What more does OD need to do to become a “must have”, desirable” function for Organisations?

Over the past years, I have worked with a number of very competent and experienced internal OD teams within major organisations. Many of them contained exciting people and I was wowed by their extensive knowledge base in OD and everything else. Yet, most of the teams’ key searching question has been – “how do we get the organisation to trust us enough to voluntarily come and consult us on big macro strategic and change issues?” (vs just being asked to do team facilitation, conduct organisation surveys, coach and work with talents, etc.) All of them - at the design stage of whatever work we were doing -- asked me whether I could tutor them on how to increase their power and impact. One particular team disguised this concern by wanting to know more about how to use metrics to show the organisation they were “worth it”. I must admit that I was surprised by the common concern all teams expressed – especially as in my eyes, they were already very impressive professionals. But I also know demonstrating competence does not necessarily guarantee us being valued by our clients - something else needs to happen. In fact, I saw when the financial crunch came some of the OD teams were dismantled as OD function was not regarded as necessary.  Hence this blog.

I will share briefly the following clusters of factors that may help to propel the OD professional function into the “must have” function for both the organisation and for their senior leaders. The list is not exhaustive and should be adapted depending on the cultural context (organisation and national). 

Cluster One:     Know your context and stay strategic

1.    Be externally and business savvy and focused – OD practitioners always need to know the “ground”, the context in which we do the work. No two organisations have the same context, hence always be ready to inquire into both the facts (statistics, figures, history, consumer feedback, number of customer complaints, “worthwhile” competitors and their comparative market share, the effectiveness of their and the organisation brand and market survey, etc) and the subjective perception organisation members have about their organisation – especially about the organisation’s standing in the environment in which they operate. Always ask What are the facts? So what are the implications? And now what for the organisation - both strategically and for OD intervention? (Adaptive Action)

2.    Aim to work in the strategic sphere – Knowing the above will earn the OD function the right to support the organisation strategic processes – from formulation to implementation. This will also give the OD function a role to support the achievement of the organisation’s strategic ambition, especially by showing senior leaders the importance of a corresponding internal OD plan. OD practitioners always wonder how to show our ROI - by supporting the implementation of an OD plan that links closely to the strategic plan, we have a natural process to show whether any OD interventions have or have not contributed to the success of the organisation’s strategic priorities. By being savvy with the external environment we become natural partners with strategists, and we then can work in tandem to support the senior leaders. If we cannot play in the corporate strategic sphere, start with business unit leaders or functional or divisional leaders.  Any OD function will render itself vulnerable if their main portfolio of work is only on team building or coaching activities or organising conferences and events, etc. When senior leaders see us as extra, add on, or non-strategic the function will suffer in reputation.

3.    Work hard to build a strong relationship and close partnership with the strategic function – In order to gain partnership with the strategic function, OD practitioners need to treat strategists as well as their key stakeholders (top tier leadership) as clients – find out who they are, seek opportunities to do favours for the strategists, help them to look even more clever, educate them about the importance of ownership and engagement from the staff as a key pre-requisite for successful implementation. In this way, we can slowly sneak in with them as partners to enrol more people within the organisation to contribute, to participate, to shape the strategy so that there will be widespread collective intelligence involved in the strategic formulation processes.  Aim to pass on the skills while helping them to design interventions to achieve collective ownership of the organisation strategic ambition, not to mention ensuring all levels and functions will be strategically savvy. OD’s ultimate concern is to help organisation members to know how to become strategically relevant while continuously investing time to develop the health of .  

Cluster Two:    Focus on human enterprise and yet make sure we put “O” back into the OD work.

4.    Be theory-based effective interveners – There is nothing as practical as a working theory, so it is important that all OD practitioners should continue to pursue an expanded knowledge of OD theories, frameworks, and principles. Once you have a firm grounding in the above (together with the OD cycle), you will not be held hostage by certain tools and methods – we can design any intervention in real time. Intervention for OD is the action thrust of our theories. Hence, having an internal OD function capable to design and execute interventions that work – as based on applied behaviour science is a real gift to the organisation.

The job of the Head of OD is to make sure the internal OD team will have a wide range of OD intervention skills based on a sound grasp of the various core theories of OD. By “wide range”, I mean the OD team needs to aim to be able to cover between themselves all levels of system intervention – from to inter, to group, to inter-group, to bigger , to system, and inter-whole system level. If there is a gap in intervention skills, always be willing to bring someone in to do the work while negotiating a clear contract with the supplier that as they do the work, they will train members of the internal team to do the work later. Finally, it is important all OD team need to be “system thinkers” – focusing on System Theory, holism, systemic alignment, total system development and grounding our intervention on this core theoretical premise, not to mention proactively teaching all leaders to be system thinkers also.

Never miss an opportunity to shift culture, of behaviour within a systemic mindset (especially during change – using the change process to embody the cultural endgame).  When commissioned to do any job, always ask what we can do to close the gap between espoused theory and theory in use. As said, if we have not touched culture, we have not done our work. To uncover the deeply held cultural assumptions, we need NOT to dish out our own verdict about the organisation’s culture, but design processes to support the organisation members to stay curious (vs judgemental) to do their own action research and investigate their dominant cultural patterns - and engage them in dialogue as to whether they think the current behavioural patterns support or derail their strategic ambitions. Also, as the team grow in skills, stir further curiosity among them to learn how to shift behaviour - covertly as well as overtly. In the end, our aim is to help the organisation NOT just to achieve change successfully, but to help leaders to build great organisations with a healthy culture.

Cluster Three: Pass on your OD skills and help to build OD capability to all leaders.

5.    Take on a facilitative-educational approach to ensure all clients eventually will be able to be their own OD consultants. The senior leaders are the primary OD practitioners in the organisation because they hold the custodian role to build great organisation – effective outside and healthy inside (Schein). This means our job is to transfer knowledge to them in whatever channels we have access to. Always carry with you a few educational pieces of material (slides, articles, models, frameworks…) and make this question one of your standard ones -- “while we are talking about this, or before we make that decision, would you give me 5-10 minutes to show you some information so that you will be able to make informed choices?”  Be generous, always give out tools and articles to any leaders, managers, strategists, HR, LD colleagues who want to try things themselves with their own team. Seek partnership with leadership development colleagues and encourage them to build OD topics into the leadership development curriculum.  If it is appropriate, work with them to co-design and co-teach OD basics to emerging leaders.  

What OD basics? Start with three key areas:

a)    What is an organisation? This is such an obvious area, but the majority of leaders are never taught properly when they are given the role to be in charge of company;

b)    Dialogical skills - When leaders know how to inquire, hold meaningful dialogue, and help staff and colleagues to make sense of what is going on in the organisation, the organisation culture will shift significantly. Moreover, being an inquirer will naturally turn the leaders into diagnosticians as they realise very quickly making decisions based on their own view would not constitute ROBUST decisions, nor would they win support from others.  Help them to embrace “change begins one conversation at a time” in their belly.

c)    Facilitation skills - Since people at work spend a majority of their time in meetings, helping leaders to learn basic facilitation skills to focus on both task and maintenance issues will not only improve efficiency but also make meetings more authentic and real. Eventually progressing them into GPC skills (Group Process Consultation) will be a big gain for the organisation.

6.    Do shadow work to enable clients to be competent OD practitioners with their own team and in their role – Part of building up the OD capability of clients is to help them to gradually take the design role, then eventually move into taking an upfront role to do their own intervention. We start to find out their desire and motivation, then support them to get there by real-time teaching, showing them the design of intervention processes, asking them what they are ready to do, then backing them up with solid support and thorough preparation. When they are successful in intervening in their own system, they will, by default, help to usher OD thinking into the organisation routine – which is what we aim to make happen. When we help them to be competent and successful in building the organisation they want, they will always remember the role we have played to support them. Wherever they go, they will call us to take them to the next level of challenge. Many OD practitioners want to play the upfront role without realising that by cultivating the shadow role we are doing exactly what OD ultimately aims for – growing independence among system members to do their own work. Would that make us redundant? No, because the organisation is forever evolving and there are always emerging areas where no one knows what to do (including us) but the clients will always come back to us and ask – “how should we approach this?” Together, we enter into the joy of learning while partnering with our clients. As they grow, we grow.

Cluster Four:   Be Relational Centric while using power and politics to get things done.

7.    Make relationships our TOP Work – As a helping profession, a support function – we all need to earn the “right to help”. People do NOT need to come to us unless they think we are a good resource for them. So besides getting ourselves to be “top notch” in the OD practice field, we need to proactively create sufficiently easy and safe access for people to ask us to help. By asking for help, people are putting themselves in a one DOWN position (Ed Schein) and by default, we are in a one UP position. This power dynamic is ultimately not sustainable because no one wants to stay in a DOWN position for long. One of the more effective ways to intentionally balance this dynamic is to build trust, and that will not emerge from a relationship vacuum. This forces us to challenge ourselves. Do we see a relationship in a transactional way – to get things done or do we hold the belief of the sanctity of all human relationships (as Martin Buber pointed out that relationship is an “I-Thou” matter). I have rarely seen any OD practitioner being successful in the long run without paying attention to his/her relationship work. The payoff, if we do, is abundance and life feeding work experiences – as people come to us because we have something that they deem desirable – referent power.

8.    Power and Politics (a norm of all organisation) – Most organisations operate in a pluralistic context which is made up of different interest groups, each pursuing their individual functional or specialist interest legitimately. Hence conflict is inevitable, and a normal part of the way things get done. Bargaining and formation of coalitions are often a necessary means to achieve goals. All OD teams need to know they operate in real political terrain in which different types of power are being used every day on them (and they on the clients). For example, positional  power comes from rank and roles; expert power is based on one’s area of expertise; information power is based on what special information we hold; favour power is exhibited by supporting others to be successful; resource power is having capacity and ability to offer resource to others; proxy power is being trusted by people in power; reward power is the ability to give tangible or intangible (social) reward to others. Personal/referent power is the highest form of power – i.e. by being who we are, people refer themselves to us as they will identify with and be attracted to the presence we have. Often this presence is non-reactive, non-judgemental, tolerant, supportive, inclusive, and developmental – always working to ensure all parts of the system will win. All OD teams need to put POWER AND POLITICS in their meeting and developmental agenda so that they will learn how to use power constructively and role model an antithesis to the destructive power play which often dominates the political scene of most organisations. For curiosity’s sake, do pause and count the type of powers you and your team are using already without knowing the labels. Power well used will increase our influence, especially if we use power in an affiliative way.

9.    Sharpening our instrumentality - The concept of use of self is a core one for OD. As many writers (Nevis, Seashore, Jamieson, Cheung-Judge, Burke) put it - Use of self is the way in which we act upon our observations, values, feelings and then intentionally execute an intervention necessary for the situation that presents. As we develop a heightened self-awareness, we allow our own sensations, feelings, knowledge and judgement to inform what action (or no action) we will need to take. In both OD and Gestalt, we value the practitioner’s own sense of “presence” in the “here and now” – always working with and not hung up about the pre-determined design in a way. This fluid sense of our willingness to go deep within ourselves and to continuously sharpen our own inner world – for example seeking and working with feedback, getting to know our ROTS and shadows, discovering and working with what stumbles us. We must also work on acknowledging, owning and expanding our strengths, learning to achieve more balanced self-talk – focusing more on affirming self-talk versus allowing our destructive and critical negative talk to harm both ourselves and others. Ultimately, it is the willingness to go deeper within ourselves that will help us to grow our presence. Once we achieve that state, we will automatically become a powerful role model to show what is needed for genuine growth in each of the clients we work with as well as for ourselves.

10. Engage in mutual accountability, supervision and self-care seriously - One habit we will need to build – especially if in an internal intact team is regular supervision (peer or group or one to one) so that mutual accountability is put in place. Working with living systems cannot be an exact science. It requires well-grounded, applied behaviour science knowledge, taking risks in experimentation, building up practice experience, getting feedback on the impact of certain practice and continuous development. Not to mention how our inner being shapes our outer behaviour and practice. Hence, it is important that all OD practitioners seek some form of supervision so that not only is there mutual accountability, but also a continuous push for growth and development. Beside supervision, OD practitioners need to be “in the flow” and have sufficient positive energy to keep doing good work.

How do we make sure we will be able to bring our BEST SELF to work? Self-care is the answer - from having “reflective” days to engaging in continuous learning, deeper inner work, shadowing others, reading, etc. Whatever will help to put fuel back into the tank is what we should do. We need our community of colleagues to help us to take self-care seriously. Clients do not just value our competence, but our energy, our aspiration on their behalf, our hope for the system, and our positive talk. This means ensuring our tanks are filled should become a collective habit for the team because when we are in flow in service to the clients, we will become the “must have” resources.     

My ending remarks:

It has been great when I see an OD function thrive and, equally, very sad when I see OD function reduced to an “extra pair of hands”, not allowed to play in the strategic zone, and OD practitioners losing their mojo and motivation. The worst thing is to see an OD function being closed down or merged with other functions – losing its marginality and its distinctiveness. It is time for all of us to be brave enough to embrace our ambition – to make ourselves the “must have” and “most desirable” practitioners/function in the organisation, working in partnership with many, but holding our unique OD torch to build great organisations as part of our effort to maintain civil society, corporation, government. Move forward with a positive and hopeful edge. I am cheering you on from Oxford UK.

Possible Action for Readers:

a)    Bring the OD team together after you read the article for a two-hour meeting.

b)    Rate your internal OD team on a scale of 0 to 10 and see where your team stands on the continuum as a “must have” function in the organisation.

c)    Share with each other the reasons behind the rating – using some of the 10 factors to start your discussion, but add other factors that are deemed as important within your organisational context.

d)    Then together brainstorm what the team needs to do to up the rating a notch or two. Identify baby steps collectively to build the OD function brand, and chart some of the possible development areas.

e)    Identify how the team will implement and monitor the actions.