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Consulting: Strategic Planning, AEC Teambuilding
Strategic Planning
We especially enjoy helping clients with strategic planning because the process gives them an opportunity to create the kind of organization that best supports their interests and values. Our approach to strategic planning differs from others in ways that ensure you achieve valuable, lasting results:
- Using the visual on the left, we approach strategic planning not as writing a plan, but as initiating a cycle of continuous improvement and organizational learning.
- We begin by working with the client to define a multi-level working group that will draft the plan, and that builds company-wide buy-in to the plan from the outset.
- We work with the working group to Take Stock of the company's current develop both a rigorous, data-driven assessment of the (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) and to Clarify Goals including an inspiring Vision, pragmatic Mission, worthy Values and achievable Goals.
- Several Action Initiatives emerge when we contrast what the company has - Taking Stock- with what it wants - Clarifying Goals.
- Successful Initiatives engage multi-level participants from the organization that define and achieve specific tasks that address the Taking Stock and Goals issues.
- Once the company achieves the Initiatives, enough time has passed that it's useful to begin the cycle again, updating the SWOT data and Goals.
Check out our "Four Ways To Improve AEC Strategic Planning blog post at
https://building-leader.com/insights/f/4-ways-to-improve-design-construction-strategic-planning
at's something exciting your business offers? Say it here.
AEC Team Building
Our team building begins with rigorous Taking Stock analysis, using surveys, interviews and focus groups to clarify what the team is doing effectively and what it most needs to improve at.
Beyond the Taking Stock work, many of our team building projects include:
- Work with the Myers-Briggs Type indicator or other tool to improve team members' understanding of and ability to communicate with one another.
- Tuning and improving the team's regular meeting agendas, management and outcomes
- Increasing trust among team members
- Using 360 surveys to improve team members' understanding of how their fellow team members perceive them
- Helping the team develop its own strategic plan
- Clarifying individual roles, goals and expectations
- Improving the team's partnering with other teams in and outside the organization
How do we team building? We avoid 1-time workshops, "canned" programs and Trust Falls :)
To ensure meaningful, lasting results, we:
- Begin all projects by clarifying the outcomes the client wants to achieve. This is essential because team building usually generates intangible outcomes that can be hard to describe.
- Working from an extensive menu of possible tasks and activities, we collaborate with the client to choose the ones that are most likely to generate the client's desired outcomes.
- Schedule the program as a series of half-day workshops spread 2- 4 weeks apart so that participants can apply new strategies and skills between sessions.
- Evaluate each session and adjust session planning accordingly
- Maintain contact with the client between sessions
- Plan for follow up and continuous improvement when the project concludes.