What We Don’t Do

Slade Research does not attempt to be all things to all people.

Expertise

We stick to our areas of expertise.

We are industrial/organizational psychologists, coaches, leadership development experts and career professionals with practical experience at creating dialogue and insight for intelligent change.

For most other things, we are not experts. You would do well to find someone who has the expertise you need.

Adaptability vs. Cost

We are nimble and quick. We provide customized solutions to meet the needs of our clients. That means we are usually not the low cost provider.

We provide high value, customized service to drive dialogue, insight & intelligent change.

We do not provide ongoing surveys or 360 assessments where large scale survey processing firms can be more efficient.

We do not tend to work with clients for whom low cost is the key decision factor in purchasing consulting services.

Strategic Topics

We have expertise in many areas of strategy, but not all.

We have expertise in corporate and competitive strategy for both large corporations and entrepreneurs.

We are especially strong in HR strategy, including talent aqquistion, employee engagement, leadership development and assessment. We can help you integrate HR strategy with corporate and competive strategy.

We are not as comfortable with creating marketing strategy, operations/production strategies or financial strategy, although we can provide research that others can use for the strategy making process.

Data

We have deep expertise in data mining and statistical analysis. But, just like you would not use a diamond miner to dig for coal, Slade & Associates specializes in certain data.

We are very comfortable with employee surveys, employee focus groups, and archival HRIS data such as demographic representation and compensation data. We are also comfortable with customer survey data.

We are not as comfortable with financial/economic data, e.g., analyzing the dollar impact of discrimination.

We are not as comfortable with customer focus groups (in contrast to employee focus groups or customer surveys).

We are not as comfortable with polling or focus groups for public relations or political candidates.

Integrity

We ensure integrity in all that we do. We follow the highest ethical principals in how we conduct research for organizations.

We subscribe to the ethical standards of industrial organizational psychologists and the International Coach Federation’s Code of Ethics. For example, we do not “coach” when the organization has pre-determined that the leader will be terminated.

Slade & Associates research is credible because we pursue objective data with transparent intrepretation rather than a specific outcome or finding. We do not perform ”advocacy research” where the outcomes and conclusions are pre-determined.

We do research in the best interests of our client. We determine upfront who the client is and what their interests are. For most of our work, the client is typically the organization and its owners or stockholders, not current management or the person negotiating the contract. We do not do work that has ambiguous clients or a conflict of interest between the “true” client and the parties contracting for the research.

We do research sensitive to the interests of all involved parties – those who provide the data, those who receive the research reports and those affected by decisions driven by the research.

We insist on informed consent of all parties involved in the research.

We advocate for meeting the needs of other stakeholders (employees, customers, the commmunity, etc.) while maximizing the outcomes of our client.

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