A suite of services are available to change leaders through Outside Angle, and previously through my private consulting practice Sam Kent Strategy launched in 2015. These services are benefitting a variety of organizations including start-up companies, schools, consulting groups, established nonprofits and new ones.

Strategic planning and implementation

An innovative, streamlined approach to strategic planning is designed for the realities of change leadership. It cuts out the word smithing that ultimately provides little value under the pressures of implementation and focuses on the content that matters. We spend time defining the problem to create a shared understanding of the why, do detailed program design to ensure clarity about the what, and lay out the process details (the how) so that the roadmap is clear. Clients finish with a complete toolkit for strategic change. Learn more about my experience leading city-wide change, an experience that helped inspire this approach.

Team performance

Team performance happens at the intersection of vision and strategy, systems and processes, and trust and relationships. Through my work at Outside Angle, we’ve helped more than 30 organizations across sectors implement team performance solutions tailored to meet them where they are and help them perform together through change. Ultimately, every meaningful effort requires helping people work together to accomplish more together than they ever could on their own. We serve as our clients’ team performance partner implementing lightweight and repeatable systems, facilitating hard conversations, and strengthening culture to help the teams we work with optimize their effectiveness through the rigors of change. Learn about my experience founding a high-performing public high school, and the toolkit that came out of this experience.

Organizational change

The way that leaders manage high stakes transitions and reorganizations defines their culture and cements their legacy. I work with leaders to support them through the most intense and vulnerable periods in their leadership journeys including onboarding and offboarding, reorgs and restructuring, launching high stakes new initiatives, and even managing wind-downs and closures. I’ve found that these are actually some of the most rewarding and impactful projects that leaders tackle, as they involve high-stakes communication and personalized support for people they care about during times of intense vulnerability. Read my blog post about why there is no faster way to tank culture than with a poorly managed reorg (and how to do it better) on the Outside Angle blog.

Change leadership

Leading change is hard, and few leaders are trained for it. Many feel pressure to solve problems for their communities rather than creating a shared process through which these problems can be shared and solved together. Often, a leader’s greatest strength can also be the source of some of their biggest challenges in a high-stakes change process. I help teams think differently about change leadership, and speak about skills and strategies for leading change in complex environments. I also have expertise in specific areas of education and organizational performance including talent strategy, performance management, progress monitoring and the future of school and learning. Check out the portfolio of courses I taught at Carnegie Mellon during my executive residency.

Tailored solutions to meet you where you are

Struggling with a particular implementation challenge? Navigating a complex shift in strategy? Dealing with a challenging crisis and trying to turn it into an opportunity? I work directly with clients to deliver concrete, agreed-upon outcomes that help their communities move forward. I also provide ongoing thought partnership and flexible support for senior executives or new managers leading big change for the first time.