You haven't hired the person who would own how your people learn and take on change. Or you have one person, and the job has outgrown them.
The Residency
Six months inside your organization to rebuild how people learn the job and take on change — then hand it to someone on your team.
Book a conversationThirty minutes by video, and it's free.
What you get
- A weekly day inside, plus a weekly hour with your sponsor and one with your successor
- How learning works, rebuilt — with your hiring, onboarding and HR leads as partners
- A named successor carrying it on the last day
How long
Six months.
Everyone holds a piece of it. Nobody owns all of it.
What it looks like now
- New peopleNew hires learn the job from whoever has time. A quick onboarding and a one-page summary feel like a handoff, and the knowledge doesn't move.
- New toolsA new system or an AI tool arrives, and everyone gets trained on it. Once the training is over, there's no one to help people change how they work.
- One personOr one person carries all of it, often alongside another job, and the scope is too big for one person.
What it usually turns out to be
Your people know how to do the work, and they're busy doing it. Building how everyone else learns it, and how the organization takes on something new, was never anyone's job.
Where you end up
One person on your team owns how people learn the job and take on change. They've been carrying it alongside me for months, and on the last day it's theirs.
Every group knows its part, how you'll tell it's working, and where to go for support. The documents, the routines and the trainings belong to your organization, not to me and not to one person.
How The Residency works
Whole Room™ — my change management method
I'm not the only expert in the room.
Every week
A day inside
In your meetings and working alongside your people. Three times, I'm there in person: in the beginning, at the midpoint and at the handover.
An hour with your sponsor
With the leader sponsoring the work: what I'm seeing, and what needs their decision that week.
An hour with your successor
With the person who will carry it on, from the day they're named.
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Month one
Find out how people learn the job here now
1Diagnose the CageI start with what you already have: how you hire and onboard, the trainings, the numbers, and how new tools are being taken up. Then I gather what's missing.
I interview the people who lead hiring, onboarding and HR, your managers, and the people learning the job. I also ask what you want learning to do for the organization, because that answer sets the direction for everything after.
Then I analyze all of it, looking for the connections that are hard to see from the inside, and bring it back as one synthesis your leaders read before they meet.
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By the end of month two
They decide what learning has to do here
2Facilitate the BreakthroughI facilitate this conversation, and I give your leaders a way to look at what the synthesis shows against what you want learning to do.
With that in front of them, your sponsor and your hiring, onboarding and HR leads decide together what it looks like when learning is working here — down to what a new hire, a manager and each of them would be doing and saying.
Every barrier gets named, with what it would take to clear it.
They choose what gets rebuilt first
3Co-Architect the Path ForwardThen they choose what gets rebuilt first. Before they do, I lay out the tradeoffs and the impact of each choice, and I ask the questions that show which moves make everything after them easier. Those go to the front of the line.
If your successor is already on your team, they're named before this and take part in these decisions. If you'll be hiring one, the decisions come first, because they tell you what the role needs.
Months three to six
Then the rebuilding starts, in the order they chose. I do it with your hiring, onboarding and HR leads as partners: they keep leading their own areas, and I work on how people learn inside them.
What gets rebuilt depends on what month one found. It can be how a new hire's first weeks go, how a manager teaches the job, how a new tool gets taken up, and how you can tell any of it is working.
My supportYour team
Your successor is in the work with me from the day they're named, and carries more of it each month.
The handover has had a date since the first week. On that day, your successor is carrying it.
In practice
St. Martin Parish Schools · 888 employees
- A stretch, not a project
- Over a multi-year partnership, I became an embedded partner to the district's leaders.
- How the work went
- It began with a leadership academy for each group of the district's leaders. Supervisors came first, so they arrived at their managers' sessions already coaching them.
- Then I modeled the work with their teams, they took it from there, and I gave them feedback on how it was going.
- Through the year
- I led virtual workshops through the year. I proposed the topics, and what each one covered changed with what the district's leads and I were seeing in the progress data.
- The work stayed theirs the whole time. What the district took with it was a plan to carry the work forward on its own.
A department chair, asked how she would describe the value of the partnership to another leader:
If a school is looking for someone who can listen to their unique context, build with them, and leave behind a system that will continue to strengthen instruction even if the partnership ends, I would highly recommend Sable.
What I need from you
- A leader who sponsors the work: a weekly hour with me, in the room at the kickoff, the midpoint and the handover, and the inside day's meetings kept on the calendar.
- Your successor, named early if they're already on your team. If nobody inside fits, I write what the role needs once those decisions are made, and your hiring lead takes the search from there.
- Protected time for the people whose view the work needs — on the calendar before the work starts.
- Access to what already exists: how you hire and onboard, the trainings, the numbers.
Is this the fit?
Is this a fractional role?
It's what people search for as a fractional head of learning or change. It's a fixed six-month engagement with my practice, not a hire.
What it isn't
- Not a hire. No payroll, and no seat on your org chart.
- Not HR. Hiring, onboarding paperwork, policy, compliance and investigations stay with the people who lead them.
- Not open-ended. The end date is in the agreement. Anything shorter than six months is a different service, and more time is a new term with its own end date.
- Not maintenance. I say yes to solving a problem, not to keeping things going the way they are.
It is if a leader is ready to sponsor the work every week, and you'd rather get the outcome than protect how it's always been done.
Start with a conversation.
Thirty minutes by video, and it's free. You tell me how your people learn the job today, and what's coming that they'll need to take on. I tell you whether a Residency fits or another service does, and you decide whether there's a next step.
Book a conversation