I’ve always loved team sports. As a young kid I played soccer, football and hockey and gravitated to playing on teams versus individual sports. I liked the all-for-one, one-for-all mentality. I’m still playing beer league hockey every Tuesday with many of the same guys I’ve played with for the last 20 years.

Through my career I’ve been fascinated with what makes one team more successful than another. There are always teams with more individual talent, but what I’ve learned is that winning teams are less about raw individual talent and more about the teams who play really well together with the right coach, discipline and leadership. This usually meant that everyone knew their role and there was an unwavering commitment to the team's success. Our coaches would tinker with line combinations moving teammates around to various positions to optimize our team. It was all about understanding strengths and weaknesses of each individual and focusing on putting the best team together with the goal of winning each game and season championship.

When I look at successful organizations we work with from large global brands to creative agencies and high growth startups, I’m reminded of the lessons I learned from my high school team sports days. I’ve observed that successful companies are differentiated by having highly effective and efficient happy teams- meaning they have hired the right people in the right seats working as a team focused on superior outcomes. This is hard enough to accomplish in smaller companies since every hire has to enhance the team composition. In complex organizations where there are multiple teams across multiple divisions the challenge of achieving this magical mix is even more difficult to accomplish. Weaving different personalities with different skills and experience across multiple functions is not easy. Especially since companies are living organisms, constantly growing, innovating, hiring, re-hiring and adapting to incredible organization change.

How companies and the teams within them thrive in such a world requires a clear vision, a strong culture and the right HR programs and processes that ensure the right people are hired, oriented and supported to achieve extraordinary results and outperform the competition.

Over the last 12 years I’ve met with literally hundreds of companies and thousands of candidates. I’ve observed several common themes with respect to how companies build winning cultures, hire well and retain and motivate key talent. Our team has witnessed first- hand what’s been successful and what’s not working. We have seen the best practices in action.

We’ve also built a network of very talented HR people who understand the people challenges all companies face and can bring experience and expertise to these. The best of these understand the importance of a strong set of core values, skilled leaders who have the mind-set to bring out the best in their people and good data that ensures smart decision-making.

Our HR consultancy was born after years of partnering with clients in their mission to build high performance teams. We’ve learned that building and retaining the right teams requires much more than having a solid recruitment strategy (a necessary, but not sufficient ingredient). We’ve looked at the most important elements and, partnering with a range of SMEs in the HR, organizational design and talent management areas, we’ve put together an initial offering that addresses many of the essential components of successful HR practices.

Our offering helps clients solve real life problems by bringing industry best practices to life.

Our initial offering of HR programs include:

Recruitment/Interviewing program review
The best in Onboarding
Employer Branding- Standing Out from the Competition
Performance Management/Employee Engagement Programs
Harassment Investigations
Rewards and Employee Acknowledgement Programs
Compensation and Rewards Surveys
Retention Programs that Work
Outplacement and Career Transition

We also offer a number of workshops we can customize to any organization including:

Successful Intergenerational Team Building
Building real Diversity within teams
Management and Leadership Development

As we continue to build upon early successes we will also make blogs and whitepapers on relevant topics available.

I’m very excited to be heading into 2020 with our new offering. I’ve had the good fortune to be able to participate fist-hand in the evolution of companies and the talent that fuels them. We’ve met some amazing experts along the way and I look forward to sharing our collective learning with all of you.

Building Teams and Why We Chose to Launch an HR Consulting Practice