PONO Consultants International
University football is associated more with tackling and touchdowns than with talking things out. But sometimes even the coaches need coaching.
The Saint Mary’s Huskies were at the top of their game last year, as usual, but people like head coach Steve Sumarah felt the program and some of the players were lacking a bit of direction.
Since they enlisted the help of PONO Consultants International Inc., however, the attitude on the team and commitment to the program has been second to none, Sumarah says. That holds true whether the players are on the field, in the classroom or in the community.
In conjunction with O’Regan’s Chev Olds, for instance, some players recently raised more than $1,800 for Hope Cottage by holding a car wash to support the foundation they had already set up to support the Halifax soup kitchen.
Then there was the visit to a lobster restaurant in Hubbards. After the Huskies dined there one evening, the owner called Sumarah to tell him he should be extremely proud of his team because they were the nicest, most mature group of young men she had ever seen come through the doors. This was from a woman who has spent more than 20 years in the restaurant business.
“Is that a reflection?” Sumarah asks. “I’d like to think it is. It was a pretty powerful statement. She had called and made it very, very clear that this was an impressive display.”
The Huskies’ on-field performance has also been more mature and even “business-like” since PONO came on board, he says.
“You’re dealing with a group of 18- to 24-year-old young men that are full of testosterone, they’re in a very physical game of football and sometimes things can get out of hand in practice. There can be fights or people chirping each other and things like that. I’ve been coaching now 15 years and this is the first year I can say I’ve not seen any of that.”
Why the radical change?
Sumarah explains that PONO president Judith Richardson met with all of the coaches and team leaders and helped steer the ship in the direction they wanted.
By leading players into a discussion and down a path they felt was important to the program – and holding them accountable by putting it in writing – Richardson managed to pull some vital tidbits out of the players they didn’t even know they had in them.
With 88 players on the team and more than 20 support staff and coaches, it can be hard to keep the ‘herd’ moving on the same path, Sumarah says. Too many players were unsure of their direction but once it was clearly laid out for them, they realized it was, in fact, the direction they craved.
Richardson is renowned for her strategic consulting and executive coaching style. Her work has taken her to far-flung corners of the world. When the government of the Altai Republic near Mongolia wanted to explore nationalizing its parks after people began chipping away at historic petroglyphs, PONO helped develop their strategic thinking.
She says she’s been called both an artist and a mechanic for her ability to engage others to visualize thoughts and how thoughts feed off one another. Not to mention her talent of recognizing subtle patterns in day-to-day interactions and how that affects peak performance.
A one-time paralegal (and later business-school professor), Richardson also helped launch the paralegal studies program at Nova Scotia Community College. Other past endeavours include restorative justice work in Hawaii and New Zealand.
The SMU grad has won numerous business awards for her organizational strategy, citizen engagement and executive coaching. Her clients range from Canadian Tire to the Russian Health Department to the Ministry of Education in Jamaica.
Born just outside Toronto, she lived in the southern U.S. for a while with her family until returning to Canada in high school. Richardson has now lived in Nova Scotia for more than 30 years and remains deeply committed to the region. When she decided to set up shop as a consulting/coaching agency, the then-single mother of two teenagers ignored everyone who told her she’d do better in Toronto.
“When you take a look at the Atlantic region, we have the same number of people as Toronto, and you don’t have to drive that much farther.”
Her belief that Halifax universities are second to none has also played a part in her decision to stay here.
Siobhan Murphy, who runs her own consulting business out of Long Island, New York, met Richardson during a class they took together in 2002 and then became a client of Richardson's.
Asked whether PONO’s geographic location makes any difference to its success, Murphy replies that Americans are more provincial in general than Canadians. And Nova Scotians like Richardson are even more sophisticated, in her view.
“I hear a more global perspective when I speak to Judi that I think comes from being sort of on the edge of the continent – closer to Europe than parts of North America.”
