How We Work
We bring the power of your leaders to bear on critical strategic priorities.
For more than 40 years, JMW has engaged with CEOs and their leadership teams to realize the alignments of vision, behavior, and purposeful collaboration that are essential to breakthrough business performance.
Our Principles
The impact of mindset.
An integral part of what we do is helping people reveal and confront the mindsets operating in the background, constructively bringing them to the foreground so they can see other views and possibilities. This is crucial for people to align and mobilize capability, shared commitment, and action.
The art of conversation.
The medium of leadership—how leaders get their jobs done—is conversation. Successful business leaders often rely on well-worn strategies for interacting with others; our toolkit disrupts those familiar patterns and leaves people with a broader capability for interacting with others.
The practice of “right to left" planning.
Humans are naturally inclined to move left to right in a traditional linear planning model. Our approach and toolkit help our clients think right to left, using our first two principles of mindset and language to get past current biases and truly stand in an aspirational future.
The habit of powerful listening.
Understanding the vast difference between habitual internal thinking that is full of biases and what is actually being communicated is an art. We give you the tools to make a habit of powerful listening, leading to powerful thinking, conversation, and results.
Our Modalities
Strategic Consulting
We may be a consulting company, but we never tell people what to do; we refuse to be prescriptive.
Instead, we give our clients choices, open their eyes, and help remove the inauthenticity in their thinking and speaking.
Leadership Development
Our job is to help people see things in a new light, so they are more capable and produce different results.
There’s always a developmental aspect to our work. While it’s different for every client and situation, we open people’s eyes to something new so they can produce different results.
Executive Coaching
We don’t consider ourselves a coaching organization, yet we do a lot of coaching.
We’ve found if development isn’t supported by some level of reflection at the individual or team level, it doesn’t “stick”. In our minds, coaching is about leaders continuously applying what they’re learning to critical strategies so they can form new habits.
Who We Work With
For transformation to happen systematically, we put our principles and modalities into action in a hands-on, pragmatic way to reach three essential groups in the performance ecosystem.
The Executive Team
Our engagement with the executive team involves in-depth development as well as strategy work to help people sharpen their clarity of purpose and aspirational objectives.
A central element of the work calls for the team to identify pivotal strategic initiatives for success. Then we deploy our consulting efforts to support them as they lead these new initiatives and produce the real-time results they’ve committed to delivering.
Next Level Leaders
While executives frame the shape of the strategy and goals, much of the actual “how is it going to happen” takes place at this level.
We work powerfully alongside this group and engage them in individual and team coaching as they take on strategic initiatives and personal projects that require them to apply new tools and capabilities.
Critical Stakeholders
Often this level of our work involves extended parts of the company and sometimes external collaborators.
For example, when we work with clients driving capital projects, it’s usually important to bring in supply chain partners to have much-needed conversations about planning, performance, and any breakdowns to address.