"Your decision to work with an organizational advisor and strategist comes down to readiness and trust:

- a readiness to acknowledge that you and your leadership team need outside expertise to meet your organizational challenges, and

- a sense that you can trust an outside partner to respect your process and meet you where you are, speak truth to power in ways that will get through, and invest themselves in your long-term success.

For that trust to build, they must “get you”, and to do that they must have humility and vulnerability to match their diagnostic ability and insight. that’s Gazek Consulting.”

Value Proposition

The need: Companies are like human beings, an analogy crystalized by Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes. Both are systems comprised of inter-related subsystems that must function in synchrony for the system to thrive. This applies as much to a company, with its production, R&D, marketing and sales, human resources, and accounting and finance subsystems, as it does to the human body, with its circulatory, nervous, musculoskeletal, digestive, respiratory and reproductive subsystems.

In addition, every company operates in an environment where change is inevitable. We know that a company’s health is impacted by its ability to adapt to change, but company subsystems usually do so at different speeds. This can create asynchrony or gaps over time that manifest as problems that can slowly “eat away at the system” to the point of a crisis.

How we manage change impacts whether we can avoid or close the gaps and pre-empt or solve the problems. Managing change without destructive conflict is increasingly complicated and the need to do so is ongoing because the rate of change keeps accelerating and the problems become more frequent, complex, and multidisciplinary, involving more than one subsystem.

My role: I specialize in helping business leaders find solutions to internal issues and persistent problems that require outside expertise. These are issues and problems that reduce the time and energy available for accomplishing their goals and competing in the marketplace, and that could hamper the company’s growth, undermine its culture, or threaten its existence.

I’m a trusted organizational advisor and strategist who helps leaders solve problems and exceed past performance through a transformational process that involves:

shifting the quality of the conversations to be more strategic, authentic, and accountable through careful listening and observation, innovative thinking, and a willingness to be open and vulnerable,
examining critical issues below the surface, where trust, relationship, and mindset can be hidden factors,
recognizing patterns, roadblocks and unseen tensions that often lead to a diagnosis that is different from the one that the client originally thought,
identifying and re-examining underlying beliefs to create breakthrough insights and replace unproductive patterns with more productive actions and behaviors that get desired results,
designing custom tailored processes to meet specific needs, issues, and directions that we’ve identified together,
building self-awareness among leaders and helping them learn to listen to each other, their teams, and customers in new ways, and
facilitating creative problem-solving sessions that produce practical, realistic, and highly effective solutions to unlock the potential that already exists.

The Value: This transformational process is my craft, which involves building and integrating all the key components of a strong and healthy organization, including:

a common vision and values with a clear purpose and mission,
a functional organizational structure with clear responsibilities and an aligned reward system,
mutually accepted systems and processes that are disciplined and streamlined,
a balanced leadership team that shows and receives mutual trust and respect, and
ongoing change management that transforms the business from its current to future state.

By keeping all these components in view as we tackle specific problems, we also avoid some of the common pitfalls that can arise with management consulting, coaching and organizational development approaches that are more traditional and limited in scope, including:

solutions that end up on the shelf or are badly implemented because they focus on external factors and ignore internal organizational dynamics,
business practices that are short-lived and not sustainable because they‘re based on what’s worked in the past and don’t consider the need for change across multiple subsystems,
a restructuring of the organization that can make matters worse because there may be underlying, internal conflicts associated with management that weren’t addressed,
shallow results from trying to change the culture and how people interact without changing the power structure itself, and
implementation of the leader’s direction that is thwarted because of a lack of attention to the need for more efficient systems and process.

The short-term and long-term value of this transformational process cannot be overstated. It builds mutual trust and respect, which are the key building blocks to greater efficiency and effectiveness and achieving the key results of the business plan. The value-added evidence of this is easily measured through increased productivity, sales, profit margin, employee engagement and retention, customer satisfaction, and significant improvements in key metrics related to each subsystem of the company.

From city building to organization building

As a young man, I was drawn to city building and place making. I started out in urban design and planning and transitioned to real estate development via business school, where I also excelled in organizational development. I became a life-long student and practitioner of organizational development as I forged a career with multiple hats as a Developer, Corporate Real Estate Manager, Public Agency Director, Consultant, and Advisor, honing my facility for achieving results in many types of organizations – from a dozen people to thousands; private, public and non-profit; sole proprietor, partnership, corporate, and institutional; start-up, multi-divisional, national and global.

I learned that the connecting thread to results is always a clear and shared vision and a highly functioning organization. Gazek Consulting enables me to combine my business acumen with people and process skills to help leaders create exceptional teams and organizations that optimize performance.

Gazek Consulting is me. I work directly with you and become personally invested in your success. I start with my A-game and strive to punch above my weight so you see measurable, positive impacts as soon as possible. That means understanding and responding to your challenges by keeping myself vulnerable, inquisitive, and self-reflective, and serving as a mirror and role model for you to feel comfortable doing the same. I bring gravitas, confidence, and a comforting personality rooted in humor and heart.

My Background

MBA, Real Estate and Organizational Development, UCLA Anderson School of Management
MA Architecture and Urban Planning, UCLA Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning
BA, Urban Studies, Vassar College