Operational change does not happen overnight.
It begins with organizational vision, business strategy, and enough enterprising spirit to execute.
The Leadership Doctor® provides business consulting, management consulting, and academic consulting to organizations, institutions, and the leaders who carry them.
Three ways organizations engage me.
Every engagement begins with an examination, and none of them begins with a prescription. What follows is written down, so the organization owns the diagnosis as much as I do.
Business Consulting
I work with organizations to identify what they already do well, what needs to be done better, and how to close the distance between the two. Engagements address productivity, performance, and the systems that either carry the work or quietly get in its way.
Management Consulting
I advise leadership teams on structure, process, and the practical work of managing change. Strategy development, execution planning, and the organizational design that turns a strategy into something a team can actually carry out.
Academic Consulting
I consult to universities, education providers, and academic programs. Curriculum and module development, program design and review, faculty development, and the leveling work that brings students to the readiness a graduate program assumes.
A good doctor does not prescribe what she has not examined.
Helping teams do more, better.
Human capital is the true driver of industry success. An organization is only as effective as the teams inside it, and a team is only as effective as the capacity it has actually built. Most of what I am engaged to do is with a group of people who have to work better together than they currently do.
We begin by establishing what the team already does really well. That matters, and it is almost always the part nobody has written down. Then we establish what the team needs to do better, in its own words rather than mine. The work after that is navigating and negotiating those two things into a plan the team will carry out.
Along the way we deal with what quietly governs a team’s performance and rarely appears on an agenda: where purpose has drifted from what people care about, which strengths are being spent in the wrong place, and what disagreement has gone unnamed long enough to become the real agenda.
I begin with capacity rather than strategy, because a strategy handed to a team that lacks the capacity to carry it is only a document. A team that knows what it does well, what it cares about, and what is genuinely in the way will outwork a team that has only been handed a target.
Team assessment
Current state and desired state taken together: values, strengths, skills, and the areas that must improve. It produces a gap analysis the team wrote about itself, which is the only kind a team defends.
Capacity building
Goals the team can measure, strategies to reach them, and tactics someone owns by name. Then execution in three movements: implement it, interpret what happened, improve it.
Conflict and opposition
Unnamed conflict does not stay still; it becomes the agenda. We surface it, work out what is actually underneath it, and build the team’s capacity to hold the hard conversation well.
Change adoption
A change that holds only while the consultant is in the building did not hold. We plan for adoption from the first week and return to confirm the new way of working survived the real work.
One method. Six steps.
Who I am engaged by.
Corporate leadership teams
Executives carrying a change they did not choose, and the teams underneath them.
Small and mid-sized businesses
Owners who have outgrown how the business was first built and need it rebuilt.
Universities and education providers
Programs that need curriculum built, reviewed, or brought up to the readiness they assume.
Nonprofit boards and directors
Mission-driven organizations that need the management to match the mission.
Sharilyn D. Franklin, Ph.D.
To transform a business into a top performer, you must possess a comprehensive understanding of the industry and inspire team members through knowledge, training, and methodology. I come to that work as a scholar, a practitioner, and a business owner.
My executive history spans business ownership and service as an executive in residence at a highly respected university. That crossing of educational and operative roles gave me a holistic and systemic view of organizations, and one conviction that has held ever since: human capital is the true driver of industry success.
I have been in the trenches, and I still get my hands dirty.
Every engagement starts the same way.
Consulting engagements begin with a consultation. We use that time to establish what you are trying to accomplish, what is currently in the way, and whether the work is a fit. If it is, you receive a written proposal setting out the scope, the schedule, and the terms before anything begins.
Every engagement is scoped to the organization in front of me, so terms are established in the proposal rather than quoted from a list.
The goal is simple. Fit to lead.
Looking for coaching rather than consulting? The Clinics and Care Plans are where that work lives.
