Teaching Our Clients to Fish

Published by Shana Wedemeyer

The proverb goes “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Perhaps one reason that Highlands Consulting routinely hears positive feedback from our clients, and one of the reasons that I am happy to be an employee here, is that we don’t just do things for our clients (or worse: to them). Instead, we partner with them to make sure that we understand their goals and interests and work with them to achieve those goals.

One of the ways in which I have been able to put this into specific practice is by becoming a Prosci® Certified Instructor. As an Authorized Training Provider for Prosci Change Management Programs, Highlands provides value to our clients by offering not only expert change management consulting—all of our employees, every single one, is Prosci certified—but also providing them with the opportunity to develop a competency in change management within their own organizations. We offer the Prosci 3-Day Certification Program as well as one-day courses for project sponsors, managers, employees, and project management team members.

While I love teaching the Prosci classes, I am also privileged to be an instructor who gets to apply what I teach in those classes on a daily basis on consulting engagements with clients. A key component of our approach to every change management effort is that we teach our clients the principles of effective change management and how to deploy processes and tools to help them succeed with their change efforts. Instead of just giving clients a fish, I take great pride and satisfaction when I see that our client project team members have learned how to fish for themselves.