Nowadays, what organisations need are doers who can think and thinkers who can do. This is because organisations have de-layered, resulting in fewer, busier managers with a larger span of control managing employees who must be able to think for themselves. So no handholding there then. In order to keep the organisation running smoothly, we all need to be multi-skilled at multi-tasking, which is easier said than done.

Let’s break it down

A business is essentially a group of people who, through cumulative, small effects create a large effect: the successful enterprise. If managers, team leaders and team members are given structured opportunities in coaching sessions to think through their business issues, they are much more likely to do more focused, productive and intelligent work, which means better cumulative effects and better business results.

In creating those structured coaching opportunities, organisations must respond to two challenges:

• The coaching system must be focused on getting fast business results, otherwise it won't be credible with the people whose dominant style is task-centred or cost conscious.
• Even if it is a credible system, it operates in a pressured environment whereby best-practice business systems (e.g. your induction procedures, coaching, strategic reviews or regular individual performance reviews) are all too easily sidelined by more urgent operational pressures. Thus, it requires intelligent planning and implementation.

• Develop your coaches in methods that focus them and the coachee on direct business improvements to customer metrics such as cost, quality, service and cycle time.
• Help the coach to develop systems thinking for a complex, crosscutting, cross-functional world, so your people can appreciate the knock-on effect of their thoughts and actions on their colleagues, customers and suppliers.
• Help your managers and team leaders establish sustainable coaching systems that don't just rely on line managers for the provision of coaching (not good if your direct reports are numbered in the 50s or hundreds).
• Provide you with facilitated large group events in order to speed up the change management process as the organisation tackles the sustainability issues, especially in demand-led environments where coaching can be all too easily cancelled.
• Support your coaches by shadowing them in their first three coaching sessions. After this, they’re much more likely to persevere and then the skills become wired in.
• Train a cadre of your own trainers so that they become the in-house thought leaders and content experts for the programme.
• Devise apprenticeship models that exponentially accelerate the dissemination of the skills. This augments the training courses provided by your own trainers, who could otherwise be overwhelmed by significant numbers of coaches to train in a short time.
• Help you devise ways of auditing the observance of good coaching practice to agreed (i.e. locally owned) standards.
• Act as project facilitators for your project team as they implement the coaching system.
• Develop the audit and evaluation programmes that help you demonstrate the effectiveness of the programme and its ROI.
• With our strong psychological background, we understand appreciative approaches that build energy, motivation and self-esteem without shirking the performance requirement or being sentimental about it.

Team leaders and managers succeed or fail on the basis of their ability to orchestrate the collective efforts of the diverse people they manage.

If you can reconcile the teeming multiplicity of ideas, opinions, knowledge, skills, perspectives and intelligences in your team and organisation, brilliant business solutions are there for the taking. 



But we live in disruptive, fast-moving times full of discontinuous change, so to adapt, the cycle time for reconciling all this difference must be short. However, without the crucial facilitations skills for reaching consensus and without smart ways of analysing and addressing the challenges you face, your solutions either become irrelevant because they took so long to reach, or worse – they’re never found, with subsequent reputational damage to teams, managers and organisations. 



We must find rapid approaches to reaching consensus that enable people to bring real attack to implementation. We have thought long and hard about how to help organisations cost effectively acquire depth and breadth in facilitation excellence. Here are our solutions packages…

The Facilitation Starter Pack 


Your facilitators will develop the design skills to create efficient, highly productive meetings of 2-25 people that result in timely actions, decisions and solutions. They will develop their facilitation skills in specialist areas such as:

• Process improvement and redesign in order to secure improvements in cost, quality, service and cycle time.
• Conflict resolution for conflicted teams and also for colleagues who are in a morale draining 1:1 dispute with each other.
• Formal problem analysis and problem solving (and we've got another interesting take on these ideas for super-facilitators).
• Fast track team building and developing team measurement systems.
• Using coaching and critical incident analysis, we coach them in handling tricky team dynamics.

HR Professionals: from organisational servant to strategic partner 



With the maturing of the HR outsourcing market, it’s now entirely feasible to outsource basic HR processes. So, the transactional, administrative core of the HR function in organisations is eroding and competent HR professionals are looking to become internal consultants to the business heads.

But the business heads face a number of pressing business imperatives, all of which have consequences for the skill sets of internal consultants:

• In a world of perpetual change and transformation, they must create and sustain an organisation fit for change.
• Globalisation means that diversity, complexity and ambiguity must be embraced and skillfully addressed.
• Where growth is to come through merger and acquisition, post-merger integration of culture and processes is key.
• In a competitive, knowledge-economy job market they must attract, retain and develop talented employees.

• Practice as an expert change agent, leading the way on planning and implementing change, using accelerated change technologies.
• Help your diverse organisation become a complex adaptive system (and not merely complex).
• Find best practice ways forward for building the organisation's architecture and culture.
• Become an expert in process improvement (both HR processes and the wider business processes).
• Work with line managers in getting the employee engagement so essential to high productivity.

• Getting the ‘entry and contracting' right is important for any consultant; for internal consultants working in politicised environments, it's even more so. We’ll help you hit the nail on the head.
• We provide you with a range of diagnostic approaches to develop your ability to think systemically as you are working with your client. Then they, too, can think systemically and contribute to the design of the intervention, because they own the results of the diagnosis.
• As well as developing your ability to design interventions, we teach you the deep knowledge of processes and methodologies required to respond in the moment, enhancing your credibility with your client.
• We provide you with frameworks, structures and processes that build formative evaluation into your work from day one and a summative evaluation at the end.

• Coaching
• Consultancy
• Balanced scorecard
• Relationship management
• Managing change

By definition, ineffective Account Management Strategies fail to achieve sales, waste resources and carry significant opportunity costs: just a bunch of adults frittering away an expensive afternoon or worse, many afternoons.

But there is actually good evidence that structured approaches to Strategic Account Management yield productive long-term relationships and future business. More importantly, these approaches are teachable, and if carefully applied, they will increase your sales.

We can help you implement a system of account management that improves business results and is sustainable. These approaches enable your senior sales and marketing people to work together in agreeing on direction and the detailed actions in support of the direction. 


What we offer


Account management is another organisational system that’s important, but hardly ever urgent. We’ll help you build a sustainable infrastructure that secures a system so effective that it becomes resilient against attempts to sideline it when the heat is on. We will help you:

• Implement an evidence-based economical approach to account strategy that means effort is expended on effective techniques.
• Develop a set of systematic approaches so that you and your team work from common assumptions in strategic account planning. So, rather than bickering over definitions, frameworks and procedures they will be busy progressing the account management itself.
• Learn and implement techniques for effectively getting onto the customer's wavelength.
• Work to dedicated account management meetings processes that quickly identify the right actions, decisions and solutions.
• Build a disciplined coaching system for account managers that supports their efforts to sit down, research and properly plan their account management strategies before going face-to-face with the client.
• Create a set of account management standards and the audit procedures that tell if you are meeting your standards.
• Once the system is bedded in, we’ll help you create an ‘apprenticeship' model so that you can quickly bring new hires up-to-speed with your account management system, without needing to send them on a training course.
• Create the pro-formas and procedures for the entire strategic account management process; we will give you the basic templates provided in soft copy, royalty free.
• Address the crucial implementation issues with the sales function and the senior executives who support the sales effort.
• Work on issues of implementation, critical mass and sustainability so that your investment isn't wasted.
• Develop your skills in responding to challenging sales conversations on the fly. For more on this, see our item 'Selling Business Solutions'.

Whether they're romantic, platonic or professional, relationships are complicated. Even those that are positive can eventually breakdown. That’s because when humans get involved, they bring an array of emotions, opinions and agendas, which don’t always play well together.

Woody Allen once described love as a virus with early symptoms of intense attraction and boundless goodwill towards the other. But in its chronic stage, the symptoms morph into irritation and an uncanny ability to row about everything…

In short, what was once a valuable relationship diminishes into something destructive.

Applying this to professional partnerships, the challenge is to build a solid foundation of goodwill from the start and then maintain it. With this robust and positive core – fuelled by mutual respect and understanding – any problems that arise can be dealt with diplomatically and effectively before they become detrimental.

The partnership dance…

Try to tango without learning the moves and you’ll step on your partner’s toes. Try to do business without building a good rapport, and you’ll do the same.

With a sea of different personalities and objectives to consider, you have to learn the partnership dance in order to win contracts and deliver on them. This ability to ‘dance’ painlessly through productive partnerships will propel your business forward positively and sustainably.

The death of competition…

The same goes for our competitors. Rather than butt heads, we need to cooperate and accommodate in order to create opportunities rather than conflicts. Thus, a new breed of partnering relationships for growth with our competitors is created: co-opetition.

We can help you turn competition into co-operation so that clashes of interests are converted into a mutually beneficial partnership. It’s all about shelving the ‘dog-eat-dog’ mentality and diplomatically managing the intricacies of our relationships, the negotiation process and ourselves.

It’s a fine balance, but successfully done it leaves the partnership, the businesses and the people intact and productive. Badly done, it feeds the lawyers.

We’ll help  you to learn the techniques…

With our help, you will learn how to build high-trust relationships that will endure the test of time:

• Build rapport appropriately and quickly
• Adopt a true win-win mindset to build productive, long-term relationships
• Understand your needs (we’ll give you frameworks to help you achieve them!)
• Remain in control of proceedings by managing your emotions as well as those of others

• Establishing partnerships
• Building sustainable relationships
• Negotiating agreements
• Looking for synergies
• Optimising opportunities

Luckily for the successful organisation, we now know what tactics and behaviours increase the chances of closing a high value sale, and what behaviours diminish them.
But there are certain questions that need to be raised…

Can others learn to use these behaviours correctly?

The answer is: yes they can – most of us already have them in our repertoire. The real challenge is to turn turgid science into compelling reasons why these behaviours are desirable, and then help people use them fluently in the emerging, complex sales conversation.

Do they improve sales outcomes?

Again, research shows that yes, they do improve sales outcomes, providing the systems are in place to ensure they are used, which leads us to the third question…

Is it possible to mainstream these behaviours until they are embedded in the culture?

Well, that depends. If you simply throw training at people and then hope it somehow embeds itself, almost certainly not. For many, the behaviours involve unlearning old habits and for some they can even be counterintuitive. If people are not supported in using these behaviours the day after a training programme ends, their chances of ever using them are slim indeed.

What we offer

This programme is carefully tailored to ensure best fit with your organisation:

• The programme demonstrates how to research and plan the sales call in order to shorten sales cycle time and improve sales success by a substantial margin.
• We use real and current situations so that your people are rehearsing scenarios that are relevant to them in order to bring the techniques alive; best practice meets their real life issues.
• Whilst skills rehearsal is important, we don't just drill people on some sales parade ground, we share the rationale so that it makes sense.
• One of the attractive outcomes (other than increased sales success) is that because the model is ethical it builds high trust relationships, enabling the business solution seller to become the client's trusted advisor.

• Build a disciplined coaching system for business solutions sellers that supports their efforts to sit down, research and properly plan their sales strategies before going face-to-face with the client.
• Create a set of standards and the audit procedures that tell you if you are meeting your standards.
• Create an ‘apprenticeship' model so that you can quickly bring new hires up-to-speed with your account management system, without needing to send them on a training course.
• Create the pro-formas and procedures for the entire business solutions sales process; we will give you the basic templates provided in soft copy, royalty free.
• Address the crucial implementation issues with the sales function and the senior executives who support the sales effort.
• This programme can be integrated with our programme on Strategic Account Management.

In the de-layered, flattened organisational structures that are now commonplace, the bandwidth to micro-manage at any level is nonexistent. But if the opportunity to micro-manage is lost and face-to-face contact rare, how can we leave lasting motivational effects of loyalty, trust, admiration and respect that inspire people to serve and achieve more than they were considered capable of?

Transformational Leadership provides the answer to those leading their teams, departments and organisations through change.

What is Transformational Leadership?

• A specific set of behaviours and techniques proven to engage team energy and commitment beyond the standard expectations of the money-for-work contract.
• A practical leadership style that can be learnt.
• It’s been heavily researched and shown to be associated with enhanced organisational performance and is particularly relevant to leadership in the ambiguous, complex environment of rapid change.

• Vision: the communication of important purposes in simple ways to enable people to make sense of the situation and help them answer the question, ‘why should I?'
• Relationship building: coaching and advising individuals, recognising the emotional issues, building trust
• Intellectual challenge: mobilising the team's collective intelligence to solve the problem for themselves and to support a change they’ve helped create themselves
• Inspirational motivation: establishing high expectations and generating self-esteem, confidence and commitment in others to meet those expectations

• We’ve thought deeply about organisational life and hold coherent views on it.
• We are intensely values driven: our organisation has flourished because of this and not despite it.
• We bring an evidence base to our programmes and enjoy receiving those tough, searching questions from teams of bright managers.
• Materials that support the programme are top flight and you will be pleased to know that there is a close match between the materials and the structured learning activities.

What’s all the fuss about?

Since the 1993 publication of Kaplan and Norton's seminal journal article on Balanced Scorecards (BSC) in the Harvard Business Review, numerous case studies have made impressive claims for breakthrough performance in organisations that have implemented the methodology. Their later work on Strategy Mapping (SM) takes this further.  Their approach  poses two questions:

What is the need that BSC/SM is fulfilling?

Strategy is great in theory, but when competing with more urgent day-to-day operations, some stark facts emerge:

• 90% of organisations fail to implement their top team's strategy.
• 70% of these failures come not from poor strategy but from poor execution.
• 85% of executive teams have less than one hour per month to discuss strategy.
• 95% of the workforce does not understand their organisation's strategy and their part in it.
• 60% of organisations do not link budgets to strategy.

• Encapsulates strategy on a concise one-page document
• Balances financial and non-financial goals
• Can be quickly updated in response to fast-changing market conditions
• Is easy to grasp and communicate throughout the organisation

• How you can diagnose your own organisation's fitness and readiness for Balanced Scorecard, so that you don't go to the unnecessary expense of initiating a non-starter.
• How you can design-in the critical factors for a successful implementation and dial out the avoidable pitfalls.

• Understand the Balanced Scorecard or Strategy Mapping concepts
• Formulate strategic objectives and Critical Success Factors using the Balanced Scorecard framework
• Identify strategic Measures and Targets
• Use an effective technique to communicate and get agreement on the Balanced Scorecard within your own organisation
• Identify possible pitfalls for Balanced Scorecard implementation
• Assess the suitability of the Balanced Scorecard for your own organisation

• Audit of your current or proposed Balanced Scorecard or its implementation
• Balanced Scorecard familiarisation workshop and exploration of BSC suitability for the client organisation
• Formulating your strategy as a Balanced Scorecard document
• Rolling out your Balanced Scorecard implementation
• Coaching the Balanced Scorecard implementation team, including the Balanced Scorecard architect, to run the implementation project

The successful introduction of a well-conceived change that brings business results is the pinnacle of management practice and job satisfaction. We love it.

But introducing a complex change into your organisation carries substantial, avoidable risks of failure (known to humorists everywhere as ‘mangling change’). These risks are not just to the organisation, but also to the reputations of the managers responsible for delivering the results. 



However, whatever the risks of change, thriving organisations are dynamic systems, continually shaped by new demands that drive such changes as:

• Fundamental strategic review
• Reorganising: flatter structures, mergers
• Customer focus initiatives
• Introduction of new technology
• Quality initiatives
• Acquisitions
• Diversification of markets or products

• A structured comprehensive change life cycle process that covers all stages of a change project, from inception through to project closure and review
• Clear project roles and organisation because clarity and focus breed success
• Communication methods and structures to secure involvement and buy-in, including whole systems events designed to mobilise an entire organisation
• Practical methodology for helping individuals and teams engage in the change and make their personal transition within an optimum time frame

• Communicate the change with passion and conviction
• Develop skilled participatory approaches that enable a team to experience ownership of the change so that it moves with speed
• Develop strategies for understanding, minimising and, if the resistance cannot be avoided, skillfully working to minimise or eliminate it
• Work sensitively with people in transition in order to minimise disruption, delay and avoidable resistance

Only a few years ago the term was used exclusively to describe Buddhist meditative traditions. Now the corporate leadership world is taking a closer look. Recently neuroscience studies from Harvard University have shown that mindfulness training significantly increases brain grey matter concentrations in areas associated with Attention Control, Emotional Regulation and Self Awareness. Further evidence links mindfulness training to increased pre-frontal cortex activity, which is related to happiness and well-being. It has gained worldwide application as a distinctive method to handle emotions.

Currently, in the medical world, mindfulness programmes are used to help with physical problems such as stress, anxiety, hypertension, depression, heart disease and chronic pain. There are further connections, however, to how being mindful in our approach can help us to become more effective business leaders.

People who have trained in mindfulness have been shown to make more rational decisions. During times requiring pressurised decision-making, meditators activate a different network of brain areas compared with non-meditators and that enables them to uncouple negative emotional reactions from their behaviour.

Meditation has also been found to be a highly effective means of training managers in corporate social responsibility. The training significantly raises managers’ levels of care and concern.

Mindfulness programmes have also been shown to raise one’s level of emotional intelligence and improve relationships. Those completing a course of mindfulness  show significant improvements with respect to emotional intelligence, perceived stress and mental health compared to others.

Whether you’re looking to develop yourself, or your company, OPDC provides a tailored programme to help unlock your potential leading to improved performance, growth and, ultimately, success.

What to do next...

All our programmes can be customised to fit your particular professional and personal objectives. For more information please contact us.