Tammy Erickson Associates Building Intelligent Organizations

Advisory Services

Our senior partners work closely and flexibly with you to develop and implement practices designed to harness discretionary effort, capitalize on the rich network of employee relationships, share complex knowledge, and innovate, while embracing a new generation of emerging leaders, and capitalizing on the expertise of digital natives in the workforce as well as the growing globalization of the workforce.

Our work is based on helping you identify Management and Organizational Practices that are not well-suited to meet today’s challenges – typically ones that are based on assumptions that are no longer valid. With you, we re-design these outdates practices, creating robust approaches to move your organization forward.

For example:

Outdated Assumptions	New Reality	We work with you to address the implications...
The primary challenges facing business are how to make or deliver a large volume of goods at a low cost and consistent quality.	Organizations are challenged to leverage intelligence – to collaborate, innovate, and use knowledge effectively.	Re-think your organizational principles, including standardized roles and top-down decision-making. Create a collaborative enterprise and the capacity for sustained innovation. Re-design your talent strategy – consider critical competencies, teachable skills, and candidates’ pre-disposition to be engaged here.
The population is shaped like a pyramid, with more young than old people; there will always be plenty of young employees.	The workforce is becoming an inverted pyramid, with more older people than young. Young hires, particularly, college graduates, will be in short supply.	Re-think career paths, moving away from using movement “up” as the only way to provide additional learning, variety, compensation or recognition. Develop approaches to leverage older workers effectively, including increasing development investments at all career stages. Create a powerful employment value proposition – a “Signature Experience" – to attract a disproportionate share of available talent. Leverage each generation – and the synergies among the generations – effectively.
Younger employees want the same thing “I” did. And Western generational models are useful in understanding global employees.	Assumptions about work differ significantly by generation and by geography.	Examine your emphasis on practices that worked for Traditionalists and Boomers – promotion, monetary rewards – but have less appeal for X’ers and Y’s; add new practices to the mix. Re-think today’s trend toward global consistency of talent management practices; understand key regional differences.
The relationship between employees and employers is based on employee loyalty, reciprocated with protection and care on the part of the employer.	Providing long-term protection and care is no longer realistic; expecting long-term loyalty is neither fair to the worker nor desirable for the organization.	Re-think all tenure-based practices: retirement benefits, vacation benefits based on tenure, promotion of the longer-term employee over the newer employee, etc. Establish a new employee-employer relationship, based on engagement and relevant skill, rewarded with challenge, choice and transparency. Insure credible management messaging regarding organizational stability (no “no more lay-offs”).
The individual’s responsibility is to do his or her own job well.	Individuals are responsible for helping the organization achieve its goals.	Re-think performance management: metrics, frequency, and source on input. Shift from individual achievement to contribution, institute peer feedback, increase frequency and tie to projects or tasks.
Inspection of in-process work is a valuable element of a supervising manager’s responsibility.	Knowledge work is discretionary – managers can’t mandate it or even insure it’s occurring.	Relax requirements for employees to be physically present in an office for a specified time period and time-based performance assessments. Revamp management development approaches to focus on today’s relevant skills.
Paying people based on time spent is the logical approach.	Paying people based on results achieved is the logical approach.	Re-think performance management approaches. Relax time-based requirements.
If you pay people more, they’ll work harder or better.	"Meaning" is the “new money” – particularly to encourage innovation, collaboration, and service.	Re-assess money-based reward systems. Build engagement and strengthen your “Signature Experience” to emphasize “what it means to work here.”
People have a single job.	Two or more sources of income are the norm.	Fight the unconscious tendency to take employees’ singular focus for granted. Build engagement. Create ways to understand and leverage the full range of skills people bring to work. Eliminate metrics based on full-time bodies; flexibly incorporate “fractional workers.”
An organization is composed of “employees.”	Work is done by individuals under a variety of arrangements; many are contingent by choice.	Flexibly incorporate “fractional workers.” Extend the responsibilities of HR to talent management broadly – having the right talent available at the right time – regardless of relationship status. Shift metrics, for example, from retention rates to “capability fit.”
People at the top have the most and the best information for making decisions.	Critical information is dispersed throughout the organization (and broader network).	Re-articulate the role of leaders: develop collaborative capacity, insure diverse perspectives, and ask great questions. Re-think the strategy development process; create a continuous cycle.

To help you examine your deeply-embedded assumptions and shift key management and organizational practices, we work with you in two integrated ways:

Custom Education: We help you turn on the ‘Light Bulbs’ within your organization, build awareness, empathy and executive capability.
Senior-Level Consulting: Our senior staff and small teams work with you to diagnose, design, and implement new approaches.

Custom Education

We partner with you to design and deliver creative, integrated, custom education programs. Our significant commitment to research provides an innovative base for program design and delivery – in many cases, we offer proprietary competency models and leading-edge approaches, as well as access to top thought leaders.

We believe it’s important that your investments in education serve multiple purposes – building networks, creating shared understanding, and perhaps most importantly, reinforcing your employee brand. Our designs help you create a “Signature Experience” – a program that not only delivers educational content, but also reflects the values and norms of your organization – an experience that reminds attendees “what it means to work here.” We specialize in the design of programs that are customized to your business. Concepts – whether financial skills, new marketing approaches, the latest HR insights, or others – are best learned when presented using the language and examples of your organization, with exercises drawn from the reality of participants’ day-to-day challenges.

Depending on the scope of your needs, we work with leading teachers from top academic institutions from around the world, as well as your in-house delivery team, to provide a broad range of delivery options. We also offer extraordinary program support, if desired, as well as a web-based collaborative platform to enhance learning, including online assessments, peer-to-peer dialogue, measurement, certification and tracking.

For those of you who would like to facilitate our most popular workshops within your own organization, you can learn more about the workshops and purchase the required materials here.

Senior-Level Consulting

Our senior professionals work closely with you to help you understand the key opportunities within your organization, design new approaches, and implement the changes that will strengthen your organization for the future.