Services – Sokrates Partners LLC

What do you need?

Significant, sustained impact on business outcomes is determined by four elements. It’s critical to get each of them right and working in harmony with each other:

Sokrates Partners is providing support on all of these elements, with emphasis where it is needed for each group – whether that is organization design, one-to-one coaching, workshops to build high-performance teams or carefully structured culture transformations.

Organization Transformation

The organization structure should be fit for purpose (aligned with strategy), transparent, as simple as possible, flexible and scalable, with clear roles and responsibilities.

Our core beliefs on effective organization transformation include:

Fundamental transformation happens through changing the way the work itself is done or the project itself is executed. Separate “change projects” and “change work streams” have high failure rates.
Emotional appeals, such as story and specific example, are often more powerful tools of persuasion than rational argument alone.
Coping with external change effectively requires a different approach for those elements that can be controlled, and those that cannot. This simple truth is frequently ignored.

Culture Change

The organization’s culture –its values, norms, and behavioral expectations and patterns – must be aligned to its business goals

Our core beliefs on culture and culture change include:

Your culture determines how your people behave, more powerfully than any incentive or control system you can impose from the board room – because culture works through broad based, self reinforcing peer pressure.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – If an organization’s culture is misaligned with its strategic intent, the organization is unlikely to reach its goals. For example, the leading cause of M&A failure is incompatibility among cultures.
Culture objectives, aligned with business strategy, can be defined explicitly; culture can be measured and adapted as intentionally and with as much rigor as any other important business lever.
Working from the strengths of a culture will always have greater positive impact than trying to fight its weaknesses.

Leadership Effectiveness

The right leaders, with the needed expertise and skills, must be in the right places

Our core beliefs on building strategic capabilities include:

Learning by doing through pure trial and error is an effective, but very time-consuming way to learn; on the job learning can be accelerated, e.g., through feedback and structured reflection.
The messenger is the message: capability building requires a “teacher” who is not just expert, but also credible. In many cases, practitioners from within the company are therefore better positioned to help employees build capabilities than professional trainers are.
People only learn what they think they can use: capability building must be directly linked to important business objectives (and related performance management objectives), and/or critical leadership role changes. “Nice to have” skills will be forgotten in a week.
Change the entire system: new capabilities can only be self sustaining if the environment embraces them. We have witnessed expensive investments in “training” go to waste when the surrounding corporate culture or structure is in conflict with the newly-acquired behaviors and skills.

Team Effectiveness

Collectively, the leaders must function as a high-performing team, with a shared vision and the ability to leverage each other’s expertise to accomplish far more together than they could individually.

Our core beliefs on team performance include:

Establishing a clear and compelling, shared team objective is the single most important thing to get right, and teams don’t spend nearly enough time on it. Most team performance problems result from competing agendas.
Team time together should mostly be spent solving problems that span across different team members’ interests, rather than reviewing individual leaders’ progress and needs.
Tension is good. Often, teams seek alignment too early. The value of combining executives with different skills, views, and positional interests into a team lies in the ability of such a team to make trade-offs and explore competing opinions and fact bases – as long as this happens in service of an agreed, higher level shared objective.
Relationships follow results. It’s useful for team members to get to know each other and build good working norms and respect early on, but strong, trusted relationships tend to result from doing good work together – not the other way around.

Commercial Effectiveness

Some of our core beliefs on commercial success:

Serving your customer’s interest is always the best long term strategy; comments and behaviors that betray self interest can quickly erode the customer’s trust. But… genuinely and sincerely asking for help is a much-underutilized and effective technique.
Contrary to popular belief, good sales people are not primarily motivated by money. Whereas monetary incentives are very important and effective in driving sales (more so than in most other functions), the deepest motivation of your most valuable sales people lies in gaining the respect and satisfying the needs of their customers.
While a strong sales leader establishes stretching but realistic goals, a transformative leader will set “impossible” goals to inspire quantum leap improvements.