Arthur,
Picking up the thread having been away for a week enables me to build more
effectively on what others have said.
Value your nervousness, as this will provide a sound foundation. 'Just' be
true to your principles. By this I mean go with what feels right at the
time. Trust your gut feel and intuition.
As a for example. At a recent meeting where the discussion was around
rebuilding/refocusing a team to enable it to meet the challenges in 1997
one of the directors kept references to @What I (the consultant) was going
to do to them!!. I felt very uncomfortable with this and rather than
taking him saying that was wrong, simply explained that he needed to know
that wasn't going to do anything to them, 'I was going to work WITH them'
It felt quite risky at the time and I felt it was essential to be clear. I
am still there, still working with them. This has typically been my
experience. Tell it as it is for me usually works.
My comments so far relate more to you operating as yourself so spending
some on yourself before your meeting is importnat.
On the content side, some things that I find valuable, getting the client
to
1. Describe, in their own way, how the organisation would look (I'm visual)
or feel or sound when it is changed?
2. What sort of benefits are they looking for?
3. How do they see their role in this?
4. What sort of performance improvement is possible if they make the
changes they have discussed?
5. How willing are they to change themselves? This is a key question
which has to be asked somewhere and in some form.
Hope that this helps.
Ian Saunders
Transition Parternships - Harnessing change for business advantage
tpians@cix.compulink.co.uk
--tpians@cix.compulink.co.uk (Ian Saunders)
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>