Conceived and built “from the ground up” around 2 basic beliefs, reflected in all our service offerings:
- To continue to survive and thrive in our ever-increasingly turbulent 21st century work world, all individuals must develop the core skill set of being able to effectively, gracefully, and purposefully transition from role to role in a timely fashion.
- At an organizational level, to be effective in driving meaningful performance improvement in our turbulent times, the strategies and tactics related to managing ”soft skills” and ”the hard stuff” can no longer be separated out and handed to different parts of the organization. These must come together at the employee, team, and mission level to really enjoy any meaningful and sustainable performance gains.
Engineering, Business & Operational Backgrounds
- The founders and ownership team have deep operational business and engineering backgrounds, rather than the more traditional HR and Organizational Development background of most industry services providers. We have taken a different, non-traditional view of the problems faced by individuals and organizations and how to solve them. (The overriding concern of HR practitioners in the HR industry is business relevance and providing true value creation to the C-suite and to the business line managers — read a manifesto that illustrates this deep strategic challenge for HR professionals).
- We have spent thousands of hours hands-on in business lines and varied operational functions, so deeply understand the day-to-day reality of trying to get things done within tight budgets, short windows, across various organizational silos, and dealing with shifting priorities and resources. A consequence of this background is that we put a greater emphasis in our workshops and support services on immediate practicality and usefulness, on driving for greater learning retention through follow-up/support activities and hands-on workshop components, and on designing the client’s real mission/business into workshop engagements wherever possible.
- Our trainers, facilitators, coaches and mentors all are selected based in large part on their backgrounds and experiences in multiple operational roles in organizations. Mostly importantly they all have deep operational experience and a “bias for action” in helping our clients move their activities forward and getting positive results.
Bias for proven tools, processes, outcomes (rather than traditional HR & OD theories)
- As business managers, owners, and practitioners, we are first and foremost interested in tools, approaches, and processes that can be learned quickly by participants and put into practice in a straightforward manner so that they can be used, tested, and ultimately adopted quickly by teams and individuals. This is a different orientation from traditional service providers (typically HR and/or OD professionals) who gravitate to more academically/theoretically developed approaches which while comprehensive may not be as easy to put into practice nor as robust in real operational settings;
- As business people with deep operational experience, we have lived many of the situations that typical operational/executive team members are going through so we “get” their pain and are always seeking ways to roll up our sleeves to help out in meaning, actionable ways. This is very different from the typical OD trainer/facilitator who can speak generally to the issues but perhaps doesn’t have the deep operational knowledge, hence has a more difficult time developing credibility with the executive and operational teams.
In summary — people with deep operational expertise and a personal mission to serve and help others, a desire for discovering and embracing the most practical tools and approaches, and a bias for driving and facilitating action in our clients: that is what Career Constructors brings to the market.
