our approach
BACKGROUND:
- Boutique leadership advisory firm founded in 1977. Committed to developing leaders (coaching), improving key executive relationships and partnerships (team development), and building competitive organizations and cultures.
- Paul Donahue, a co-founder, holds a doctorate in organizational behavior. Experienced in a wide array of industries.
- Firm specializes in accelerating strategic transitions (exceptional growth, mergers, succession…) with new and renewed leadership teams.
- Firm helps leaders and their teams develop personally and interpersonally side stepping the inherent resistances in themselves, their organization, and the culture trade-offs that can thwart the their vision. For example:
- Leaders with stylistic limitations hanging on to old patterns ~ reluctant to chance risks.
- Tolerating unacceptable behavior.
- Disconnects between partners.
- Keeping weak people. Hiring second rate people.
- Trapped in the “extinction spiral:” Failing to continuously invest AND seek cost efficiencies in both strong and weak market cycles.
PASSIONS:
- Creating powerful partnerships that are both fun and profitable.
- Making Presidents and their teams successful.
- Partial to egos that can subordinate themselves for a greater good.
- Loyalty.
BIASES:
- Distaste for abusive, irresponsible power (bullies), and amateurism (not knowing what you don’t know).
- Big egos without humility.
- Dislikes victims, and tyrants who are kind to them.
- Little patience for defensiveness ~ people who can’t take criticism or who blame others.
APPROACH:
Get to know the senior executives and their organization through:
- Confidential conversations with them and their people,
- How Others See us -360 input,
- Participation in meetings, and discussions on their hot topics.
- Construct executive and organizational game plans to leverage strengths, illuminate blind spots, and complement shortfalls.
- Provide developmental recommendations to leaders on realistic, achievable changes in the way they connect, communicate, and make decisions.
- Master the power of the client’s culture as both a means and an end using it as the touchstone for all connections ~ internally with each other and externally with their customers.
- Encourage them to exercise their strengths and to be true to their foundational identity ~ values and principles.
- Increase their insight and self-awareness by helping them clearly see how their expressed identity ~ style and comfort level ~ can compromise performance.
- Help leaders and founders “let go” by modifying the way they engage and interact.
- Smith & Donahue seeks to have an ongoing role with client companies with the goal of creating an intimate, collaborative executive partnership that makes money and has fun.