How We Work

We build capability, not dependency.

That principle predates the company. When we train a search committee, they walk out able to hire better for the rest of their careers. When we run a leadership cohort, your staff can facilitate the next one. When we map your initiatives, you keep the framework and run it again next budget cycle.

It’s also why our packages now come in three formats. The behavioral science that used to be available only through a consulting engagement is the same behavioral science in the materials you run yourself.

Where the method came from

In the late 1970s, a psychologist named Bill Bryan noticed something in his clinical practice: when clients talked about their work, the way they told the story revealed capabilities that no assessment was catching. He took that observation to David McClelland’s research group at Harvard, and spent the next four decades turning it into a system.

What came out of that work is a set of validated instruments and a distinctive interview methodology, built and refined across school districts, state agencies, universities, and more than a dozen Fortune 500 companies. In most of that corporate work, the assignment wasn’t to do the hiring — it was to train the client’s HR and organization development staff to do it themselves, and to build the competency models that outlasted any individual leader.

That’s the same thing we’re doing now, at a price point a school district can actually reach.

The Guided Storytelling Interview

The GSI is our proprietary interview methodology and the piece of our work that no other firm has.

Most interviews ask people what they would do. The GSI asks them what they did — and then structures the follow-up so carefully that what emerges isn’t a rehearsed narrative but an actual behavioral record: how they decided, who they involved, what they noticed, where they got stuck.

It grew directly out of the behavioral event interviewing research at McClelland’s group, and we’ve spent forty-five years refining it for the specific job of predicting performance in real organizations. It’s the engine underneath our hiring package, our leadership assessments, our searches, and our strategic planning input process.

Four things we do that others don’t

We work with how people actually behave, not how we wish they would.

Our competency models link to observable behavior, not résumé credentials. Our assessments look for patterns in what someone has already done, because that’s what predicts what they’ll do next.

We distinguish mindset from skill.

Some capabilities are trainable and some aren’t. Knowing which is which — before a promotion rather than eighteen months after — is the difference between developing someone and setting them up to fail.

We transfer the technology.

Everyone involved in a TBG process learns the method. Clients routinely tell us they’ve used what they learned in a superintendent search to hire teachers, run evaluations, and — in more than one case — improve hiring in their own businesses.

We measure whether it worked.

Every engagement opens with a needs assessment that sets measurable outcome goals, includes impact measurement at the close, and includes results assessments at six and twelve months. If you need to demonstrate evidence of effectiveness to a board or a state agency, it’s built in rather than bolted on.

Bring students into it

Wherever a process involves stakeholder input — searches, strategic planning, climate work — we recommend including students, and we’ll coach your team on how to do it well. They notice things adults have stopped noticing, and the practice of being taken seriously in an organizational process is itself worth something.

Who this works for — and who it doesn’t

We’d rather tell you upfront than three months in.

This works well when you:

Are willing to invest time in the process itself
Want to build internal capability, not just buy a solution
Are open to collecting and looking at data about your own organization
Care about change that holds, not just a result this quarter

This is probably not the right fit when you:

Need something resolved before next month’s board meeting
Want a deliverable rather than a method
Aren’t in a position to examine current practices honestly

If you’re in the second column, tell us. We’d rather point you somewhere useful than take an engagement that won’t work.

Organizations we have worked with

All of our searches have been successful! If you would like to speak with some of our highly satisfied clients, let us know.

High Praise from Our Clients

There is no one with a more in depth understanding of education leadership development needs than Bill. His training programs were huge eye openers for leaders in our and surrounding districts. His ability to motivate leaders to up their game is unparalleled. In addition, my school was able to employ his “initiative and program mapping” process to create a focus on what was most important, and ensured that our energies were targeted on those activities that were most influential in improving student performance.

– Suzanne Koroshetz, former Principal of Brien McMahon High School, Norwalk, CT
The Bryan Group staff is highly skilled in executing the search process, including building an effective working relationship with search committees and boards. They are very adept at successfully navigating the political challenges that often accompany the search process. This is why we use them to conduct all our superintendent searches.

– Barrett M. Christina, Executive Director of the NH School Boards Association
One of the things that struck me was the recognition by search committee members of the value of the process he taught us that could be used beyond the immediate search process, e.g., making better hires in the district, and for those working in the community, making improvements in hiring for their businesses.

– Keith Pfeifer, Ed.D., former superintendent of the Monadnock, NH School District
Bill helped us significantly improve student performance through many different organization capacity building processes. He also provided us with competency-based hiring training, to include the use of the Guided Storytelling Interview methodology which we now employ with the hire of every leader, as well as teachers. He is the ultimate partner for any district or school redesign process. Change leadership is his forte.

– John Freeman, Ph.D., former Superintendent of the Pittsfield, NH School District