Our Mission:

We equip organizations and their people to achieve their full potential.  How?  By diagnosing alignment challenges, evaluating competencies, designing learning experiences, administering practical performance guides, teaching evidence based coaching and offering executive coaching.

Our Vision:

We want to become the thought leader and resource of choice for addressing organization alignment challenges.  How?  By building an extensive database of expectations between individuals across the widest range of strategic and tactical challenges, organizations, and industries.

 

Our Views of Successful Change

Build on existing language. If there’s no common language, you are confused and competitively blind. But, you need to start where you are!

Change is hard, real change is real hard. Companies routinely initiate change but never seem to “really” change. We focus on avoiding those common “change traps”

Change is not about making time, it’s about releasing time. Executives must “create” time for change by reducing the distractions to getting work done.

Coaching cascades reinforce change. Managers must coach and be coached.

Create an accountability environment. Support, compensation, and other directional systems must be integrated.

Do “different” things! Don’t just do “things” differently. Think “out-of-the-box” and do different things rather than trying to get a little better at what you’re currently doing.

“Everyone needs to walk the same talk.” Receiving inconsistent voices from various sources causes people to “do what they’ve always done”.

Measure the “hows” not just the “whats” of success. Move management’s focus away from what was achieved to how you can win - measure leading indicators, not just lagging indicators.

No one sales process is the “right” one. The “right” sales process is the one to which people are committed.

Paint the train - revenue and competency grow together. Too often such training is disconnected from “real jobs.” Revenue and competency growth are dynamic concurrent processes not static sequential ones.

Sales and marketing people learn when they realize their collective ignorance risks losing a specific deal. It’s not what you know, but what you don’t know that creates competitive vulnerability.

Speed, intensity and momentum are critical. Move with “speed” to swim above cultural inertia. Move with “intensity” by focusing on a few new things. Build “momentum” by promoting early successes.

White Noise can’t be ignored. The background “hum” of distracting cultural legacies- “white noise”- drags change and must be overcome FIRST.

We help you develop your plan for change—a plan that stays with you! Regardless of the path chosen we encourage executive manager coaching (see "Our Services," Executive Coaching for details) as an element that ensures that strategic direction and key personal learning really stick!

Training can not be done in isolation. It needs to be customized to fit your revenue generation actions. This dual focus builds on your existing sales or performance language and effective practices. We work with managers (Executive Coaching) and your key sales people on their actual accounts by focusing on missed opportunities, being competitively unpredictable and delivering differentiable value to influencers and decision makers.

Distractions constantly interfere with success! We help you align expectations to minimize - and even eliminate - these distractions in any environment - management teams, productivity groups, manufacturing or sales units (see "Our Services," AlEx™ for details).

The “CASCADING” approach to managing long-term comprehensive change: The Cascade Approach engages your leadership team in change by helping them lead from both the top down and the bottom up simultaneously - this is the "heart" of a 360 degree change effort.

We help your drive for feedback and behaviors that demonstrate clear alignment with your strategic objectives.

This is the most effective way to encompass all related systems to create a company that continuously adjusts itself to changing customer conditions.

The “RIPPLING” approach to quick-term skills training: Targeted training can provide immediate impact and a starting point for more enduring comprehensive change. We can provide skills training and coaching programs that are aligned with your strategic direction and built upon your core training and leader's language.

Our story dates back to 1987 when Lee Hammett began offering consulting as Professional Development Services in California.  Lee’s vision was to use his leadership experience to provide sales training and coaching designed to improve sales team effectiveness.  His services expanded rapidly to include all types of executive coaching from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies.

Nick Anderson became acquainted with Lee through his work at Holden Corporation, where Nick also engaged in coaching, training and learning design.  Nick’s experience and education in behavioral sciences proved a great complement to Lee’s experience and led to the two joining forces in 1997 to become PDS Group.

During their consulting engagements Lee and Nick soon identified organization misalignment as a major factor in nearly every situation where organizations and individuals were not achieving goals.  Nick had long been a student and proponent of the expectations approach authored by John Machin in the 1980s as a key to success in organizations of all sizes.  To process the data needed to effectively conduct an alignment exercise, Machin required mainframe computing power only available at universities when the concept was first designed and tested.

Nick and Lee decided to implement the expectations approach with their clients, only to discover that the software had long since disappeared.  With Machin’s consent, Nick began preparing a new concept for the software that could be implemented on a personal computer.  Thinking about programming the software led Nick to reconnect with Terry Merriman, technology consultant, Internal Audit Manager, and programmer on the side.

Terry brought his programming skills and a passion for corporate governance, and effective processes as well as personal and organizational performance to PDS Group in 2000, and programmed the PC based AlEx™ software first used in 2001.  As the PDS team developed their expertise and alignment practice with AlEx™ they served a number of Fortune 500 companies in Canada and the US.

Their collaboration resulted in a new partnership in 2009, PDS Group LTD, committed to making alignment and related consulting services available to a wide range of organizations in North America, Europe, and the Middle East; their mission and vision for PDS.