| Products & Services Training / work conference design:
Typical Engagement: Drawing on the recent research and business literature, ISL has designed numerous workshops focused around such concepts as: leadership development, team development and team facilitation, change management, personal visibility and contribution, communicating for effectiveness and innovation - all designed to leverage individual and team effort for organizational success. Survey-feedback methodologies:
Climate and 360-degree Surveys; Future Search Conferences Typical Engagement: Working with a mega-church which was anticipating expansion to a multi-campus ministry, ISL collected formal survey data from: church members, church leaders and members of the larger community. The results of these surveys were utilized in an on-going planning process (Vision 2010), facilitated by ISL consultants, which extended over a 12-month period designed to process this information, plan effectively for the church's expansion, and design related action steps. Feedback-anchored executive coaching: Typical Engagement: For a large insurance and financial services firm ISL was contracted to provide executive coaching for managers moving into new levels of responsibility within the firm. Typically such coaching engagements included the use of 360-degree feedback methodologies to provide behavioral anchors for the coaching process. These coaching contracts last between 6 months and two years and involve buy-in from the executive, his/her manager, and corporate-level talent management and HR professionals in monitoring outcomes and developing transition support planning at the conclusion of the coaching contact Change Management: Typical Engagement: For a large hospital system with competing models for change management, ISL designed an enterprise-wide framework for managing change. ISL designed and facilitated a series of strategic meetings among partners resulting in the creation of a new agenda for the change process and a list of agreements for working together, along with a follow-up process for ongoing team progress checks at regularly-scheduled onsite team meetings. What emerged was a new approach to strategic leadership development and executive education as part of a new core curriculum for senior management. High-performance team development and facilitation: Typical Engagement: Drawing on the recent research and business literature on teams and teaming, ISL developed a work process/workshop for the top managers in a food ingredients company. This process focused on how to operationally-define teamwork among the managers and how to launch multi-functional teams to solve division-wide problems at various levels of organization. Talent Development / Leadership Development / Succession Planning: Typical Engagement: For an international petrochemical operation with branches in Indonesia and Pakistan, ISL created a supervision/management curriculum and on-going training program for the development of company ex-patriots and local management talent. The general management groups were truly cross-cultural, evenly split between the American ex-patriots who would initially take the lead in the operations and their local-partner counterparts who would be taking over the leadership roles over time. Key-member retreats:
To focus critical organization issues and begin action planning Typical Engagement: Using the concepts of vision, values, alignment and engagement, ISL worked with the senior management of a newly-configured shared financial services center to design a process for "creating the high-performing organization", resulting in a focused sense of purpose, direction, and individual contribution and commitment on the part of center's management and the key client interfaces within the larger organization. Coupled with the team development activity, the contract also provided for intensive 1-on-1 coaching and counseling of key managers regarding their role as change agents in making the new "shared services" approach work. Organization "awareness-raising" for key organization issues: Typical Engagement: Because ISL believes that one of the keys to organizational effectiveness is .... "the right people - having the right conversations - about the right things - at the right time" we apply a variety of strategies to bring critical issues to the surface so that these conversations can take place within the organization:
- Sensing interviews with key personnel
- Knowledge capture with retiring executives
- Creating "seed" articles and white papers for organizational in-house publications focusing on topics such as: Visioning; Leadership/Succession Planning; Teaming for Success; Strategic Thinking; Success Skills for Global Executives; Knowledge Harvesting; Communicating for Innovation
Speaking / Keynote Presentations: - "The Organization Survivor: how to make yourself indispensable in your organization"
- "Shapers and Shakers: building agility in thinking and execution to maximize your impact."
- "The ‘We Generation': using the new connectivity to engage your workforce and leverage their value"
- "Smart-Talk: how to encourage innovation and idea-generation in meetings and conversation"
- "Vision / Alignment / Engagement: the drivers of a healthy organization"
- "Knowledge Harvesting: how to capture the wisdom of retiring employees"
White Papers: | | |  | “The Organization Survivor: How to Be Indispensable in Your Organization” This white paper presents the results of 10 years of interviews with key players in organizations ranging from Fortune 100 companies to small entrepreneurial start-ups. What has emerged is a blueprint for success in the 21st century organization. Learn how to:
· Effectively balance the capacity for collaboration with individual initiative
· Use mental agility to leverage your impact
· Increase your personal visibility
· Span organizational boundaries to become the center of a knowledge network
· Tap the power of action-learning and observant participation
| | | |  | “Shapers and Shakers: Building Agility in Thinking and Action” This model, developed to assist in talent management, shows how to balance both “thinking” and “execution” to create organizational high-performance. Managers will learn how to:
· Leverage the two primary currencies in organizational effectiveness: information and execution
· Develop organizational talent to greatest impact
· Use this teachable model for multiplying organization effectiveness | | | |  | “The We Generation: Leveraging the New Connectivity to Engage Your Workforce” A new generation of employees in the 21st century operates from a more highly involved stance. They’re connected, they’re networked and they both devour and create information. The new employee is an “informavore” accessing and sharing information and data like never before in American business. This white paper details:
· How to use the new connectivity to engage this new workforce
· How to create “response-ability”
· How to assist your employees in developing a mindset of active involvement
· How to use a new level of engagement to catapult your organization to the forefront of your industry | |
| | |  | “Vision-Alignment-Empowerment: The Drivers of a Healthy Organization” For any organization, having a clear understanding of its place in the economic environment, aligning the forces at play to maximize effectiveness, and creating a sense of personal contribution and commitment among employees is the key to high-performance. This white paper describes a simple diagnostic to assist organizations in: · Creating a sense of purpose: mission and vision
· Aligning organizational forces to maximize organizational impact
· Shaping a culture and an operating style which builds employee commitment
· Learning from their own processes | | | |  | “Knowledge Harvesting: Capturing the Wisdom of Retiring Executives” One of the greatest threats to organizational effectiveness in the 21st century is the knowledge drain that occurs as critical information and organizational wisdom walks out the door inside the heads of an army of retiring baby-boomer executives. Finding a way to harvest this information will create an indispensable asset for the savvy organization. This process will allow participating organizations to:
· Capture the knowledge that exists only in industry insider’s heads: know-how, know-who and best practices
· Create intelligent-technology platforms to share thinking about critical business operations and processes
· Develop a process for interviewing retiring executives for the purpose of capturing tacit knowledge |
| 
