Consulting at Your Organization
Our relation-based consultation and coaching can address various organizational purposes. This facilitated process progresses through a number of stages, which are typically as follows:
- Start and contracting:
The beginning of the relationship between the consultant and your organization is meant to negotiate the fit of the consultant’s skills and values with the organization’s hopes, needs and values. This stage is a process of clarifying the expectations of the consultation efforts and shaping the desired characteristics of the client-consultant relationship.
- Inquiry and dialogue:
Although particular information comes forward in the first stage, the process of inquiry is a facilitated approach to gaining knowledge about the organization (collected in a variety of ways). The process is collaborative and dialogical between the consultant and client organization members, to generate meaning from the information gathered.
- Feedback and action plan:
At this stage, you and the consultant come to a mutual understanding about the meaning elicited from the inquiry and the areas of focus for the next consulting activities. You decide what to act upon and the consultant helps to design and facilitate a process for implementation.
- Implementation:
Specific activities in service of the project’s goals are then carried out in your organization. These may be led by the consultant, supported by the consultant, and/or accomplished by the organizational members alone.
- Extension or Closure:
When the implementation activities are completed, you and the consultant assess the progress compared to the original intentions. If the work is completed, this is the time to reach closure of the project and celebrate the changes that were made. If there remains work to be done, the contract can be extended or you may feel confident to complete the remaining work with your organization.
Through this process, our aim is to help you achieve your own desired results as efficiently as possible. The facilitation is competency-oriented to elicit your local knowledge, skills, abilities, and strongly held values and commitments, while focusing on interpersonal connections within your organization in order to support change. The process encourages you to reconsider taken-for-granted, limiting beliefs that may be constraining your organization's growth, and re-story your organization's identity to make new possibilities more visible. The process aspires to help you achieve sustainable, long-term results.
Competency-oriented service delivery consultation
This consultation process is very useful for mental health organizations wishing to instate Brief Competency-oriented models (e.g., narrative therapy, solution-focused brief therapy, collaborative dialogical therapy) into their organization’s service delivery systems.
This consultation process will assist your organization to streamline service delivery to provide quick access and facilitate clinical work with children and families that is highly accountable, collaborative and client-focused.
This energizing process focuses on opening service pathways so that families can get the help they need when they need it. Brief Competency-oriented services can be conceptualized as having three components:
- The overarching philosophy that guides efforts to provide timely, high quality, accessible and consumer-driven services;
- The specific therapeutic approach;
- The specific service delivery mechanism through which organizations provide access to therapy.
Recognized brief therapy approaches include collaborative, client-centered models used by skilled clinicians such as narrative therapy, solution-focused brief therapy and collaborative dialogical therapy.
This consultation process can address all or some of the above-mentioned three primary components.
Over-arching philosophy and practice-skill development
This aspect of the consultation offers advanced training and consultation to staff regarding the development of a shared philosophy and language, theoretical assumptions and principles, and micro-skill development. The pedagogy is experientially driven and involves incremental repetition and practice over time via experiential exercises, consultation of recorded sessions and live family sessions.
The outcomes of this consultation and training process are:
- Increased staff confidence and competence in their knowledge and abilities
- Sustainability over time through stronger staff connections and collaboration
- Clear structures for live consultation and peer consultation including
- Outsider witnessing/ reflecting teams
- Pre and post session briefing and debriefing
- Peer consultation format
- Reflective supervision format