learning user-centered, agile, and iterative techniques to deliver products and services.
For teams who want to expand from pure statement of work / performance work statement engagements to more open-ended consulting work, partnering with your client to solve the bigger problems.
For team members who don’t yet understand what engagement managers do, or think engagement managers are an unhelpful overhead.
For when you’re dealing with clients who don’t make decisions, so treat everything as important so nothing is important.
For teams dealing with organizations with bad internal communication and silos, with meetings where people talk past each other without understanding each other, and a million different stakeholders.
For teams who need to build trust amongst people who don’t trust each other, or don’t know how to.
For teams going around in circles where everyone — including the client — is happy, but you’re also feeling stuck.
It’s also for people tired of bullshit and buzzwords. (And those who don’t think that highly of consultants in the first place.)
How it works
This is a four-week series of group workshops split into teaching and doing.
First, we work with your team to explain and demonstrate principles with real-world examples. After that, we go through your current and previous work — after we’re all NDAed up — and apply what you’ve learned. These are practical workshops, not abstract.
It doesn’t matter what the role or responsibilities participants have. We match the material and exercises to what makes sense for you and your organization, all while making sure nobody’s bored.
Why you want this right now
You want to ease the path to more business
Then your teams need to know how to build stronger relationships. They’ll learn how to
listen and talk with candor
spot where and when everybody lies (sometimes a lot, sometimes a little)
do your research to develop empathy and compassion
You want to increase your client’s chances of success
So you want your team to understand how people really, really, really work in organizations. Help them help your client by
understanding your client as a person, their web of relationships, their ecosystem, and their context
building better mental models of organizations, by seeing and understanding peoples’ behavior outside of organization charts and hierarchies
recognizing and supporting key individuals critical to success, wherever they sit
making and validating predictions about motivations and fears
managing expectations, and recommending roles, responsibilities and who to consult and inform
You want clients to look forward to reading your material
Then learn how not to waste your client’s time. Earn their trust and respect by writing simply, with clarity and purpose. Get rid of filler and get to the point by
practicing how to spot bullshit, admitting when you use it, then learning how to remove it
understanding and meeting the different communication needs of different audiences – from executive leadership to middle management
learning how to present options and recommendations to leaders
knowing when a presentation isn’t a presentation, and how to get people to read things
learning how to be respectful, candid, and communicate bad news
You want to become partners to spot and solve the big problems
Helping your client succeed in the end always comes down to goals and focus. Which means it also comes down to your client’s strategy. Strategy is hard! Learn how to help your client focus on the right goals, right strategy, and right tactics by
helping your team see their work in the context of the bigger picture
understanding the interplay between how you work and how your client works
diagnosing how an organization’s focus problem affects your work
recognizing when a strategy isn’t really a strategy, and how to use Lafley and Martin’s Playing to Win framework to get started and and what to do about it