Our Offerings

We know what works and what doesn't.

Our clients choose Conner Partners because our exclusive focus on change realization provides deep expertise, insight, and wisdom.

Risk Assessment

Our team works with you and your teams to develop a comprehensive change risk profile for your strategic initiatives and highlight the areas of greatest concern. Focus risk areas include:

• Intent: Is there a well-articulated case for change and a plan for maintaining intent integrity throughout implementation?

• Sponsorship: Does the strategic initiative sponsor have a prepared set of leaders who understand their role as sustaining change sponsors?

• Synergy: Is the synergistic teamwork that comes from senior team alignment and commitment in place and evident?

• Resolve: Is there a clear plan to foster critical commitment to change and harness resistance effectively?

• Culture: Does the organization’s culture align with the strategic change, and how will that alignment (or lack thereof) influence change success?

• Capacity: Is the organization prepared to balance its capacity to absorb disruption with the change demands of this initiative?

• Change Infrastructure: Does the organization have the necessary change resources in place?

Once the comprehensive change risk profile is developed, we work with you and your teams to mitigate change execution risks. We can help assess and proactively address risk for an individual initiative, a portfolio of change initiatives, or your overall capability for change execution.

Advising

Our senior consultants possess an average of more than 20 years’ experience in executing strategic change. To help you realize your strategic change and transformation initiatives, we pair the executives who are leading change efforts in your organization with seasoned professionals from our firm who understand the realities of orchestrating major change endeavors. Our passion is sharing what we have learned, helping you replicate patterns of change success, and delivering on the full promise of your change initiatives.

Strategy is hard. Execution is harder.

Facilitating Patterns of Success

When it comes to executing major strategic change, people come to us for one of two reasons: They’ve already tried to implement significant strategic initiatives with limited success, or they are preparing to implement these initiatives and recognize how challenging it will be. Whatever your strategy execution challenges, we support you through tailored application of the Conner Partners Strategy Execution Framework (SEF). Five decades of research and client applications have informed our approach to guide you to a successful outcome.

Executing Strategic Initiatives Jointly With Your Teams

We provide a team of highly seasoned professionals with the right mix of expertise to support your organization and its unique challenges. Our team works with your team to plan, execute, and realize the expected business outcomes from your strategic initiatives.

Intervening in Initiatives That Are Stuck

Every initiative gets stuck at some point. Even the best leaders hit roadblocks, lose momentum, or find themselves unable to move an initiative forward. We offer a variety of interventions that uncover the cause(s) and quickly provide remedies for your stuck projects.

Build competitive advantage.

The skills required to successfully execute strategic change can be established and enhanced over time, creating a capability to out-execute your competition. Admittedly, the process of developing change execution competency is a challenging aspiration and demands a serious commitment. However, it offers the real promise of creating a sustainable source of competitive advantage for you and your team.

How Do You Replicate Execution Success?

Conner Partners works with you to identify and address immediate priorities as well as strengthen your long-term strategy execution capability and agility. Our approach to building change competency combines the transfer of knowledge through leadership sessions and workshops with the guided application of that knowledge as we work side by side with you on your change initiative.

Transferring Strategy Execution Expertise—As we plan our engagement together, we work with you to establish goals for building your change execution skills, with an eye toward decreasing the need for external assistance in the future.

Executive Sessions—Conner Partners’ deep experience navigating the challenges of strategy execution can be easily summarized for senior officers. We work with your leaders to help them better understand the dynamics of successfully implementing strategic change and their role in guiding the effort.

Capability-Building—We conduct workshops, bootcamps, and certification programs at all levels of your organization, from senior executives through business leaders, change agents, middle management, and frontline employees. We tailor each training and development experience to your organization, the change that you are executing, and the participants themselves. Additionally, we augment our capability-building workshops with 1:1 and/or group coaching and advising. Our bootcamp and certification programs include Conner Office Hours, enabling participants to access us for support throughout their learning journey. We can also provide a helpline when appropriate.

Deep-Dive Application—As you identify specific change execution risks and challenges, we can provide your key change leaders and agents with the opportunity to develop specific skills to support progress toward realization. Examples include:

• Conducting intent workshops to establish intent clarity

• Facilitating the design of a targeted enrollment plan to build organization-wide commitment to the change

• Conducting a capacity/absorption exercise to ensure the organizational “sponge space” necessary for the initiative to succeed

• Facilitating the process of evolving the organizational culture to curate critical mindsets and behaviors needed for change realization