A Better Way to Consult
Consulting inherently has limitations, especially when it comes to supporting a strong organizational culture and the people coming to work every day. And especially when the organization does not have the capacity to implement the work designed by their external consultants.
As organizational leaders, we have all been there. We knew in our hearts we were stretched already, but the work needed to get done, so we reached out to consultants. The best ones helped to build capacity on our team, but even that still was not enough. I remember, as the Chief Talent Officer of Cleveland Metropolitan School District, working with an outstanding firm that had done great work for us, and still my heart sinking when they left. We just didn’t have the capacity to ensure strong implementation, and the work faltered right at the most important moment for our people.
I have seen this same thing over and over when I was a consultant with Promise54. I remember wrapping up projects because we had finished our deliverables and the budget demanded it was time to finish up, with a pit in my stomach worried that the work would sit on a shelf, leaving my phone number in the hopes that the organization might call back in a pinch. Yet, knowing all of our work together was likely going to sit on a shelf.
So many organizations today, with changing demands from their team members, are struggling to create a vision for a healthy people-centered workforce and are not looking for a consultant to pop in and out leaving them anxious to implement some perfect vision. They know they need more.
That’s where an embedded Chief People Officer comes in.
Your organization may not be ready for a full-time Chief People Officer, but having someone there fractionally, knowing your team, your culture, your values, that can pinch hit when necessary and lead the culture work, may be exactly what you need.
We have seen, firsthand, how impactful embedded support can work. Embedded Chief People Officers get to know the leadership team really well, as well as managers and staff in the organization. They get to know what makes people tick and they get to see how leadership plans are received by their staff. Working with one client in this capacity, the buzz I heard from staff members really helped me to guide the leadership team to both hear from staff directly and to stay in conversation. It meant not charging forward with a new performance system yet, but first getting very clear on the roles and expectations. Another client brought me in to support the talent strategy and a couple weeks later lost their recruiter. I was able to focus first on recruiting key positions and then was able to leverage that work to develop the talent strategy and implementation plan they needed. And then I was still there to start the implementation plan until they could hire a new head of talent who I then onboarded.
Not every organization needs this type of fractional, embedded support. If you already have a strong talent team with the capacity to implement, traditional consulting may be right for you. However, for organizations that have very little wiggle room, and their teams are already over-stretched, it just isn’t realistic to assume in three months, after the project is over, that you are going to be able to take over. When I was at the school district, hiring 400 new teachers, investing in a new HRIS, and handling a backlog of 100s of grievances, I knew that we weren’t going to be able to effectively implement a new performance management system for our central office employees. And not surprisingly, the new system never fully stuck. I really could have used a different sort of long-term support. We had the appetite, but not the internal engine to make it run.
On the flip side, as an embedded Chief People Officer for a number of organizations these last two years, I have seen the relief from CEOs, when I could take on the next piece of work or set them up with a communication for the team to start the implementation. And I could support them to think about change management and how much change their team could take on at a given moment.
That is why I am thrilled to launch coLeague. coLeague places on-demand Chief People Officers, people strategists and implementation experts, inside organizations—exactly where and how organizations need them. We recruit and select outstanding talent leaders who are not interested in traditional 9-5 jobs right now, but love the work too much not to do it. And we match them with the organizations that need their specific expertise.
We have worked with organizations grow exponentially, organizations just starting up and organizations that need to contract and are looking for organizations that want a partner to build the systems with them that will allow them to do all those things in the future in a way that centers their people. They want to do that work and they don’t want that pit in their stomach as they head off alone into implementation.
