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"As a result of the leadership and guidance provided by Mickey MacIntyre during our year-long planning process, Equality Ohio is now strategically prepared to achieve our vision of an Ohio where everyone feels at home."
—Lynne Bowman, Executive Director, Equality Ohio
The realChange Process is a guided change process. We think that leaders need support through a change process that sets up the best possible scenario for success. Your realChange Partners (RCP) will work closely with you during every step of the process. You and your team should feel confident that you have a partner in this endeavor who will answer any questions and provide whatever guidance is necessary to ensure success.
Our process goes beyond simple consulting to a four-step engagement. Typically we will complete the first two steps and you will have your plan for Board approval within four to five months. RCP will remain with you for eight months after your plan is approved to engage in steps three and four of the process to ensure that the plan becomes part of the daily life of your organization. All four of the steps are outlined for you below. But, first let's talk briefly about the leaders of the process.
The Catalyst Committee (CatComm)
The CatComm is the team of people invested in the future success of the organization and who want to be involved with creating the changes needed to ensure that success. realChange Partners will work with the Board of Directors and staff in identifying this team of 8-10 people that represent stakeholder groups like your board, your members/donors, your clients, coalition organizations, leaders in the philanthropic community and business leaders who support the organization. The CatComm is responsible for bringing the completed strategic plan to the Board of Directors for approval.
Through their service on the CatComm, the organization will be training leaders who will be seeing through the multi-year strategic plan. This is one of the core goals of the realChange Process — building new leaders invested in the success of the plan.
The Four-Step realChange Process
Your RCP and the Catalyst Committee will work together to ensure the success of the four-step realChange Process. Below is a synopsis of the process we will undertake.
Step #1: realAssessment
realChange Partners engages first and foremost in understanding where things stand right now. After all, your leadership needs data and information, not gossip and guesswork, to make sound decisions about the future. So we begin with realAssessment, our data collection phase. It is intensive and far-reaching... way beyond a SWOT analysis. We will look at everything internally and in your operating environment. Community needs assessment, focus groups, stakeholder interviews, electronic surveys... all could be part of your realAssessment. From our years of experience we know what to look for and how to ask the questions that will get effective answers for Catalyst Committee decision-making.
Step #2: realChange
Once we have data in hand, we will begin planning. While we may already know the need, this phase will clearly articulate that need (often known as vision, mission and goals). More importantly, we will look beyond symptoms and find what the "Challenges to Change" are and determine the realChange Plan for your organization. A challenge to change could be structures, systems, resources or people that are preventing the organization from achieving your next level of success. Using our time-tested analysis we will help you decide what Challenges to Change you should address and the right path to take to do it. We will ensure that there is alignment of all participants behind the work before you invest in the more costly implementation of the efforts.
Next, we will address in quantifiable and qualifiable ways (our goals, objectives and actions) how we will meet the need. This phase engages participants in deciding who will be accountable for what, by when, and with what resources. This is, in essence, ensuring that you have a realistic plan that has achievable outcomes based on the resources available. We want to set expectations that are reasonable for success because success will bring more success.
Step #3: realWork
We have our strategic plan, now it is time to make real change. realChange Partners will be with you for the implementation of your strategic plan. Specifically in this phase we will provide ongoing coaching, strategizing and support in all aspects of your implementation planning.
We ensure that the strategic plan is a living document that gets infused into the daily life of the organization. All too often, strategic plans are put on a shelf as soon as they are adopted. Most often, this is because either:
- Board and/or staff believe the process is done and fail to integrate the plan into the life of the organization, or...
- Board and staff see the plan as written in stone and are unable to adapt and modify the plan as it is being implemented in the day-to-day realities of organizational management.
Both of these issues can be prevented with the support and guidance of your RCP. This is why our contracts run beyond the adoption of the plan. Regardless of the planning timeline, the contract will extend eight months beyond the activation of the plan in order to engage in the realWork and realOutcomes steps of the engagement.
Step #4: realOutcomes
While it is a success to create and implement plans, it is more important to determine if the work made real change. Ensuring there are targeted outcomes-based objectives is the first step, but evaluating against those outcomes is a process that many plans fail to address. Your realChange Process includes components to ensure you are moving toward successful outcomes-based evaluation. We will check on the progress of plan implementation, determine necessary changes and evaluate the process to date. The evaluation is designed to reinvigorate and engage people and move them forward on the next round of actions in the plan. Outcomes-based evaluation will be modeled so participants can use it continually until the implementation phase has ended.
Let's make realChange together. Okay Partner? Contact us today!
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