When I first learned about TC, I appreciated that people were nice, friendly, and seemed to really care for each other. For example, I noticed everyone greeted each other very pleasantly at the office. People appeared to collaborate well and talk so passionately about their work and clients. I was immediately drawn to the culture.
What keeps you at TC?
The things that initially attracted me to TC are why I stick around today. I care for everyone I work with, both colleagues and clients alike. We all really care about each other on a deep level, appreciate each other’s work, and make each other better people.
What is your typical TC day like?
Like many of my colleagues, I work on a few projects at a time, so my day can vary quite a bit from one to the next. Most of my work involves change management, communications (mainly workplace transformations), and leadership development.
For my workplace clients, a lot of my work consists of meetings with client’s leadership and/or move coordination teams to help their staff have a smooth transition. This includes advising on change management tactics, communicating out updates/progress, and engaging with staff impacted by the moves. Part of the communication piece includes developing products for the client to distribute out to staff (e.g., how-to guides, Welcome Packets) — working closely with our graphics department to ensure a clean and neat product is delivered to the client. Engagement activities include developing and designing meetings such as Town Halls, Move Briefings, Open Houses, technology adaptation training, etc.
In my leadership development work, my clients seek out ways to advance their leadership capabilities and help overcome the challenges they face in their day to day. A lot of my work consists of meeting with my clients to identify their needs, priorities, and challenges and designing sessions around those conversations. We repeat this same process as we go through the project to ensure we are aligning with their needs and meeting them where they are.
In what ways have you grown since being at TC?
Reflecting on my tenure at TC, I’m so proud of the person I’ve become and all that I’ve accomplished. I’m now a trusted advisor to my clients and a much more confident person all around through the projects I’ve been given the opportunity to work on and the people I’ve had the privilege to work with. I have wonderful colleagues who I can lean on for support—who are there for me when I need help or advice, and challenge me to be a better person.
I have amazing clients who not only care about investing in their own growth through our work at TC, but also of their colleagues and staff around them. Moreover, I feel that I found my passion in consulting—supporting the growth of my clients and helping them overcome their challenges. I wouldn’t be who I am today without TC and our amazing community.
Experience a Day in the Life of . . .
Organization Design and Development
The Clearing combines data science, social science, and visual tools in a manner uniquely suited for the strategic transformation of federal systems through organizational design.
Designing and sustaining a strategic transformation requires a basis of theory along with a set of skills that reinforce people, processes, and systems as they change. Sustaining and thriving in change demands that leaders focus on four areas:
Strategic Communications:
Explicit Behavior Shifts
Performance Indicators and Measures
Multifaceted Risk Management
Program/Project Management
The Clearing’s approach to project and program management focuses on identifying and delivering the fewest, most important initiatives that will provide an organization with the best customer results and the highest growth.
Our certified project managers use best industry practices and our custom project management methodologies to create a program structure that provides clear governance, enrollment of stakeholders, strategic communications, and risk management roles to ensure successful outcomes.
Our management consulting approach aligns and builds trust among leaders and stakeholders and creates clarity on which initiatives should be tackled first. Our project managers then work with clients to drive the initiatives to successful completion.
Strategic Communications
The Clearing’s strategic communications consultants are skilled at developing communication strategies that work within the culture of the organization and meet diverse stakeholder needs. Additionally, our strong graphics capabilities allow us to create compelling, concise, and impactful presentations and thought leadership products to support strategic communications initiatives.
Organizational Strategy Facilitation Services
The Clearing’s strategy facilitation services help clients design and run successful in-person or virtual strategy sessions that ensure the group’s goals are met.
Our facilitation sessions allow participants to exchange information, engage in meaningful dialogue, and discuss actionable matters. In each session, The Clearing’s strategy consultants will work to balance the passion of the group, the agenda, and the leaders’ needs to guide the group to the intended outcome. We facilitate senior leadership discussions, business meetings, and off-sites, as well as negotiations in and across organizations.
Agile Change Management
The Clearing’s agile change management consultants help our clients “lead through change” by:
Assessing the organization’s current environment
Diagnosing underlying issues that keep the organization from realizing its vision
Implementing short sprints to develop testable, timely solutions
Iterating quickly based on feedback.
Our agile change management methodology creates a shared perspective and shared intent among critical stakeholders, mitigates risks, enrolls stakeholders, and determines behaviors necessary to implement and sustain the change.
Organizational Strategy Implementation
The Clearing provides forward-looking management strategy consulting services to increase organizational effectiveness, growth, and innovation.
We combine our innovative strategic thinking with our client’s existing organizational strategy knowledge and expertise to develop pragmatic and actionable solutions to strategic challenges.
Our corporate strategy consulting services blend strategy and design with the critically important voice of the customer and build alignment across the organization to deliver lasting, meaningful, and actionable change.
Employee Experience (EX) Consulting
In the wake of the pandemic, organizations face unique challenges in adapting to new working norms while addressing evolving employee experience (EX) needs. We recognize that cultivating a positive and engaging EX has become a strategic imperative for driving organizational success and enhancing customer value.
The Clearing’s Employee Experience Improvement model, adapted from Itam & Ghosh, 2020, focuses on three objectives:
Engagement
Enablement
Autonomy
Our EX improvement services begin with a comprehensive assessment of the current employee experience, utilizing surveys, interviews, and focus groups to understand organizational culture, leadership practices, and engagement levels.
We then collaborate closely with clients to develop a customized EX strategy tailored to their goals, focusing on fostering an inclusive workplace culture, promoting employee recognition and well-being, and implementing effective communication and feedback mechanisms. Frequently, we will implement technology solutions to streamline HR processes and facilitate remote collaboration to empower employees and enhance productivity.
Experiential Visual Design Services
The Clearing uses visual design to establish meaningful and impactful business outcomes for our clients through strategic storytelling.
This skill set allows your CX design consultants to distill complex and technical narratives into easily accessible visual products suitable for dissemination across traditional and digital communications.
Product Development Consulting
Our product development consultants support clients tasked with digital transformations, communications integration, and customer-centric technology improvements, helping organizations and government agencies to better react to their changing customer and federal priorities by creating enterprise-wide agility.
Our product development services include:
Designing & Implementing a Product Management Process
Human-Centered Design
Wireframing to Rapid Prototyping
User Experience (UX) / User Interface (UI)
CX IT Transformation Consulting
IT transformation efforts often fail when leaders do not fully consider the full range of the human aspects involved in implementation, which range from buy-in and adoption challenges to training and usability issues.
The Clearing’s IT strategy consultants provide the necessary change management, communication, and program and project management support during digital transformations and IT migrations that address the human side of change to deliver an improved customer experience. We partner with our clients to offer user-based requirements gathering, IT usability testing, training, communication products, and technology adoption strategies for large-scale technology rollouts.
CX Data & Research Services
The Clearing’s CX data and research consultants use data analysis to understand complex operational systems and resolve observed challenges.
Our CX methodology analyzes available data to understand the current state of your system and then identify the key interventions that will help you achieve your outcomes.
Our team of customer research consultants can also help identify additional sources of data that will unlock additional insights and track key performance indicators to determine if designed interventions are working.
CX Strategy Consulting
Every single brand interaction shapes your customer experience. How do you know you’re delivering the experience they want?
The Clearing helps clients create an intentional customer experience (CX) strategy by defining, planning, and codifying an organization-wide customer experience improvement approach that supports your organization’s goals.
CX Organization Design
Organizational design is both an art and a science. Your organization’s cultural, structural, social, and technical elements serve as the building blocks that determine whether your processes and behaviors will support your organization’s ability to deliver the customer experience required to accomplish its mission and realize its vision.
The Clearing’s CX consulting services ensure that your organizational design focuses all available resources on the most important aspects of business and customer needs. Concentrating on the fewest, most critical elements will reveal an organizational structure that creates the space for leaders and employees to better serve customers and provide results.
CX Transformation & Change
Transforming your customer experience requires leaders to view their business through a customer’s lens and then make the incremental changes required to improve.
Our customer experience consultants help organizations transform their values, structures, operations, technology, and culture to mature their CX capabilities by creating an environment that focuses on the customer and delivers a high-quality customer experience at scale.
Brand & Identity Consulting
Your organization’s brand is a collective emotional and cognitive perception your customers form based on your customer experience strategy and their interactions with your people, processes, systems, and countless other interactions. To succeed, your brand must evolve to meet your customer’s needs at every touchpoint along their customer journey.
We offer a variety of brand services including:
Brand Strategy Development
Logo & Visual Identity Creation
Brand Training
Marketing Support
Balancing Risk, Safety, and Security
The Clearing’s management consultants deliver a unique, powerful, and highly successful approach to help organizations manage complex risk, safety, and security issues.
Our corporate culture consulting offerings in this space include:
The Clearing’s workplace change consulting model helps organizations navigate the entire corporate change lifecycle by defining the organizational vision, mission, and corporate strategy involved. We guide you from idea to implementation while minimizing distractions for the workforce and reducing the level of effort for leadership.
Specifically, our workplace consultants help organizations shape their culture by aligning your company’s physical space, people, technology, and business processes with cultural intent. to, This process helps your organization leverage technology and strategic investments to increase productivity and improve performance.
Improving Organizational Resilience
As leaders, how do we navigate uncertainty and risk while continuing to show compassion and illustrate strength and conviction across our organizations? The answer is organizational resilience.
Our organizational culture consultants will help you build resilience to keep your business healthy in the face of unavoidable shocks and stressors. We help individuals and organizations build better leadership models, management tools, and conflict resolution skills before a challenge occurs, better preparing your organization to deliver positive outcomes to difficult situations.
Corporate Culture Transformation
The Clearing exists to help leaders through difficult organizational culture challenges that require a transformation. Whether facing stagnation, a reputation crisis, customer dissatisfaction, or fragmentation, our consultants help leaders recognize that transforming organizational culture is part of the solution.
Our change management consulting approach begins by reviewing your organization from a broad internal and external perspective. This methodology involves large-group conversations that engage multiple stakeholders discussing the daily role that they play in shaping your organization’s culture.
Leadership Coaching Services
The Clearing offers a wide variety of customized leadership coaching services as a catalyst or complement to our business transformation services.
Our one-on-one leadership coaching supports managers and executives seeking to achieve personal and organizational success by aligning their behaviors and actions with those objectives and ensuring accountable progress toward those objectives.
Leadership Training
Our interactive and experiential leadership training workshops provide participants the opportunity to reflect on and apply their learning to current challenges, strengthening their ability to manage complexity and competing priorities, guiding teams towards success, shifting high performers toward leadership roles, enhancing the development of seasoned executives, and more.