Management Consulting Services
Strategic planning
Grow Conservation can guide your organization through a strategic planning process that takes you from what you value to what you achieve. Ryan will begin the process by seeking to understand your organization’s values. He will examine environmental values through a sustainability lens, considering ecological, social, and economic facets of your work. Ryan also will consider those elements that are vital to your organization as it interacts with internal and external stakeholders as well as the broader community that it serves.
Ryan led multiple long-range planning processes at the Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry, covering a wide range of disciplines and numerous stakeholders. He also has guided business development efforts in the private sector and strategies for political and public interest campaigns.
Grow Conservation comes into a strategic planning process with a learning and analytical mindset, bringing this diversity of corporate and public-sector perspectives to contribute to your organization's future direction and growth.
Meeting and workshop facilitation
When you gather your organization, your team, or your stakeholders, you want to make the most out of the time spent together. Grow Conservation provides meeting and workshop facilitation services to help you maximize the value of these gatherings. In either virtual or in-person settings, Ryan can provide agendas and structure to establish and maintain progress through the meeting. He can use facilitation techniques and probing questions to stimulate creative thought and lively discussions.
While with the Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry, Ryan coordinated both the Ecosystem Management Advisory Committee and Natural Gas Advisory Committee. These committees are collections of experts from corporations, nonprofits, government, and academia, brought together to address a myriad of challenges facing the Bureau and the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. Ryan also led numerous state-wide workshops of Bureau leadership and staff to engage on strategy, forest management, and recreation management. As part of state forest planning efforts, Ryan coordinated and led dozens of public meetings and workshops throughout Pennsylvania.
Through Grow Conservation, Ryan can bring this broad experience to your next staff meeting, stakeholder workshop, or public event.
Internal and external stakeholder engagement
In the conservation community, stakeholder input and support play critical roles in our ability to accomplish goals. Grow Conservation can lead engagement efforts of either your internal or external stakeholders to ensure you understand their values and incorporate their perspectives into your organization's work.
Stakeholder engagement can take a variety of forms, including public opinion polling, surveys, interviews, focus groups, and workshops. Ryan has experience in each of these methods through years of implementation in a state-wide public agency. He led the largest stakeholder engagement effort in the history of the Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry as part of the agency’s present strategic planning process. As part of that comprehensive process, Ryan led over 30 workshops with key external stakeholder groups, including a transition to conducting them all virtually during the first period of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Bureau collaborated with public polling experts to obtain data on attitudes and perspectives across the Pennsylvania population. They also coordinated staff workshops across all levels of the organizations from seasonal staff to executive leadership.
Grow Conservation will help you assess who your key stakeholders are and then customize the right solution to engage them efficiently and effectively. We can then help you integrate the engagement outcomes into the planning and implementation of your organization's strategy.
Organization culture enhancements
Most organizations will tell you that, “Our employees are our most important assets.” It is true that no work gets done without your staff or volunteers, but it takes intentional effort and investment to keep your team happy, effective, and engaged. With Grow Conservation, discussions around organization culture begin with an assessment of what human values are critical to you as an organization as well as what the status of your culture is at present. We will then consider how to align your business practices and systems with what you and your team value.
Ryan dedicated the later part of his career at the Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry toward engaging staff about the strategic direction of the organization and ensuring that a human-centered approach was taken into the future. He has received certified training in a number of highly-valued professional development programs and has worked through practical solutions in a major state agency. Grow Conservation will bring passion and experience to enhancing your culture and improving your organization’s engagement.
Team coaching
Grow Conservation believes that the team is the most important functional unit of any organization. Small teams are where the most collaboration and creativity occur. They are where new ideas are generated and where problems get solved. However, developing and sustaining high-performing teams can be a challenge. Grow Conservation can help.
Ryan led a small, inter-disciplinary team for nearly a decade in the Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry, and he has worked as the project manager, coordinator, or facilitator of countless permanent or temporary teams over his career. A former colleague says of Ryan,
"Ryan has a unique combination of technical skills, human-centered leadership skills, and integrity. His ability to build effective, goal-oriented teams is exemplary. When I think of Ryan, I think of performance and results."
Whether you are forming a new team or trying to optimize the performance of an existing team, Grow Conservation can guide the team through an assessment phase and then an enhancement phase to improve enthusiasm and functionality and make the team really work.
