Who learns the fastest? Who learns the fastest are organizations that function as high performing teams. When you can establish your organization as kind of an optimally functioning team across the boundaries that you just talked about, across staff and board, across whatever gulf typically create divides within your organization, then you have an opportunity to really accelerate your traction and produce the kind of impact, whether that be around profit or social good, that you’re trying to achieve.
Aaron Thomas: How do organizations actually do this? What I will say is I have seen in Corporate America where you have … Now I’m saying this from the perspective of working for the organization, so you have the “high paid” consultants come in and when they leave they have this bulky report and that bulky report is supposed to solve all of our ills, but it seems like the steps to really change and to grow requires more than just having a bulky report. Would you agree with that?
Daria Torres: Absolutely. That’s why I think, especially when an organization has worked with consultants who follow that kind of playbook of huddle in a team room, develop the strategy, produce the shiny glossy report … When you follow that playbook, you often do not produce tangible results that an organization can look back on and attach a clear ROI to their investment.
There is a different way of working, and the way my firm works is that different way, which is that the board and the staff have to be involved from day one in helping the craft what essentially are the ingredients of a solid strategic plan.
There’s three elements to it. First is the why. You have to as a collective team have a very clear vision. Second is the what. Your mission has to be also quite accessible, easy to understand, and goals and priorities have to flow directly from that. After the why and the what, third comes the how, which is what is the implementation path or the action plan that is now going to help us produce, help materialize the vision and the mission.
Only in that kind of manner, that approach will yield the buy-in. It yields the commitment, the ownership, the accountability, because the board and the staff have collectively built consensus. They’ve collaborated in the problem solving to get to the answers of what this organization needs to be doing, and along the way you’re becoming more of a learning organization and learning to operate as a high performing team.
Aaron Thomas: Can you give an example, again not naming names, but can you give an example of an organization that you have helped where they’ve had that top to bottom changing and transitioning and making things happen, where the organization has either grown profitably or whether they have grown in their social impact?
Daria Torres: Sure. Instead of focusing on one example, I will tell you that all of my clients go through this experience, and that is not a misstatement, it’s not a promotion. It’s the truth, because it’s the only way I work. It’s the only way teams I assemble work.
That process I just described of involving in a very rich and deep way the board and the staff in the process of shaping the agenda, the roadmap, that is the answer. I could name any number of clients that sit cross multiple sectors, education, health care, technology, media, public serve, the list could go on and on. That is indeed why it’s difficult in the line of work that I do to ever consider a job really done, because once teams start to operate this way relationships form. Relationships form not only more tightly within the organization, but also with those who have supported them.
As a consultant, you become an extension of that team, so I consider my clients [to be] clients for life because when you go through an experience like this you develop a professional respect and a degree of reliance on having that input long term. That’s the way I work, and I love it.
Aaron Thomas: I’ve seen a lot of consultants and it seems like they like going for the money grab, so there’s an opportunity to work with a company, whether they can actually help them or not, or whether they even believe that the client is going to implement the things that they suggest. They’re going after it because it’s another paycheck.
I can see that what you’re doing is really different because in order for you to work with that client, then you’re pretty much demanding that everybody has to work with you. It’s not just where the executives at the top are hiring someone for the middle managers or whatever to work with, but you’re saying no, I have to work with you all. This is the only way that I can do this.
I think it’s very good. I think it’s a breath of fresh air to see a consulting firm that actually recognizes, number one, the value of what true change is, because if you do just go for the one paycheck or the one consulting gig and there’s not really change, then that may be all that you do get. If there’s real organizational change then, as you said, you have a client for life. We’re all in this for revenue, and also it’s a continuous revenue stream as well. You’re helping them out and also they’re providing value to you too in the fees that they’re able to pay you, so that’s great to see.
