About Us
We are trained and certified coaches, as well as consultants with many years of real world business experience.
Unlike many management consultants and coaches, we have substantial experience and expertise in legal practice and law firm management.
We help our clients turn their ideas into strategies, and their strategies into long-term results. We help them move past obstacles to individual and organizational change.
We believe the most elegant and detailed plans are useless until they are successfully implemented.
We recognize that our executive and lawyer clients often encounter situations fraught with uncertainty, complexity, conflict, and risk. We help them deal with these challenging situations by improving their abilities to lead, decide, and make changes.
We believe there is more art in leadership than most people realize. Skill in it comes from sustained practice and guidance. After basics are mastered, a lot of it is resilience, adaptability, and improvisation. We help our clients develop a broad repertoire of leadership skills, and more importantly, the insight to know the right time to use a particular skill.
We believe there is more science to making changes than most people realize. Recent developments in neuroscience have given us a solid basis for understanding the best ways for people to make and sustain changes. We believe these changes at the individual level are the foundation for sustainable organizational change.
We know our clients’ emotions and intuitions are just as important as their intellect when it comes to making changes and being a leader. We work with the whole client, so that their cognitive, emotional, and social intelligences integrate and complement one another. By doing so, they achieve better and more sustainable results.
We are not fond of management fads and flavors of the month. We believe that cookbook approaches to leadership and management are counterproductive and at times harmful. Our consulting, coaching and facilitation is always tailored to our clients’ specific needs and situations.
We believe that “soft skills” like persuading, building consensus, and giving feedback are indispensable when it comes to organizing people, motivating them, and holding them accountable. Soft skills lead to tangible improvements and bottom-line results.
We’re not afraid of “unconventional wisdom.” Case in point: most people think the key to success is making the fewest mistakes. We believe it’s actually more important to quickly recognize and correct mistakes that have been made.
We accept conflict as a natural part of life both within and outside of business. We don’t seek to avoid it, smother it, or minimize it. Instead we see it as something to get skillful at handling, so better solutions and performance can emerge from it.
We are big fans and followers of the Chinese proverb: “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.” As much as we like books, we believe few people change simply by reading them. We believe doing and experiential learning are the keys to improving performance.
We work collaboratively with our clients. Our goal is to help them take new actions. We can no sooner act or make changes for them than we can wear their clothes or eat their food. Results depend on our joint efforts, so we think it’s disingenuous to guarantee them. Though we don’t guarantee results, we do make three guarantees about our performance:
- We will be attentive – to what our clients say, how they say it, and what they don’t say.
- We will be honest – and will not dilute, sugarcoat, or avoid giving feedback to our clients, even when it’s tough to hear.
- We will be kind – especially when we are delivering honest feedback. We don’t scold, nag, or demean our clients as a way to motivate them.
