Services
Since its founding in 1985, the Berkeley Consulting Group has been supporting clients Leading Successful Organizations. We typically work with CEOs and top management of organizations who are searching for ways to make their organizations more successful in terms of performance, more relevant in terms of their environment and market, and more effective and competent in terms of how their people work to get results.
Content Leadership – Success Formula
In this practice, our approach has shifted somewhat over time to reflect the latest thinking about strategic management, organizational design, change management and leadership. Yet, the fundamentals remain the same because the leader’s job hasn’t changed much.
First, the leadership needs to establish the ‘formula for success’, which is the ‘content’ underlying its success. That involves two components:
Strategic Direction – Success requires the organization to be given a sense of strategic direction in terms of why the organization exists, what it wants to accomplish, how it is positioned in its industry or sector, and why it will do well.
Strategic Direction and Change for Organizations – In many cases, we help develop the plan for the new direction in the form of a strategic plan, a new business plan or an organization plan. Naturally, change can stem from any of these interventions. Obviously, the strategic, business and organizational plans need to be realigned during the actual change process.
Multi-organization Strategic Change at ‘System’ Levels – Berkeley has frequently led the development of new strategic plans at a broader system level involving multiple organizations and stakeholders.
Organization Design – It is also an imperative of ‘success’ to define how the people and organization need to behave to be successful in terms of implementing effectively and efficiently. That means establishing a structure for roles, processes that create accountability and promote the right motivations, as well as behaviours within the organization.
Organizational Governance and Design – Berkeley’s prime focus in its early years was organization design and most of our work in change management, system design and mergers is based on that experience and expertise.
Organization Amalgamation and Mergers – Berkeley has assessed the feasibility of mergers and alliances and supported the actual merger reorganization and change process in many settings – municipalities, hospitals and community agencies.
Leading Change to Make it Happen
In order to put the strategic direction in place and encourage the behaviours for successful implementation, the leadership can only really use two broad tools – their own behaviour (and that of their top team) and a change management process to make it happen.
Leadership Behaviour itself is critical to success. The CEO and the top management team need to be a team in establishing the direction and communicating it. The top team, individually and collectively, needs to have the skills to guide the implementation. They need to demonstrate, in their own focus and time management, commitment to the change agenda.
Change Management defines the program for getting from here to there in terms of the strategic direction and expected behaviours. Reports and words are not enough. To get improvements in performance, implementation is obviously crucial! That means leaders need to formulate a change agenda defining what about the organization needs to change as well as a change process defining how to make those changes take hold in terms of resource allocation, policies, people’s behaviour and actions.
Change Management – Berkeley has supported many clients review their organizations and develop plans for change. The form of these studies changes from place to place. We have supported change in a number of organizations over extended periods of time.
Successful Performance – Using the Rensselaerville Institute’s methodology, Berkeley has helped government and charitable funders develop outcome-based funding approaches with their recipient agencies as well as helping agencies develop outcome management and measurements.