Newsletter
November 2003
Spotlight: Talkin’ OD to Senior Management
If organization development (OD) is so critical to corporate 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. ...more
This
Issue:
“Change” in eight hours: Our one-day clinic in January will give HRPAO members a chance to play a high-octane change management “game.” ...more
Ballots, get your extra ballots here: Boost your chance of winning free tuition. ...more
OD Certificates: Presenting the IRC's #1 alumnus. ...more
Queen's IRC road show: Will we see you this fall? ...more
Our prized subscribers: These are the lucky folks who won the big prize in last month's newsletter contest. ...more
Bridging the info gap: How do you explain OD to the higher-ups? ...more
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Upcoming Programs
All - Toronto- Regina - Halifax
Sept. 21 - 26, Kingston
Industrial Relations
| Register | Sept. 22 - 25, Kingston
Building Smart Teams
| Register | Sept. 23 - 26, Toronto
Change Management
| Register | Sept. 30 - Oct. 03, Regina
Dispute Resolution
| Register | Oct. 07, Toronto
Performance Management Essentials and Strategy
| Register | Oct. 07 - 08, Toronto
Compensation Clinics (Performance+Group Benefits Programs)
| Register | Oct. 08, Toronto
Employee Group Benefits
| Register | Oct. 15 - 17, Toronto
Business Strategy
| Register | Oct. 19 - 24, Kingston
Negotiation Skills
| Register | Oct. 21 - 24, Regina
Building Smart Teams
| Register |
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Change Clinic: Eight hours to transformation
Queen's Industrial Relations Centre has partnered with Human Resources Professionals Association of Ontario to develop professional development programs of interest to HRPAO members. We have developed a series of “clinics,” one- and two-day programs run in Toronto designed to give core learnings in areas of interest to HR professionals. The next event is The Change Clinic, January 14, 2004. The Change Clinic is an accelerated learning program that helps you address major challenges such as:
- How to stay in tune with the trends impacting your organization;
- How to create the necessary sense of urgency; and
- How to build support and commitment for change.
In the morning, Dr. Carol Beatty, Queen's IRC Director and acknowledged expert in the field, offers the latest thinking in change management theory. In the afternoon, practice what you have learned by participating in the Change-O-Meter simulation. You and your team are presented with a case study in change management and asked to choose interventions to guide the “organization” to success. You'll be scored and given immediate feedback on the quality of your decisions.
OD Certificates: Presenting the IRC's #1 alumnus
Meet trailblazer Kathy Pals, the first recipient of a Queen's Industrial Relations Centre Certificate in Organization Development (OD).
Kathy, a senior human resources consultant at the Workers Compensation Board of Alberta in Edmonton, knows the value of big-picture HR—and what it takes to align people systems with strategic purpose inside her organization.
“I would definitely recommend the certificate to my colleagues here in Alberta, and beyond,” Kathy says. “It was a great experience, and I have the bonus of being the first graduate.”
Kathy received her new credentials after taking part in the Queen's IRC's first OD Foundations program in Kingston in early October. She had earlier attended both Change Management and Building Smart Teams (formerly Building High-Performance Teams), the other two required programs in the Certificate. And what did she think of the debut program? “The historical review of OD put its development into perspective with global and organizational evolution,” she says. “The whole systems philosophy challenged the group to take learning to a higher level, and the application of theory to our specific organizational challenges was extremely valuable.”
Queen's IRC is Canada 's leader in OD practitioner training, offering both the Certificate in Organization Development and the advanced Organization Development Master Certificate, which focuses on specialist areas and high-level facilitation skills.
In 2004, why not join Kathy and the Queen's IRC in breaking new ground by attending the following OD seminars:
March 29- April 2, 2004 and September 26- Oct. 1, 2004: OD Foundations—the blueprint for aligning people systems and strategic purpose
November 2-4, 2004: Designing Organizations for OD Practitioners - key concepts and skills for creating effective organizational designs
If you have questions about the OD seminars or certificates, please contact Brenda Barker, the Queen's IRC faculty member who designed the program, at 613-533-6000 x77086 or via email at bb7@post.queensu.ca . For brochures, visit our web site at www.IndustrialRelationsCentre.com .
Queen's IRC on the road
Our traveling road show this fall will be stopping at the Knowledge Exchange Conference, put on by the Canadian Society for Training and Development in Toronto, and the HR 2003 HR Solutions Show in Ottawa. The Knowledge Exchange runs November 12 and 13 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. The HR 2003 event takes place December 2 and 3 at the Ottawa Congress Centre. We hope to see you there.
For information on the Knowledge Exchange, go to: http://www.cstd.ca/conference/index.html
For information on HR2003, go to: http://www.smartcitysummit.com/HR2003/
We have our winners
Congratulations to the following lucky folks who won a copy of State of the Art and Practice in Dispute Resolution (published by IRC Press) in October's e-newsletter contest: Dawn Davies, Carolyn Dowding, Debbie Hansen, Rick Lewis and Tony Ransom.
Spotlight
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.
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Call us: 613 533 6628
Fax us: 613 533 6812
E-mail us: ircentre@post.queensu.ca
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