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When a business grows beyond a few dozen employees, it becomes difficult if not impossible for one person to lead simply by the strength of their personality, or manage all the activities of the business themselves. It becomes essential to establish organizational systems that will achieve his or her goals, and reinforce the culture envisioned by the leader.
"Organizational development is the system-wide application of behavioral science knowledge to the planned development and reinforcement of organizational strategies, structures, and processes for improving an organization's effectiveness."[1] In other words, “Get all the business functions and teams to work well together.”
The following are some of the ways that Change Leadership Resources can help you get your entire organization working with common purpose:
Leadership Team “Vision Sessions”
“A system is a network of interdependent components that work together to try to accomplish the aim of the system. A system must have an aim. Without the aim, there is no system.”
- W. Edwards Deming
The importance of providing your organization with a clear sense of direction cannot be overstated. A clear vision provides two critical elements: 1) It guides every communication or interaction that your employees may have with customers, superiors, peers, and subordinates by enabling them to be consistent with your goals; 2) It enables everyone to “correct course” that is, recognize when their activities are not advancing them toward the common goal, and take corrective action.
It is not uncommon to encounter situations where a leadership team understands their goals, or the need for change, but has difficulty translating their understanding of the issues into a compelling, “actionable” vision that will motivate and guide their organization. Through structured, facilitated sessions, customized for your team vision statements can be articulated.
Leadership Team “Troubleshooting”
“Because they are made up of imperfect human beings, teams are inherently dysfunctional. Building a team is both possible and remarkably simple …but it is painfully difficult.” So said Patrick Lencioni in his best-selling book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. It is common to encounter leadership teams that give the outward appearance of being on the same page, but are actually in serious trouble. Using an approach based on the techniques in Lencioni’s book, steps can be taken to improve the functionality of any leadership team.
Leadership Development
After studying organizational behavior for years with the Gallup organization, Marcus Buckingham famously observed, “People join companies, but they leave managers.” Another anonymous but equally wise person observed, “Your leaders’ better all be 10’s because 7’s hire 5’s and pretty soon you’ve got a mediocre organization.” Obviously, the development of leadership talent is critical.
Change Leadership Resources can help you with:
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360o Feedback process design and evaluation
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Coaching system development
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Leadership development program analysis
Change Management
Research conducted by McKinsey, GE and other organizations has found that the failure rate of business change initiatives is over two-thirds[2]. Post-mortems reveal that the root cause of the failures is not due to a poor quality technical strategy (most had a robust technical strategy!). The failures were the result of a lack of attention to the cultural impact of the changes, and failure to adapt seemingly unrelated business systems and structures to support the changes.
One of the core strengths of Change Leadership Resources is expertise in the application of the Change Acceleration Process (CAP) developed at GE in the 1990’s.
Follow the link below to read a detailed description of GE’s Change Acceleration Process (CAP)
Human Resources Processes Analysis & Design
The policies and processes of the Human Resources (HR) function are among the most powerful levers available to any leadership team for improving performance or shaping the culture of their organizations. However, for a variety of reasons, they are often overlooked.
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Performance management system design, development and evaluation
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Competency model development & deployment
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Hiring and staffing system design & development
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HR metrics design & development
Organization Structure Analysis & Design
If an organization is structured in such a way that the measurements and incentives work against the best interests of the organization as a whole, no amount of training or process improvement will overcome this. Because this is a relatively common problem, organization structure is routinely considered as a part of the Performance Analysis Phase. When necessary, a detailed analysis and re-structure recommendations can be performed.
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