Strategic Planning
Are you a new organization needing to strategically plan how you will deliver effective services to your customers? Are you an existing organization that needs to dust off and reinvigorate an existing plan?
Let us help you develop your strategic plan, implement it, measure its effectiveness, change it as needed to keep the plan relevant, and use it as a communication tool to keep your clients, your partners, your funders, and the public up to date on your progress.
“He who fails to plan is planning to fail.”
This statement has been credited to Benjamin Franklin, Sir Winston Churchill, and several other prominent experts, but some suggest various forms of this adage were used hundreds of years before any of them said it. The fact that this advice has been around so long indicates the solid logic behind it. Success in most anything, except maybe the lottery, can be traced to some level of planning for the future, allocating resources with purpose, measuring results, and revising plans based on the results to be even more successful in the future.
Strategic planning helps organizations achieve consensus on their mission, vision, guiding principles, goals, objectives, and measures to be used to evaluate effectiveness. A well written, intentional strategic plan makes it possible to allocate resources to achieve goals and objectives and to evaluate progress toward achieving goals. Effective assessment may point to changes that need to be made to the plan to achieve better results in the future.
Cagle Consulting has decades of experience in strategic planning for small, medium, and large organizations. That experience includes many successes and some failures, both of which better equip us to base our support not in an academic vacuum but in the real world.
Based on our collective experience, we believe:
Having no plan is unacceptable when serving others;
Having a plan that is developed but never leaves the shelf is only one step beyond no plan; and
Having a dynamic, organic plan that guides the organization daily can be transformative.
Policy and Program Development
Do you want or need to establish new policy and/or programs? Is it time to review and revise existing policy? Are you working to keep up with and comply with new federal or state regulations?
Let us employ our decades of experience in developing policy and programs to help you navigate the complexity of analysis, writing, and system development required to be the best organization possible.
“The best public policy is made when you are listening to people who are going to be impacted.” - Elizabeth Dole
Establishing policy to guide the work of an organization helps ensure that federal and state laws and regulations are adhered to and that the organization’s practices generate the best outcomes. Likewise, clear, strong, well-written policy helps breed consistency in practice.
Developing programs must be intentional and systematic to ensure that the end consumers receive maximum benefit. Cagle Consulting brings decades of experience in developing policy and programs in diverse fields and can help you develop competency and processes needed for the future.
Having developed policy and programs in child welfare, economic services, early education, sexual assault, domestic violence, DEI, and immigration, Cagle Consulting has created tried and true processes to draft policy and develop and implement programs and is flexible enough to adapt those processes (or develop new ones) to meet your specific needs.
Advocacy Assistance
Why is advocacy important?
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead
Every day we encounter things, both small and large, that we believe need to change. Should a lower speed limit be posted in your child’s school zone? Does current government policy disproportionately benefit one group over another? Should the United States act to prevent aggression of one country toward another?
When we believe a law, policy, or regulation is unjust, we can either choose to accept it or try to change it. However, when we decide change is needed, it is often difficult to determine to whom we should talk, exactly what we should say, and what steps are needed beyond speaking out.
Advocacy, like anything else worth doing, requires planning. As you might expect, effecting more difficult change requires a deeper understanding of the process and people involved as well as a more detailed plan.
Cagle Consulting’s experience in advocacy, ranging from advocating changes in local policy to state and federal laws, can help you develop an advocacy plan that will enable you to generate and maintain support for changes you want to see in your communities.
Crisis Management
“When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters ‒ one represents danger and the other represents opportunity.” - John F. Kennedy
Are you in the middle of an organizational crisis? Or are you planning for how to handle unavoidable crises before they arise?
In either case, let us collaborate with you. We have decades of experience in managing crisis in real-time and in proactively developing plans to deal with anticipated crisis. One thing is for sure: crisis will happen. The questions are: How well will you deal with it, and will you be able to turn crisis into opportunity?
We can help you create plans to implement when a crisis arises or we can step in immediately to help you navigate a current crisis at whatever level of involvement meets your needs.
All organizations should regularly scan their environment for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). Identifying weaknesses and threats can help predict where crises could arise in the future. Knowing strengths and opportunities can help avoid crises or better manage them when they occur. Conducting a SWOT scan can enable an organization to think through the challenges brought by potential crises, plan how best to address them, and even turn a crisis into an opportunity.
Cagle Consulting is steeped in crisis management from the turbulent world of child welfare. Let us use our experience to guide you through planning for crisis, managing crisis in real-time, and turning crisis into opportunity.
Executive Coaching
Are you an executive, either newly appointed or one with years of experience? Do you lead other executives who have varying levels of experience? Regardless of your history, all executives can benefit from working with a coach who can help them step back and examine their entire purview, including strategic direction, budget, personnel, and organizational culture.
Let us use our unparalleled level of executive experience to look at your organization objectively and develop a comprehensive coaching and mentoring plan to help ensure optimal performance for you and other leaders of your organization.
“Everyone needs a coach, whether it’s a top-level executive, a graduate student, a homemaker, a homeless person, or the President of the United States.” - Anthony Robbins
Too often organizations assume those they hire will be fully competent in their new role because they were successful in their previous role. Just because a person has been an excellent front-line employee does not mean they have the skills to supervise or manage. Likewise, a top-notch supervisor or manager doesn’t necessarily make an excellent executive. Each level of responsibility comes with its own unique challenges, and it should not be taken for granted that an employee will be able to successfully overcome those challenges alone.
Coaching provides a way to develop employees and help them acquire the skills they need to help the organization achieve its vision, mission, and strategic goals. For new leaders, it can help them become acclimated more quickly and thereby reach their optimal performance sooner. Although organizations can and should assign mentors, executive coaching can provide a regular, confidential forum with a neutral party who can help develop necessary skills and provide lessons learned and advice gleaned from decades of leadership in other organizations.
Culture Change
Are you frustrated with dysfunctional relationships within your organization? Are you perplexed by a seeming inability of your team to agree on direction and work together to achieve organizational goals? Are you questioning why your team can’t execute a strategic plan? If so, you may be dealing with a problem of organizational culture. And as the saying goes, “Culture eats strategy for lunch.”
Let us leverage our relationships with premier organizational culture consultants to help you overcome issues and take your organization to new heights by changing the culture.
“A culture is strong when people work with each other for each other. A culture is weak when people work against each other for themselves.” – Simon Sinek
Organizational culture consists of the collective values, beliefs, and practices of all employees. When individuals hold different values and beliefs, organizational performance and quality of services may suffer. Aligning organizational values with the personal values of your employees can, on the other hand, help you improve performance and enable you to better meet the needs of those you serve.
Common indicators of a culture problem include:
High turnover
Clashes and disrespect between employees
Frequent failure to meet organizational goals
Regular breakdowns in communication
Miniscule things get a lot of attention
Because organizational culture depends on the complex and varying make-up of individual employees, culture problems are notoriously difficult to address. The answers to and responsibility for overcoming issues of organizational culture are “top down;” that it, the solution lies with an organization’s leaders. By engaging experts in organizational culture, positive changes can be accomplished.