Involving People, Improving Groups

As the newest member of the Emu team, I felt it was my responsibility to ensure that I fully understood the mission of Emu Consulting and what we do for our clients. I knew Emu’s tagline was “Involving People, Improving Groups,” but I wondered: Is that really representative of what we do?

Being the leadership and change management guru that he is, of course Dr. Gertner (Doug Gertner) was receptive to my desire to sit down and discuss this mission statement qua tagline and whether it truly communicates Emu’s values. Turns out: Yes, it does!

Our goal at Emu Consulting is to provide organizational training and development. But what does that really mean? It means we do work with the people in an organization to improve the everyday communicative process people go through in order to do their jobs effectively. We want to help people get along in their work groups so that their positive relationships benefit each other and, ultimately, the organization at-large. Lynne Cooper, author of Listening Competency in the Workplace: A Model for Training, defines training as applying to a specific, necessary job skill while development aims at broader objectives. I like that definition because, for me, it demonstrates the difference between training and development but also illustrates how the two are inextricably linked. So Doug and I help train organizational members to develop the skills that will help them and their organization attain those broader goals.

All of the training we provide at Emu looks at the interplay between the individuals and the work groups to which they belong. Although we train people in various skills—listening, teamwork, conflict management, time management—the focus is always on both individuals and the groups to which they belong because in an organization, one person’s communication always impacts the larger work group. By the same token, the culture of the work group always influences interpersonal communication. You cannot separate the two; their relationship is always symbiotic.

So, in effect, long before I came along, Doug nailed it when he crafted the tagline that says so clearly what we do: we involve people in order to improve groups.

There is a second and equally important piece of the concept of involving people, and that has to do with the way we train. At Emu Consulting, we love to really get our participants involved. Our seminars are all hands-on, activity-based learning. And most important, we have fun doing it—because this is our passion!

If you would like to improve your work groups—and have fun doing it!—contact us today. Or, to learn more about the various seminars we offer, visit our Training page.