BACKGROUND:

• Boutique leadership advisory firm founded in 1977. Committed to developing leaders (coaching), improving key executive relationships and partnerships (team development), and building competitive organizations and cultures.
• Paul Donahue, a co-founder, holds a doctorate in organizational behavior. Experienced in a wide array of industries.
• Firm specializes in accelerating strategic transitions (exceptional growth, mergers, succession…) with new and renewed leadership teams.
• Firm helps leaders and their teams develop personally and interpersonally side stepping the inherent resistances in themselves, their organization, and the culture trade-offs that can thwart the their vision. For example:
• Leaders with stylistic limitations hanging on to old patterns ~ reluctant to chance risks.
• Tolerating unacceptable behavior.
• Disconnects between partners.
• Keeping weak people. Hiring second rate people.
• Trapped in the “extinction spiral:” Failing to continuously invest AND seek cost efficiencies in both strong and weak market cycles.

PASSIONS:

• Creating powerful partnerships that are both fun and profitable.
• Making Presidents and their teams successful.
• Partial to egos that can subordinate themselves for a greater good.
• Loyalty.

BIASES:

• Distaste for abusive, irresponsible power (bullies), and amateurism (not knowing what you don’t know).
• Big egos without humility.
• Dislikes victims, and tyrants who are kind to them.
• Little patience for defensiveness ~ people who can’t take criticism or who blame others.

APPROACH:

Get to know the senior executives and their organization through:

• Confidential conversations with them and their people,
• How Others See us -360 input,
• Participation in meetings, and discussions on their hot topics.
• Construct executive and organizational game plans to leverage strengths, illuminate blind spots, and complement shortfalls.
• Provide developmental recommendations to leaders on realistic, achievable changes in the way they connect, communicate, and make decisions.
• Master the power of the client’s culture as both a means and an end using it as the touchstone for all connections ~ internally with each other and externally with their customers.
• Encourage them to exercise their strengths and to be true to their foundational identity ~ values and principles.
• Increase their insight and self-awareness by helping them clearly see how their expressed identity ~ style and comfort level ~ can compromise performance.
• Help leaders and founders “let go” by modifying the way they engage and interact.
• Smith & Donahue seeks to have an ongoing role with client companies with the goal of creating an intimate, collaborative executive partnership that makes money and has fun.