Jon Zulawski, Executive Vice President & COO and Tracy Nelson, President & CEOIn an interview with the editorial team Manage HR, Tracy Nelson, President & CEO, and Jon Zulawski, Executive Vice President & COO of Aspire Talent Group, discusses at length how their company partners with clients to build the capacity and capabilities of their leadership team and position their organization for success.
Could you provide a brief overview of your company?
Tracy: Aspire Talent Group supports our clients in creating a strong organizational culture that engages and retains their workforce while driving strategic results for their business. We partner with our clients on a variety of talent needs such as building their talent pipelines to be ready for their workforce needs of the future. We can help teams create better alignment and maximize performance. We partner to help our clients integrate and optimize their organizational talent strategies with their business strategies. This alignment of culture, talent practices, and leadership creates a powerful competitive advantage for them. We customize our approach based on our client’s business; we don’t focus on “cookie cutter” solutions. Our business is built on relationships, and we understand the importance of building trust.
Jon: We work with organizations of all sizes and across a variety of industries, but we have a passion for serving small to medium-sized organizations that don’t always have the budget to access high-priced training and talent solutions. It’s common for firms to talk about “partnering” with their clients, but that’s how we truly operate, and the value we place on partnership and collaboration is reflected in our approach. We leverage our customized online solutions and platforms to provide small and medium-sized businesses with capabilities often reserved for larger organizations.
Please elaborate on the services you offer to your clients.
Jon: Our services include leadership development programs, employee training workshops, team building and team development solutions, assessments and diagnostics such as culture and engagement surveys, leadership 360 assessments, and styles inventories such as DISC and MBTI. We also provide coaching, LMS and learning technology services, learning function optimization, HR consulting, and we are certified Predictive Index partners supporting our clients with a variety of talent optimization tools and services. We provide services both in person or in fully virtual/online environments, so we serve clients across the country and world.
Tracy: We’re honest about what we can do to help or when we may not be the right fit for what our clients need. We work alongside our clients, helping them find ways to maximize their dollars invested to get the biggest bang for their buck.
We may be the perfect partner for organizations who:
• Need talent experts with deep experience, top-notch credentials, and a proven track record of success but don’t want to pay high consulting firm prices for a “one size fits all” standard approach.
• Need more than a “single shingle” consultant who may not have the full depth of experience needed or a broad enough suite of offerings or capacity to meet all their talent needs.
• Have tried the standard “off the shelf” vendor training programs or other solutions but have not gotten the results they wanted or felt the solution wasn’t tailored enough to hit the mark for their organization’s needs.
• Want a high-trust partnership based on straight talk, sound solutions, and real value for their investment.
We want to learn more about our clients and give them the opportunity to learn more about us. If we are not the right fit for what a potential client needs, they can count on us to tell them that. When we work together, we are true partners dedicated to our client’s success. We have a broad range of consulting services designed to help leaders, teams, and organization achieve more.
What are the challenges your clients face, and how does your company solve them?
Tracy: One of the key services our clients are seeking right now is helping them assess and evolve their overall talent strategy and practices. We know recent events have required organizations to shift their business strategies for the new environment. A shift in business strategy requires that talent strategy and practices evolve as well. We work with organizations to assess their current state and align their business and talent strategies, then provide flexible solutions tailored to their specific gaps and needs.
Aspire Talent Group supports our clients by developing leaders, teams, and organizations who are ready to face the demands of the future. Our talent optimization solutions help every organization achieve more through engaging, retaining, and developing a strong workforce that drives strategic results for the business
It can be a struggle for small and medium-sized businesses and organizations to find the right partner. Firms that specialize in one particular aspect of talent optimization or development often come to the table with preconceived notions of the appropriate solution, while many larger firms require financial commitments that are unrealistic. We understand those challenges, and we approach each engagement with a shared goal of helping right-size the solution for the client’s needs and budget.
One of the ways we’ve supported our clients over the past few years is by transitioning their new employee onboarding processes and orientation programs for online, remote, and/or blended delivery. Moving from a full-day, in-person classroom new employee orientation session, for example, to a full-day live virtual sessions – via Zoom or Teams, for example – was a common intermediate step, but it doesn’t provide the same high-quality orientation experience. We’ve partnered with many businesses and organizations to successfully optimize that experience based on their needs and the needs of their employees. The optimized program often includes a combination of live, instructor-led remote learning sessions, self-directed online e-learning activities, and guided conversations with managers and leaders across different teams and departments.
Could you cite a client success story?
Jon: We recently worked with a mid-sized organization to conduct an assessment of their current talent strategy and practices, assessing areas such as their employer brand, performance management and performance review process, state of talent identification and succession planning, retention, engagement, and culture. We also took a fresh look at their organizational values and leadership competencies. One of the most urgent priorities identified was a need to build a talent pipeline and comprehensive leadership development program to ready next-level leaders. We used a leadership diagnostic to measure current competencies and capabilities to identify their most significant areas of development needed. We then partnered to build a comprehensive 12-month leadership development program that leveraged in-house capabilities supplemented with ready-to-go workshops on key leadership topics. We helped transition internal training content into an online format and provided targeted on-demand learning through our learning platform. Every leader created an individual development plan and received coaching throughout the program to support their learning. We enabled our client to define and implement a measurement plan to evaluate the effectiveness of the program, including using custom surveys and analyzing other metrics to ensure the new program was having the desired impact. The online components created tremendous efficiencies and increased access and convenience for leaders in addressing their development needs and preparing them for next-level roles.
What are your plans for the future?
Tracy: The “new normal” is that there is no more “normal”! The pace of change is only going to continue to increase. The needs and demands of the workforce are evolving, and employers will have to continue to evolve their talent practices to compete in the market for talent. We’re here to help! We’re experiencing rapid growth, and we’re continuing to expand our services and solutions.
