About The Cooperation Company

Mission

We help you manage conflict so it does not manage you.

Busy leaders must allocate valuable time to deal with an increasingly complex and conflicted work environment. Our mission is to help you save time and money, improve your image, enhance your credibility, and increase support for your mission.

What we are good at. The Cooperation Company is good at improving the way people work together. We do this by helping you create collaborations between organizations, between stakeholders and organizations, and between people in organizations.

The philosophy behind how we work. First--do thorough pre-project planning. Second--custom design the staffing of your project. And third--make the contracting as efficient as possible.

Our objective. We help clients work toward the future they want. We do this by serving as a neutral third party who serves as a positive agent of inquiry, a source of advice, and as an agent of change. We create outcomes that emphasize positive working relationships that last into the future so, hopefully, our services will not be needed again on the same issue.

How we staff your project. All associates in The Cooperation Company are seasoned professionals. We combine the talents of executive managers who have experience in your work environment with professional mediators who know how to resolve disputes. Both are good at getting people to work together. Everyone has many years experience building collaborations between people and between organizations (click here to see The Cooperation Company Team).

Contracting. Our greatest success has come by working in partnership with clients to first understand what they need. After this client/consultant collaboration we tailor specific solutions for your workplace. Expect a series of detailed, pre-project discussions to identify this need and select the right people from our talent pool. From this needs assessment we usually create an action plan that lays out explicit deliverables, time lines, and roles and responsibilities for you to approve and around which a contract is built. We also have some ‘off-the-shelf’ services (e.g., training, meeting management, keynote speaking) available via simple contracting and streamlined payment options. While we use the following six general contracting approaches, we are open to other ways that best meet your needs.

The first two approaches are familiar:

RFP. The standard practice of submitting proposals as part of a Request-for-Proposal bidding process.

Direct. Negotiation with the client, usually within proscribed procedural rules such as maximum spending limits.

We also encourage innovation, including:

Pre-assessment. We complete a pre-project assessment for you for a small fee that yields recommendations on needed services for full contracting assistance, no matter who is hired to conduct the final consultation.

Flat fee. The client defines a project need and the fee they will pay and we propose a scope of work on that basis.

On-Call. The client is faced with the need to respond to an emerging issue but the scope of work is not possible to define. We provide services on an hourly basis as you call upon us to coach, give advice, or complete specific tasks for you.

Retainer. The client ‘enrolls’ our members as adjunct staff to work on issues and opportunities as they arise in the course of a project’s life, usually with a specified number of hours of work per month.