Workplace & Leadership: This I Believe

In my work with organizations both as an employee and external consultant, I have learned (and continue to learn) many things over the years. Many of these have evolved or been entirely reversed, which is indicative of the fact that we are living at a very dynamic time.

For example, in a recent article in Harvard Business Review magazine, Michael J. Mauboussin writes about how organizations are so often using the wrong metrics to measure success. The continual focus on earnings per share instead of other metrics and statistics prevents these companies from fully understanding their business. It’s time for business leaders to adapt their thinking.

In this blog post, I thought I would simply state some of what I believe with regard to the workplace and leadership. Although these statements are likely to continue evolving over time, I believe they will retain a kernel of truth that should remain constant.

I am indebted to many great business leaders and theorists for these ideas and I apologize in advance for a lack of attribution.

• Most people want to do their very best at work.

• More autonomy for how the work gets done leads to greater employee satisfaction and higher productivity.

• Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them. They hire motivated people and inspire them.

• Character traits like zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity are common among great employees, yet are rarely advertised for or even looked for when seeking and interviewing candidates.

• Emotional intelligence may not get you the job, but it will undoubtedly keep you in the job and help you get promoted.

• Getting the right people focused on the right task is the most important objective for any organization to reach its goals.

• Focusing on employees first is what will make customers happy and this leads to happy shareholders.

• The role of a great leader is not to come up with great ideas. Instead, a great leader should create an environment in which great ideas can happen.

• Everyone has the capacity for leadership no matter the position.

• Leadership development should not be restricted to executives, but implemented throughout every level of the organization.

• Most of the billions of dollars companies invest in leadership development fall short of success because the programs are so heavily focused on data and assessment gathering and very little on people and processes.

• A high level of trust in the workplace is directly related to greater productivity, higher profitability and more engaged employees.

• Building trust and accountability are the most important things a manager should work on in order to get the most out his or her people.

• Praising workers in a meaningful way is a simple, yet highly effective means of raising employee satisfaction and overall productivity.

I welcome your thoughts and comments as well as other statements with regard to what you believe in order to extend the conversation.

Combining Best Practices of Expert Consulting and OD Consulting

One of the challenges in my line of work is clearly communicating the value of the services I provide. Organization development is a fuzzy term and it means different things to different people. Consulting is also a loose term that is hard to define.

Expert business consultants are often hired as a “pair-of-hands” to do something that cannot be done in-house because of time or resource constraints. These consultants are typically specialized in a particular business area and hired to complete a project with minimal supervision, assistance or even interaction with other people.

Organization development (OD) consultants provide planned interventions with individuals (leadership coaching, 360 evaluations), groups (conflict negotiation, team building, facilitation and training), or entire organizations (change management processes and implementation). OD consultants require a great deal of contact and collaboration with people directly involved in the intervention.

Organization development involves a system-wide application of behavioral science knowledge to a planned development as well as a reinforcement of organizational strategies, structures, and processes to improve an organization’s health and effectiveness. This cannot be done without the active participation of people within the organization.

OD consultants also work independently analyzing data as well as studying the client system with an outsider’s perspective, but we rely on both our client’s understanding and ownership of the problem at hand. In this way, we can become effective at helping the organization with their immediate challenges as well as provide learning and growth for tackling future issues on their own.

Expert consultants and OD consultants offer organizations huge benefits that supplement in-house management and staff. The consultant can be brought in when necessary to solve problems or develop opportunities as they arise.

But both the expert consultant and OD consultant could learn valuable lessons from each other in order to be even more beneficial to their clients.

Using an OD lens, the expert consultant could better look for signs of dysfunction, resistance, or a lack of trust within the client system. Paying more attention to these people issues can often mean the difference between a project’s success and failure.

The expert consultant should also consider taking a whole systems perspective when evaluating a particular project. Is the presenting problem really the issue or is it something larger within the entire organization that needs to be addressed before a sustainable solution can result?

A common downside in hiring an expert consultant is that if there is no learning from the work that is performed, then the next time the job needs to be completed, the consultant must be hired back again to do the same thing. This may be great for the consultant, but ultimately doesn’t serve the client very well.

The OD consultant is trained in the interdisciplinary fields of sociology and psychology, drawing on theories of motivation, learning and personality. Central to the OD process are the ideas of group dynamics and action research as well as maintaining a collaborative relationship with the client. The OD consultant is ultimately a change agent and knows how to get people in the organization involved in solving their own problems.

But the OD consultant could also learn important lessons from the expert consultant.

Much of the value the OD consultant provides is measured qualitatively rather than quantitatively. And though these results may be difficult to measure, especially because they are often longer in duration, measurements must be included in the scope of any project.

Perhaps most importantly, the goals of any OD project must be directly tied to a business result; otherwise the intervention can become merely an academic exercise.

Too often the OD consultant is caught up in helping people get along better, but not tying this directly to a business objective. The intervention may therefore appear much less important to the organization, no matter how much it has directly contributed to an increase in overall productivity.

Providing the best practices of expert consulting with solid measurable results that are tied to business objectives along with the best practices of OD consulting that incorporate people issues, a systems perspective and enables organizational learning is an approach that may ultimately deliver the best value to the organization. And that makes good business sense to us all.

Mark Craemer         http://www.craemerconsulting.com

What is OD?

As someone who spent many years working in organizations—both for-profit and not-for-profit—I found the challenges with people far outweighed the challenges with technology. That is, it was the “who” that mattered more than the “how” or “what.” I came to believe that improving the interrelationships between human beings can go a long way towards increasing overall performance as well as better the workplace environment. This is a central reason for why I entered the field of organization development.

Last week here in Seattle I attended the annual OD Network Conference where more than 800 of us gathered to join and learn. It was exciting to be among such legendary OD professionals as Peter Block, Roger Harrison, Barry Oshry, Edgar Schein, Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff. It also got me thinking that, as a profession, we’ve been speaking primarily to ourselves rather than to the world at large. From my interactions with potential clients, the definition of organization development as well as its application is not widely understood. OD could certainly use a make-over to better define it in terms of benefits to the organization.

So what exactly is organization development? Quite simply, OD is a planned effort to increase an organization’s effectiveness and health. According to organizational consultant and author Warren Bennis, organization development is a complex strategy intended to change the beliefs, attitudes, values and structure of organizations so that they can better adapt to new technologies, markets and challenges. It can involve interventions in the organization’s processes, using behavioral science knowledge as well as organizational reflection, system improvement, planning and self-analysis.

From Kurt Lewin, widely recognized as the father of OD, came the ideas of “group dynamics” and “action research,” which are central to the basic OD process as well as the notion of a collaborative client/consultant relationship. OD is interdisciplinary in nature and draws on sociology, psychology, and theories of motivation, learning and personality. The OD consultant acts as a change agent with expertise in behavioral science and knows how to get people in an organization involved in solving their own problems.

Some specific contemporary examples of organization development efforts are team building, conflict negotiation, leadership development, change management, process improvement and more. These efforts can be implemented through process consulting, coaching, training, facilitation and other methods.

All organizations could benefit from organization development interventions because OD consultants use a systems perspective and help make processes more efficient, increase employee engagement, build better leaders and facilitate sustainable change initiatives. All of these interventions can directly effect the bottom line, but this may not be apparent in the short term.

I believe we OD professionals, both internal and external, could do our profession a great service by better measuring our efforts and then reporting the results more widely. Despite the fact that things such as group dynamics, employee engagement and improved leadership are difficult to measure, we should use both qualitative and quantitative methods to better justify these interventions and report them beyond the usual academic and OD professional communities. Only through this sustained effort will more potential clients be receptive to our work and actively seek it out to better their organizations.

Mark Craemer                               www.craemerconsulting.com