Our Approach

It’s a fundamental reality in business—all successful organizations have a vision and mission, but turning the vision and mission into results is where things almost always fall short. At The Wheelhouse Group, we help organizations achieve their vision and mission through the disciplined execution of cross-organization initiatives.

Consider this definition for the term “execution” from Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan’s best-selling business book entitled, Execution—The Discipline of Getting Things Done:

Ex-e-cu-tion (ek si kyoo shun), n 1. The missing link. 2. The main reason companies fall short of their promises. 3. The gap between what a company’s leaders want to achieve and the ability of their organizations to deliver it.

Through our application of organization development, change management, and learning and development tactics, we forge the essential connection from the organization’s vision and mission to the people and their actions. We do this through our proven approach which is grounded in several core principles:

1. We understand the businesses we work with and the challenges they face.
2. We let the organizations we work with be the catalyst for change, while we focus on the trajectory.
3. We engage the support of key stakeholders to ensure buy-in and success.
4. We partner with others to share techniques and continuously improve.
5. We are multi-disciplined in our knowledge and experience; we leverage a complete skill set vs utilizing a singular skill area.
6. We know our strengths and limitations.

Proven Success

We combine our strengths in change management, organization design and strategic communication to drive a disciplined, meaningful set of processes and sustainable programs to make your vision a reality. Our consultants have proven this successful approach on the following strategic initiatives:

Cross-company restructuring of internal support functions:

• We led the change management effort in centralizing corporate functions dispersed throughout 60 offices and across 3 continents; the successful reorganization changed the jobs of over 1,000 employees worldwide and the business processes that impacted 8,000 employees worldwide while saving the organization $70 million annually.
• We worked with a large investor-owned utility to implement a shared services business model for its 75+ subsidiaries; new business model reduced annual company operating costs by approximately $30 million.

Driving the priority initiatives of a new CEO:

• We drove the integration, execution, and communication of a new CEO’s high priority initiatives in his first six months leading a billion-dollar IT services firm. The initiatives effectively transformed numerous aspects of the organization’s structure, approach to customer relationships, brand position, and service offerings.

Leading large scale culture change for a Federal agency

• We facilitated large-scale culture change regarding systems engineering practices for a large Federal agency. We engaged stakeholders to move from silo functions to a collaborative, best practices-based, knowledge management orientation. To promote this culture change managed the development of best practice toolkits for agency wide publication, using the SEI Capability Maturity Model framework, and the creation of a “communities of practice” forum to bring subject matter experts together across the agency for knowledge sharing.

Developing a strategic plan for a multi-billion dollar privately held professional services firm

• As part of a strategic facilitation team we designed and facilitated a strategy session for approximately 50 partners and senior executives. The facilitation focused on identifying key ingredients for building strong relationships in the specified market space, developing a clear understanding of how the firm’s competitors play in this arena, articulating the firm’s market space identity, win themes, and key differentiators, drawing high-level conclusions about the practice area’s strengths and weaknesses, and giving practice area colleagues a chance to get to know each other through networking and small group tasks.

Improving processes for an internet infrastructure services provider

• We worked with the executives and sales managers to redesign the process of “finalizing the deal” an integral and key step of the overall sales process. WHG designed and facilitated a series of workshops and other interactive sessions to identify the current process, present a shared vision for a desired futures state process, and identify the gap between the two. Collaboratively, the team created communications plans, implementation strategies, and change management plans for the new and improved processes.