A few years ago, Education Trust, a research and advocacy organization devoted to improving academic  achievement  for all students, was faced with the complications of transitioning from a small organization of fewer than  30 employees to a larger one with 50-60  employees, or more. As Ericka Miller, Vice President for Operations and Strategic Leadership at Education Trust, puts it, “Our funders were willing to give us the resources to have an ever greater  impact, and we needed to expand our reach and capacity. We were moving from ‘small and scrappy’ to a new stage: one that demanded that we be more thoughtful and deliberate about how we planned and executed our work.”

MAG first helped Education Trust with the organizational restructuring and strategic plan demanded by both this growth spurt and the organization’s attainment of the goals it had set for its first decade. Then, in 2006, the Education Trust extended its relationship with MAG in order to help implement the strategic plan, provide management training for senior managers, and advise on board development.

“As we expanded, we needed to come up with processes that gave people the sense of responsibility to plan and execute their work...We have to learn to delegate more effectively and communicate our decisions and thoughts in new ways as we move into this new phase of the organization,” Miller says.

With assistance from MAG consultants, Education Trust is working through the challenges that come with transition. “From both my perspective and the President’s perspective, our MAG consultant was someone we could call on to help us with a particularly thorny issue,” Miller says. “She helped senior managers put some sensitive and complicated issues on the table in a safe way so that we could solve them and work together better as a team. It would have taken us far longer to articulate those issues without MAG. Thanks to MAG, we were able to get to the real work – improvement – far more quickly.”

Over the long term, Education Trust has developed new ways of institutionalizing the cultural change that the shift required. “We’re getting the entire staff involved in articulating our organizational principles and practices, with the intent of ultimately incorporating them into our handbook,” Miller says.  “MAG helped us get that project off the ground.”

To Miller, what made MAG stand apart as the organization went through this process was that the MAG consultants really listened. “I’ve never heard out of their mouths ‘So this is how we do it.’ Both MAG consultants spent a lot of time just talking to us about what our needs are and getting an understanding of what we’re trying to accomplish. They could identify what we needed to spend more time on, and they were so flexible and accessible. They were also able to get the confidence of our staff very quickly and made them feel comfortable and safe in saying things that needed to be said.”