Employee Recognition – Spotlight on Dan Ohmott

This month we’re talking about employee recognition, including the basics of employee recognition and type of awards. We have also been sharing Employee Spotlights, one of our favorite ways of recognizing the unique, talented, and dedicated people that make FMP Consulting a great organization and great place to work!

This week we wanted to share another Employee Spotlight, highlighting Dan Ohmott. Dan has been with FMP for eight years now, so we wanted to get a better sense of what makes him tick and, maybe most importantly, why he always seems to be in such a great mood.

We thought we’d start by asking if he grew up knowing he was destined to be a consultant and, if not, what led him to FMP…

No- I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up! I like to tell this story when we’re conducting interviews, but in school I took one class on HR and absolutely hated it. It was the worst subject matter ever. That said, through my internships and previous work experience before FMP, I started to realize that it’s the people that make up an organization that are really the most important. You can have great technology or products, but it is the services you offer and the people you have that drive long-term success. You can find short term success with an innovative product, but without the right people, it can’t be sustained. So, that drew me to an organization that had that focus, like FMP. That HR class had been focused on the transactional areas of HR, which I now realize is a very narrow scope and still isn’t an area of interest for me. FMP takes a broader perspective and focuses on people working to help other people. So, for those reasons, I like working at FMP.

Dan has a reputation for being McGyver-like in his ability to work across a wide-range of capability areas and on any project, but we wondered what kind of projects he most enjoys. 

I have grown to really enjoy the consulting engagement experience. More so than a technical competency or capability area, I enjoy projects that are heavily focused on problem solving. I also think it’s great to work with clients who are more collaborative in nature because those projects tend to be more successful and the end product is much better. At the end of the day, I enjoy approaching a new challenge and solving problems, rather than going in with a pre-determined methodology and having a solution in mind before you even know what they are asking.

With his resume bursting with strategic planning experience, Dan has a unique perspective into working through this process with different clients and organizations.

A lot of the strategic planning work that I’ve been doing is with clients that are completely new to FMP, so we have limited knowledge or background with them before we start. Even with existing clients, when you start working on a strategic plan, it can be with different, more senior members of the organization than we may have otherwise been working. This can make it a little intimidating to walk into a senior leader’s office or new organization and not know how they work on a day-to-day basis, but I enjoy taking the time to learn about them. Typically, I review as much information as they can share, conduct interviews, and learn about where they are coming from, where they want to go, and why. Projects like these have really broadened my horizons to the different types of organizations out there. No two organizations have the same culture or goals, but ultimately, a lot of them want similar outcomes, broadly speaking. The specific goals leading to those outcomes might not be the same, but we can begin with a time-tested process and tweak it to fit the client and their expectations, knowledge level, stakeholders, and where they are trying to go. You have some organizations that are very sophisticated and have been through this process before (which can be good or bad, depending on how successful it was before) and some organizations that are going through this learning process for the first time. Tailoring our process to their needs and expectations is really crucial to developing a strategic plan that reflects their organization, goals, and desired outcomes- particularly if you want the final product to be more than eye-candy.

So, what’s next for Dan?

This is the hardest question. I’m most excited about continuing to grow the strategic planning work that we’ve been doing. This is a strength of FMP’s and it is closely related to another area, workforce planning, where we’ve done a lot of work. Looking at these two processes together, it presents a nice opportunity to continue to grow work and client relationships across a logical progression. When connected to our organizational assessment work (which focuses on understanding organizational health related tostrategic intent, structure, people, and process), you can create a very clear understanding of an organization, now and positioned for the future. Professionally, I’d like to continue growing and expanding this work to different types of clients and help organizations focus on achieving their goals.