Overview

Although Fieldstone Consulting ® no longer formally offers its services, Bill Weary is happy to converse with leaders wishing perspectives on issues and opportunities their organizations face.

The following sections serve as a record of the principles that informed Fieldstone Consulting ®'s assignments.

• Understand and resolve a given issue or question.
• Lift a board's understanding of its own institution and its role in it.
• Set an agenda of work for the board (and so improve its performance and pleasure) and help implement that agenda.
• Inaugurate an institution-wide planning process.
• Plan, whether institution-wide or within, longer or shorter term.
• Link an institutional plan to the launch of a capital campaign.
• Prepare for a transition in leadership.
• Set expectations and a course of action for a new chief executive.
• Assess individual and institutional performance.
• Identify an institutional agenda.

Fieldstone Consulting, Inc. ® helped create that broader institutional context through:

• Interviews
• Conversations
• Small and large group process
• Surveys
• Benchmarking and knowledge of best practice
• Direct observation of key meetings and events
• Reports and summaries prepared on the basis above

The broader context typically included:

• Exploration of opportunities—fresh ideas—not normally addressed in the institution's daily life
• Constituents' and community perspectives and beliefs
• The institution's own history
• Practice and performance at comparable institutions

Specific Services

• Institutional and cultural assessments that offer:
  • A broad and recognizable appreciation of your institution, its history, and its story.
  • An understanding of the work and challenges of each of your institution's component parts, how they relate to each other, how they affect the whole, and how the whole impacts them, individually and as a group—in short, a "systems" or "cultural" understanding of your institution.
  • A context within which to place your institution, in comparison to itself and its peers.
  • Answers to hard institutional questions: Where are we? Where do we want to go? How far away are we? Do we know who we are?
  • An outside reality check. Are we doing all we can? Are we asking the questions leaders in the field now are posing? Are we overlooking anything?
  • Essential questions and points of view that may not have occurred to you.
  • Answers that ground your institution and its leaders in reality, hope, and manageable steps to your vision.
  • A reference work to guide you for years to come—and against which you can measure your own progress.
  • The comfort that comes from knowing your institution, inside out.
  • A consultant with a doctorate in early modern French institutional and social history, who:
    • Moves easily among schools, universities, museums, foundations, associations, musical groups, churches, consortia, and scientific societies.
    • Knows where to find evidence and how to use it.
    • Enjoys making sense of complexity and apparent confusion.
    • Loves communicating what he's learned.
• Strategic planning that provides:
  • Leadership from "the top," evidence from "the bottom," and final shaping and approval back at "the top."
  • Change that begins with the reflection and conversation the process itself inspires.
  • Planning exercises that are inclusive, intensive, and brief: No endless committees, study groups, or task forces.
  • An approach uniquely suited to your institution. Your needs are unique, and, so, too, must be your planning process. Generic planning yields generic plans.
  • The measure of "control" of the planning process that you need, at this moment in your institution's history.
  • Integrated, practical, and creative solutions, growing out of an accurate understanding of the institution.
  • Guidance from a balanced group of your institutional leaders, charged by the board to lead the process and bring back the recommended plan.
  • The courage to make and then implement hard, necessary decisions.
  • A final plan-format that tilts the balance toward implementation.
  • Guidance from a professional planner with long-standing expertise in a wide variety of procedures, outcomes, and institutions.
• Governance audits that lead to:
  • Most effective board structure.
  • Relevant, lively, coordinated, and focused meetings of both board and committees.
  • Board productivity and achievement.
  • Close and productive relationships between institution and board.
  • A sense of accomplishment and pride within individual members of the board—and the consensus necessary for action.
  • Built-in accountability.
  • The overall benefits that come from the support and guidance of a widely experienced and published student of governance, steeped in structure, process, and assessment, and knowledgeable in how and when to make both small and major adjustments.
• Board workshops that offer:
  • The missing piece: The context within which the board works.
  • The confidence and energy that emerge from wide, shared understanding of the institution and the work it must do.
  • Intense engagement, exchange, and learning.
  • A workshop agenda that integrates your board's unique issues and that results in achievable goals and tasks.
  • Widespread excitement, and a plan to reach your vision—in the face of well-understood institutional reality.
  • A professional facilitator who knows how to design varied, lively, and effective group interaction.
  • Expertise that comes from long-term, high-level consultation with a wide variety of institutions like yours. Professionals in the field know that it takes a decade for a new consultant to mature and acquire a strong reputation.
• Transition management that may include:
  • Setting a new institutional agenda, through board, faculty, and/or community workshops, at the close of one period of leadership or the start of the next.
  • Careful assessment of viable options.
  • Assistance in preparing an overall plan for managing the multiple and complex opportunities and requirements of a shift in leadership.
  • Preparation of a leadership statement that captures the institution's recent history and current situation, and translates that story into characteristics sought in the next chief executive officer.
  • Assistance with management of the transition itself.
  • The guidance of a published and former search consultant.
• Individual performance reviews that rest on:
  • Carefully planned process.
  • Appropriately prepared and communicated assessment criteria.
  • Reliable evidence.
  • A full understanding of the institution, its history, its culture, and its needs.
  • Well conceived, institution-wide policies.
  • A full understanding of the lessons learned over several decades of performance reviews.
  • The belief that good reviews better performance.
• Other assignments that:
  • Escape obvious categories.
  • Benefit from careful and far-reaching exploration and planning, before the project even begins.
  • Require especially original approaches.
  • Must rest on the expertise of a consultant comfortable in a wide variety of institutions, at a wide variety of points of development.