Explaining
OD to Senior Management
By
Christina Sutcliffe, Queen's IRC research assistant
Building
leadership. Forming partnerships across boundaries. Aligning
structure and resources with purpose. These are common phrases
in the corporate lexicon, but how do the concepts behind them
work to benefit an organization's performance?
To
answer this question, human resource professionals,
organization consultants, and progressive senior business
leaders are turning to organization development (OD). OD draws
together various concepts in a cohesive, systems perspective
to align structure, leadership, learning, and relationships
for maximum strategic leverage.
If
OD is so critical to an organization's survival, why aren't
all companies bidding for OD consultants as if they were the
last electric generators on the eve of Y2K? It is because the
potential impact of an OD initiative is not widely
recognized—and perhaps we as HR professionals are partially
to blame. We need to clearly demonstrate to our senior leaders
how OD pervades almost every aspect of an organization's
ability to be effective.
To
understand the information gap regarding OD and its benefits,
the Queen's Industrial Relations Centre earlier this year
surveyed HR and OD practitioners from the Toronto and Ottawa
areas about the purpose and pervasiveness of OD in their daily
work. By sharing a sample of our findings, we hope to provide
a starting point for your conversations with senior leaders
about what OD is and why it is important—and ultimately, to
add momentum to OD's application within your organizations.
Below
are the IRC's questions and verbatim samples of responses we
received.
What
is the purpose of OD?
Our
participants told us the purpose of OD is to:
- Identify
and build an organization's competencies to achieve
strategy
- Align
organization resources to achieve goals
- Work
to support the management of strategic change
- Build
capacity by enhancing thinking capabilities at every level
- Continually
reinvent the organization
- Identify
how structure inhibits performance
We
quickly noticed themes emerging from these responses. Simply
stated, we began to see OD as the link between people with
purpose. Every organization has a unique set of goals, values,
and beliefs, with a supporting strategic plan. All
organizations, however, need to support their employees by
setting them up for success. Alignment of organization
characteristics—resources and leadership, for example—is
critical to achieving organization goals effectively and
efficiently. Disorganized resources or low-leverage leadership
may set up an organization for failure rather than success.
What
do OD professionals do in an organization?
In
answering this question, our participants reflected that OD
concepts and practices are fundamental to their everyday role.
Ironically, the application of OD in workplaces is not
recognized, even in some HR departments. Here is a sample of
what HR and OD practitioners believe OD professionals are
doing in organizations today:
- Leadership
and team development
- Ensuring
the right people are in the right place at the right time
- Restructuring
core business
- Organizational
design
- Learning
development and consultation
- Managing
and disseminating knowledge
- Facilitation
and conflict handling
Themes
emerged from the work participants said OD professionals are
doing. For example, there appear to be five common
characteristics that OD is being applied to: Strategy,
Leadership, Design, Learning, and Relationships.
As
we continued to review responses from our focus groups, it
became clear that issues and challenges faced by HR and OD
professionals fit easily into one of these five areas. They
provide a clear framework for linking people with purpose, and
a solid foundation for the IRC to consider comprehensive
applications related to OD diagnosis, intervention and
evaluation using its new model, the Blueprint for Organization
Effectiveness.
Why
do organizations require OD?
This
question gave participants the opportunity to reaffirm the
importance of OD in organizations, and to help one another in
creating urgency for the application of OD in their
workplaces:
- Organizations
need to be proactive rather than reactive
- To
change the perception that a “leader” is someone at
the top of an organization
- To
create functionality between policies and procedures, and
formal structure
- To
help define and nurture new partnerships
- To
break through functional and departmental silos to
facilitate creation and innovation
- To
think about how to really add value, and to partner with
organizations to help think about the role of employees in
adding value
- To
attract and retain human resources in a competitive labour
pool
Our
participants' responses suggest that OD is a critical
foundation to begin a methodical and comprehensive review of
an organization's effectiveness. Leaders know that aligning
these areas is critical to achieving strategic goals. What
they may fail to realize is that the work of OD provides a
systematic way for dealing with these complexities.
One
of the most prevalent struggles identified by our participants
is the senior leaders' need for a definitive understanding of
OD. Again, this seemingly points to an information gap: if
senior leaders were familiar with the practice of OD and more
clearly understood its impact, perhaps more thought would be
given to the potential organization benefits.
The
HR and OD practitioners we surveyed told us that OD “creates
alignment with the organization's strategic goals.” We
learned through our discussions that OD and HR practitioners
are challenged with the same issue: how to educate senior
leaders about the benefits of OD to create leverage for its
application in their organization. We hope these findings
provide you with a starting point to begin this discussion in
your workplace.
Copyright
2003 Industrial Relations Centre, Queen’s University,
Canada.
