About Big Bear Partners
Who are big bear partners?
We are your future of work experts who help bridge individual growth and achievement with high-performing organisations. We have deep experience with rapidly growing and ever-changing companies and are driven by our passion and obsession with technological and biological advances that will positively affect the course of humanity. Big Bear Partners think holistically from the individual’s perspective as well as your company’s unique lens on the world.
What is Your Why?
Why do you exist as a company? What do you want to achieve? Once we know that, Big Bear can create the people strategy to help you get there.
Matching Personal Passion
& Mission To Your Company's Purpose
Once we’ve agreed your purpose and vision – we shape, create and deliver how you will attract, engage, select and hire incredible people – aligned to your vision and mission – based on their Ikigai (reason for being).
Creating the Best Environment for High Performance
We will help you create the optimal conditions for inspiring your incredible people with brilliant leadership – working together to create a world-class performing team. Embracing the Five Behaviours, as outlined by Patrick Lencioni in his book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team helps you avoid dysfunctional team behaviour and embrace high performance norms.
Anticipating and Preparing for Inflection Points
Big Bear experts have been through hyper-growth and global expansion. We’ve watched entrepreneurial cultures bend and often break under the strain of scale-up growth activity as well as restructuring and M&A activity – and can provide you the unique insight needed to steer your growth with awareness, intention and design – with people at the heart of your journey.
We target earlier stage or SME companies too young or small for a fully functioning HR department – and laser-focus our delivery to your urgent people challenges when you are between 50 and 500 employees strong. Our target clients are typically small to mid-sized, global growth-oriented technology and biotech/life sciences organisations, operating locally or globally and are within their Series A through to C funding rounds.
Bringing Winning People Strategy to Achieve Vision
Jeff’s career has spanned over 30 years of HR leadership and consulting working within investment banking, consulting and technology (SaaS, Voice Recognition, NLP, AI/Machine Learning, eCommerce and biotech & life sciences). He helps anticipate key inflection points within exponentially growing companies across people, processes, and technology to ensure vision realization. For the last 17 years, Jeff has been working with start-up & SME tech companies to provide actionable strategies to grow people, process & technology, building highly effective innovation cultures to support the revolutionary pace of disruptive product and service creation. As CEO of Big Bear Partners, Jeff is an accomplished talent & innovation accelerator and future of work consultant for SME businesses in the emerging, fast-growth high-tech and biotech sectors, as well as mature businesses undertaking digital transformation.
Big Bear Partners Values:
Borrowed from some of the greatest success stories in recent times – every Big Bear Partner member needs to be able to answer these value statements in the affirmative
Judgment
- I make balanced, value-based decisions despite ambiguity
- I identify root causes, and get beyond treating symptoms
- I think strategically, and can articulate what you are, and are not, trying to do
- I am good at using data to inform your intuition
- I make decisions based on the long term, not near term
Communication
- I am concise and articulate in speech and writing
- I listen well and seek to understand before reacting
- I maintain calm poise in stressful situations to draw out the clearest thinking
- I adapt my communication style to work well with people from around the world who may not share my native language or perspective
- I provide candid, helpful, timely feedback to colleagues, clients and partners
Curiosity
- I learn rapidly and eagerly
- I make connections across disciplines and silos, uncovering patterns and trends
- I seek to understand your customers around the world, and how you seek to engage them
- I seek alternate perspectives
Courage
- I say what I think, when it’s in the best interest of my client, even if it is uncomfortable
- I make tough decisions without agonizing
- I take intelligent risks and am open to possible failure
- I question actions inconsistent with my values
- I am able to be vulnerable, in search of truth and check my ego always
Passion
- I inspire others with my desire for excellence
- I care intensely about my clients and their success
- I am tenacious and optimistic
- I am quietly confident and openly humble
Selflessness
- I seek what is best for my client, rather than what is best for me or my company
- I live in service to help my partners, clients and colleagues
Innovation
- I create new ideas that prove useful
- I re-conceptualize issues to discover solutions to hard problems
- I challenge prevailing assumptions, and suggest better approaches
- I keep nimble by minimizing complexity and finding time to simplify
- I thrive on change and adaptation
Inclusion
- I collaborate effectively with people of diverse backgrounds and cultures
- I nurture and embrace differing perspectives to make better decisions
- I recognize we all have biases, and work to be aware of them and grow past them
- I intervene if someone else is being marginalized
- I am curious about how our different backgrounds affect us at work, rather than pretending they don’t affect us
Integrity
- I am known for candour, authenticity, transparency, and being non-political
- I only say things about fellow employees that you say to their face
- I admit mistakes freely and openly
- I treat people with respect regardless of their status or disagreement with you
- I always share relevant information, even when worrisome to do so
- I am committed to assuring the leaders I work with adopt this same thinking for themselves
Impact
- I accomplish amazing amounts of important work
- I demonstrate consistently strong performance so people can rely upon me
- I strive to make your colleagues better
- I focus on results over process
Bringing your scale-up vision to life through intelligent people solutions