My cocktail party (remember those?) intro to my work is that “I provide training, consulting, and coaching to help leaders deal with their people problems, so they can get back to focusing on their business.” As anyone who has met me knows, I am ready, willing and able to elaborate on that, but that’s a pretty good starting summary.

The first response is almost always “we don’t have people problems.”

That’s awesome. Really. And I hope it’s true, but in all seriousness, people are imperfect, and they tend to work imperfectly with others, with imperfect results. We get called in to work with companies for all kinds of reasons, but when we start to dig in, we usually find that weak processes and communication within the team need to be improved in order to see some positive change.

We use the term “people problems” to describe the work we do within our clients companies- we don’t solve accounting or marketing problems, we don’t develop new products or file patents- we help business leaders create systems and solutions for managing people that make sense for their company.

For too long, management philosophies tended to minimize the importance of people problems within organizations. We were told to focus on the bottom line, and to attempt to manage people with command- and- control tactics, as though if we just used the right combination of carrot and stick, the people within the organization would become completely interchangeable and optimally efficient.

We know this is false.

Engaged, passionate employees are more productive, more innovative, and more likely to stay with a company that they feel values them as individuals. As leaders, we need to focus on building the structures and processes that solve the people problems to give our people the support they need to solve the business problems.

So if we ever meet and you ask me what I do for work, the truth is I am a resource for leaders. I provide the bandwidth and knowhow to knock out their professional to-do list.

Some of the projects I help design and implement:

Hiring process development
Creating employee handbooks
Writing onboarding and training guides and materials
Defining company culture
Teaching business owners how to hire with their mission and vision in mind
Building evaluation programs with progressive discipline
Communicating culture through job description training
Or whatever I am currently working on based on the needs of my clients

I might tell you all that, but it’s way more likely I’ll tell you that I solve people problems!

As the Delivery Manager at Back Pocket Resources, Kaydi is able to leverage her experiences in education and entrepreneurship to help small businesses thrive through consultation, training, and process development. She is also the founder of MakeGreatAdults, a parenting website that exists to provide support and resources to families, particularly while dealing with the challenges posed by distance learning.

'People Problems'