Articles for Leaders & Change Practitioners
leadership
Conflict
Resolution
Organization
Development
A Question of Loyalty
I was consulting with a significant part of a large aerospace company. I was interviewing a very senior vice president. He was complaining about how hard it had become holding on to top employees. Of particular concern to him was what he saw as the lack of loyalty of...
You Can’t Do It Alone and. . .
You Don't Have to Many leaders have the notion that it is lonely at the top. Like so many things, if you believe it, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The fact is no one has ever accomplished anything of any significance alone. Think about that. I think about my...
Get to Critical Mass Support with System Mapping
Creating change in human systems such as teams and organizations is a matter of developing a critical mass of support for the change goal. Of course, developing that critical mass may involve working through whatever resistances there are and resolving the conflicts...
Changing an Organization’s Culture
Changing an organization's culture or the norms of a team is not something to take lightly. An organization's culture is the pattern of how it routinely behaves much like the personality of a human being. The analogy is apt since an organization is a human system....
Don’t Waste Your Strategic Plan
Don't waste your strategic plan. A good strategic plan serves as the focal point for how an organization toward both long and short-range success. It provides… Direction for aligning an organization's staff and activitiesCriteria for organizational decision-making....
The Ways We Waste Our Time and Energy: Conscious Use of Self #2
Time is a resource. And leaders never have enough of it. There are staffs to be managed, customers to coddled, finances to figured out, superiors to satisfy, and the partner and kids at home to be pleased and loved. The list goes on and on. Time’s a wastin'. Yet, we...
Self-Mastery: The Foundation of Effective Leadership (and a lot else!)
The foundation of effective leadership is self-mastery. When followers aren't following and results are hard to come by, the first place a leader needs to look is at themselves. When life isn’t working for you, when you aren’t getting the results you want, when your...
Leadership = Some Place to Go and People Willing to Follow
Great leaders are going someplace extraordinary and lots of people follow them! Leaders in most organizations know where they want to go. Keeping followers aligned and in sync to get there, however, can be frustrating. Here are seven areas to turn that frustration into excitement. All of the questions are born from the two primary aspects of leadership: They have some place to go, and they have people following them!
Quick and Easy Consensus Decision-Making
Consensus decision-making has the reputation of being very time-consuming. It needn’t be if the steps outlined below are followed. The failure of most supposed consensus procedures result from failing to ask those objecting if they are willing to accede to the...
Six Ways to Cure the Dysfunctional Team Blues
The CEO is frustrated! She is the CEO of a major health care organization and, like many other organization leaders, believes in teams. She has project teams, functional teams, cross-functional teams, process improvement teams, etc. A few of those teams work very well...
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Definition of Organization Development
Let’s clarify the definition of organization development (OD), the most powerful technology for managing change in human systems. It is unclear to too many people and organizations who could need it. Not too long ago, I was having dinner with a client during a project...
Quick and Easy Consensus Decision-Making
Consensus decision-making has the reputation of being very time-consuming. It needn’t be if the steps outlined below are followed. The failure of most supposed consensus procedures result from failing to ask those objecting if they are willing to accede to the...
Sustainable Interventions
You used all of your skills to move your team from being dysfunctional to one with a high level of productivity, full engagement of all team members, and they even had some fun together. But will your success last? Will they revert back to dysfunction when you can’t...
Six Ways to Cure the Dysfunctional Team Blues
The CEO is frustrated! She is the CEO of a major health care organization and, like many other organization leaders, believes in teams. She has project teams, functional teams, cross-functional teams, process improvement teams, etc. A few of those teams work very well...
The Why, What, & How of Organization Development
An upated and restructured definition of organization development
It Takes Dragons
People ask me why I use a rather fierce looking dragon as my Center for Human Systems’ logo. Dragons are known throughout the world in all climates, cultures, and eras. There are dragons with horns, claws, breath of fire, great size (some small), wondrous wings (some...
OD Is Not A Recipe!
Lean, Six Sigma, Prosci, and other formulized change management methodologies all offer an orderly set steps to take—a recipe for ending waste, improving productivity, and otherwise accomplishing desired changes. There are, of course, several recipes from organization...
Give Your Clients What They Need, Not What They Want
A CEO of a medium-sized hospital asked me to train his front-line patient-facing staff in how to be pleasant to patients. The head of IT department asked me to facilitate “an advance” for her and her staff. She pointedly told me that everything was working well; that...
The Power and The Problem of Organization Development
Organization development is the most powerful technology we have for managing change in human systems. Yet, that focus on human systems, which is the heart of OD’s power, is also its problem. OD is misunderstood and misrepresented most often because Westerns in...