Devona is the President and CEO of Goeins-Williams, Inc, a full-service performance consulting company based out of Clayton, DE. Devona describes the necessary people skills in order to work in performance consulting as well as shares great tips for acing a phone interview!
Transcript
>> Okay my name is Devonna Williams [phonetic] and I am President, CEO of Gowan's Williams Associates [phonetic]. We're a performance consulting company. It means helping organizations increase and improve their performance in lots of areas that people process and performance work is pretty much what we do. Work gets done through people and the processes they use. And in our case, we work with organizations -- a lot of the work is organizational development, but it's not exclusively. Sometimes it's process dealing with the systems that they use as well as solving the people dilemmas like teamwork and leadership and management skills. What we do though, we try to be more part of the team. When we come in, once we understand what the objectives are of our clients -- the performance objectives they have -- then we work with the client to help solve those problems. And sometimes people view us in a favorable way, because you know, finally something will be addressed. We don't often -- the work doesn't often result in people actually losing their jobs, but for people's workplaces improving. We go onsite with the client to meet them initially and to facilitate the processes or to review information or in a remote location. So, for example, a typical day may be facilitating our strategic planning session. Preparing an agenda for that prior to going out; meeting with that client. Preparing materials. On-site work and then back and forth completing information. Maybe going back out for the same client or a new client. Conducting focus groups at a location that may be, say at a hotel or a community center. Really depending on the client. So lots of different processes and sometimes it's individuals; sometimes it's with a team. [ Silence ]
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