a major pharmaceutical company. Our client (the president of the division) hired us because although he felt like he had managers who had very good technical skills, they did not know how to engage their people. The impact was major quality issues in production due to human error, missing targets for delivery, and safety was slipping. During the time that we were there, the organization also went through a major acquisition doubling the organization from 11,000 to 29,000 people; given the acquisition, there were major issues related to developing one consistent culture.Our work over five years created a common language and culture; ensured all leaders and managers developed skills to effectively engage with people at all levels, especially inspiring and ensuring work effectively on the shop floor; enabled the shop floor members to lean in and speak up; and did this in a global organization with over 90 plants and operations worldwide. Through our interventions we were able to link our work on inclusion to the on-going work on lean Six Sigma (lean eliminates waste in the processes); inclusion was how they achieved results—inclusion eliminates waste in interaction as people speak a common language and work in collaboration. Among other skills, our interventions focused on creating internal change agents and peer-to-peer development. We were also able to document real shifts in the ROI, in measures that mattered for the organization—time to market, reduction in human errors, improved safety records, and significantly increased numbers of innovative ideas that were suggested, implemented, and reduced cost. [For more information on ROI, see Katz & Miller, 2017.]
5 What do you think are the most important skills for a student of OD to develop?Knowing self and being a lifelong learner about self, others, and organizations.
6 Many students say that OD is a difficult profession to “break in” to. What advice do you have for students wishing to get started in the field?Find a partner or team; do not work alone.
7 Feel free to include here any other information (about you, the current or future state of OD, etc.) that you would like students to know.The Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group, Inc. (1970–present) is the oldest OD consulting and the oldest diversity firm. We have been various sizes throughout the years and are now 12 people. However, when the consultants were employees, the firm was 48 people. Many of our clients have been Fortune 100 companies; however, we have a wide range of backgrounds, including work in manufacturing, industrial, sales, retail, energy, transportation, consumer goods and services, telecommunications, media, technology, education, finance, insurance, health services, government, and nonprofits.I see one of the new frontiers of the field will be the work interactions between people and AI.
Dialogue and Collaboration
As early as 1969, Beckhard noticed that “one of the major problems affecting organizational effectiveness is the amount of dysfunctional energy expended in inappropriate competition and fighting between groups that should be collaborating” (p. 33). Indeed, the same can be said of individuals. A key value in organization development is the creation of healthy environments that promote collaboration rather than competition, with the assumption that a win-win solution is both possible and more desirable than conflict. This does not mean that the suppression of conflict is desired; in fact, the opposite is true. OD interventions seek to bring conflicts to light where they can be addressed in a healthy manner through open dialogue, rather than to allow the suppression of conflict that continues to fester unspoken. Moreover, the goal is for organizational members to learn how to recognize hidden conflict and to deal with it in an appropriate manner.
Authenticity, Openness, and Trust
According to Burke (1977), in a review of organization development trends, authenticity was on its way to overtaking democracy as a primary value in the field. When we create competitive environments, organizations develop as contexts in which it is valued and rewarded to withhold information or mislead to gain status and authority. Collaborative practices cannot succeed in that environment. Instead, they demand that we act in an authentic manner. Being authentic means being straightforward, genuine, honest, and truthful about one’s plans, opinions, and motivations. This has implications for how managers communicate with employees, for example, in providing an honest explanation for a project (what the project is intended to accomplish and why) as well as one’s own opinions and beliefs about it. Authentic leadership demands consistency in words and actions as followers look to leaders’ behavior to assess whether their talk is forthright and can be trusted (Goffee & Jones, 2005). Leaders demonstrate trust by giving employees information; explaining organizational direction, values, principles, and rationales; including them in dialogues and discussions; and allowing them to make decisions. This value applies not only to organizational members but also to OD practitioners, who must be authentic with clients in order to expect the same in return. This means confronting clients where appropriate and being honest with the client in the assessment of the data and one’s own feelings.
No intervention or organization holds to all of the values listed here as static entities. In fact, it is probably not useful to think of values as categories, but instead to think of them as a project or objective. Many practitioners think of OD values not as states (e.g., an organization is or is not participative, is team-oriented or individual-oriented), but rather as a continuum or direction. They represent movement away from traditional notions about organizational bureaucracy and human behavior (like Theory X, discussed in Chapter 2) and toward alternative humanistic views about individuals and groups. Any consulting engagement or intervention strategy successfully modeling OD’s core values can be seen as moving an organization toward these values rather than turning on one value and turning off another as you would a light switch. This belief demonstrates the value of being “in process,” that organizations and individuals are continually growing and changing.
Changes to OD Values Over Time and the Values Debate
The humanistic roots of organization development began with its foundation as a field interested in individual growth and self-awareness. OD has always had theoretical, practical, and humanistic components, with focus varying in one of these three areas at times in its history (Friedlander, 1976). Recently, however, as we discussed in Chapter 2, the movement toward organization effectiveness has taken a greater hold in OD as practitioners are more frequently asked to consult on organizationwide changes.
Two surveys of OD practitioners (one in the early 1990s, the other in 2012) can provide some insight into how OD practitioners see the importance of values to their work. In the first of these, Church, Burke, and Van Eynde (1994) found an increase in practitioners’ values toward achieving business effectiveness outcomes (such as increasing productivity, enhancing quality, or developing a competitive advantage) over traditional humanistic values (such as openness, collaboration, and other values described above). (Compared with these first two categories, practitioners ranked lower on the list those values related to the external environment, such as caring for the natural environment and enhancing corporate citizenship.) In fact, the major values in both categories (business effectiveness and humanistic concerns) were ranked almost equally in their importance to practitioners. The researchers noted that contemporary practice deals much more frequently with organizationwide, bottom-line results and that experiential activities for individuals and groups are no longer the mainstream of organization development practice.
In the follow-up survey 20 years later, Shull, Church, and Burke (2013) noted quite a few similarities in the results. Practitioners continue to be focused on business effectiveness, but not to the detriment of humanistic values. They write that “OD practitioners remain largely focused on employee welfare and driving positive change in the workplace. Humanistic values such as empowering employees, creating openness of communication, promoting ownership and participation, and continuous learning remain strong” (Shull, Church, & Burke, 2014, p. 25). Fewer practitioners reported that OD has a “touchy feely” reputation, but they also noted a perception that the traditional values of the field are weakening (a perception that was held most strongly by newer practitioners).
This business results in emphasis in organization development targets bottom-line results that can involve downsizing and job