Chair
Martha Kesler
Vice Chair
Jamie Kelly
Treasurer
Amy Cowart
Trustees
Lori Blander
Marco Cassone
Sherry Duda
Jean Hartmann
Cindy Miller
Sanjay Naik
| |
|
|
Have an article you’d like to share with OD Network members? Something you have written or read recently? Email us at communication@odnetwork.org.
| |
|
The Biggest Mistakes New Executives Make
Sabina Nawaz, Harvard Business Review
Organizations invest a lot of time and money in hiring the right CEO or senior executive to set a vision and make the changes in their company. Yet within the first 18 months, there’s a 50% chance the executive will leave the organization. This failure comes with enormous costs, not only in disruption to the organization but financially, too. One estimate puts the cost at 10 times the executive’s salary – sometimes more.
The reasons these individuals leave are many. They often cite poor cultural fit, inadequate onboarding, or the lack of appropriate expectations. But in reality, many new executives inadvertently set themselves up for failure within the first few months of their tenure through their own actions.
| |
|
How Can Leadership Development Support Business Goals?
HRM Asia
Aligning leadership development goals with business needs remains an under-developed area of leadership development.
Research further shows nearly 60% of employees believe that their companies are not ready to meet the needs for improved leadership effectiveness, says Tom Rose, Head of Innovation and Customer Solutions, AchieveForum.
To meet this need, Rose says organisations can start by implementing the following three-step strategy.
| |
|
The 4 Types of Organizational Politics
Michael Jarrett, Harvard Business Review
The first 100 days are usually the honeymoon period for any new CEO to make their mark and get others on board. However, for Airbus CEO Christian Streiff, it was just a brief window before his abrupt departure from the European aircraft company that’s part of the EADS consortium, along with DiamlerChrysler and Aerospatiale-Matra.
| |
|
Overcome Resistance to Change with Two Conversations
Sally Blount and Shana Carroll, Harvard Business Review
cross industries and sectors, the track record for organizational change is bleak. Research finds that anywhere from 50%–75% of change efforts fail. And for those that do succeed, many don’t achieve the goals of the original vision. Why is change so hard?
Usually, figuring out the right answer is not the challenge, whether it’s a new strategy, more-efficient processes or systems, or a new structure that better meets the needs of a growing company. The biggest hurdle to effective organizational change is people. A core part of your job as a leader is to help others overcome the inherent, very human bias toward maintaining the status quo.
| |
|
How Boards Botch CEO Succession
Robert Hooijberg and Nancy Lane, MIT Sloan Management Review
The strategic importance of CEO succession is indisputable, and the elements of effective succession planning have long been known. So why do many boards plan poorly for CEO succession when the cost of failure is so high?
| |
|
Why Workplace Diversity Depends on Engaging Millennials
Jane Griffith and Eric Beaudan, The Globe and Mail
Millennials are the largest generation in the Canadian workplace – estimated to make up more than 50 per cent by 2020. The most educated and diverse generation yet, we believe they have different values and expectations about the workplace. We also believe that in the next decade or two, they have the potential to change the face of leadership in Canadian companies by radically increasing the number of diverse executives in the C-suite and at the board level. But this can only happen if organizations engage and develop this multidimensional cohort.
| |
|
Women May Find Management Positions Less Desirable
Francesca Gino, Scientific American
There is a striking gender gap in leadership positions across our society. Women represent 5 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs, only 15 percent of executive officers at those companies, less than 20 percent of full professors in the natural sciences, and only 6 percent of partners in venture capital firms. Scholars of the gap suggest that some of the explanation relates to how people perceive and react to women – the gender-based discrimination we so often read about in the news, which is perpetuated by both men and women. Compared to men, research shows, women are perceived as less competent and lacking in leadership potential. They receive fewer job offers and lower starting salaries, and are more likely to encounter challenges to, and skepticism of, their ideas and abilities.
These reasons no doubt play a role. But, as new research suggests, there is another reason that may also be important: women feel less happy than men when they occupy managerial positions, and expect to make more tradeoffs between life and work in high level positions. This points to a different way of understanding the problem and potentially solving it.
| |
|
Are You Using the Diversity Leaders in Your Organization?
Kellye Whitney, Workforce
I’m a sucker for packaging. It’s probably because I’m in the media and headlines are my business. I live for messaging that hooks and reels you in like a caught fish. The right word combo — you’ve got all my attention
For instance, I ran across The Only Way to Beat Unconscious Biases in the Workplace a few days ago. I mean, come on. That headline is perfect, right?
The article was good too — though the headline was better — it discussed methods talent leaders can use to tackle unconscious bias, specifically HR technology systems. Hint: It has nothing to do with the user experience and everything to do with what the author called, the nudge.
| |
|
The Best Cybersecurity Investment You Can Make Is Better Training
Dante Disparte and Chris Furlow, Harvard Business Review
As the scale and complexity of the cyber threat landscape is revealed, so too is the general lack of cybersecurity readiness in organizations, even those that spend hundreds of millions of dollars on state-of-the-art technology. Investors who have flooded the cybersecurity market in search for the next software “unicorn” have yet to realize that when it comes to a risk as complex as this one, there is no panacea — certainly not one that depends on technology alone.
| |
|
The Jobs That Artificial Intelligence Will Create
H. James Wilson, Paul R. Daugherty, and Nicola Morini-Bianzino, MIT Sloan Management Review
The threat that automation will eliminate a broad swath of jobs across the world economy is now well established. As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become ever more sophisticated, another wave of job displacement will almost certainly occur.
It can be a distressing picture.
But here’s what we’ve been overlooking: Many new jobs will also be created — jobs that look nothing like those that exist today.
| |
|
The Heavy Toll of ‘Always On’ Technology
Larry D. Rosen, interviewed by Frieda Klotz, MIT Sloan Management Review
How quickly should employees respond to emails? In most workplaces the answer is “right away.” But scientific research is starting to suggest that managers need to recognize the effect that being “always on” has on employee stress and overall efficiency.
More than a decade after the smartphone’s introduction, researchers have been tracking and analyzing its impact — and that of its addictive technological relatives, email and social media — on our brains. In their book The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World (The MIT Press, 2016), neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley and psychologist Larry D. Rosen reveal what happens in our brains when we get interrupted or self-distract and how that affects us behaviorally and psychologically. The book explains how internet-connected devices and expectations for immediate responses to communications degrade our attention, with implications not just for productivity but also for mental health and stress levels in the workplace
| |
|
Systematic Complex Problem Solving
Tiffany Yates and Ray List, OD Practitioner
Organizations face problems of varying importance, scope, and urgency. Evidence suggests a simple, scalable, and replicable framework (SSRF) is the utmost productive approach for complex problem solving. Despite perceived importance or complexity, single problems should not be viewed in a vacuum; instead, problems should be backlogged and analyzed for relative importance.
| |
|
Assessment: Do You Know How Bureaucratic Your Organization Is?
Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, Harvard Business Review
By our estimates, an excess of bureaucracy costs the U.S. economy more than $3 trillion in lost economic output per year. When you look at all 32 countries in the OECD, the cost of excess bureaucracy rises to nearly $9 trillion.
Yet while the incentives for dismantling bureaucracy are substantial, so are the hurdles. Bureaucracy is ubiquitous, familiar, and deeply entrenched. For most managers, bureaucracy is not merely the “safe” choice; it’s the only choice. They’re likely to see radically flat organizations like Haier, Valve, and Morning Star as weird exceptions, as opposed to valuable exemplars.
| |
|
The Art and Science of Evaluating Organization Development Interventions
Allan H. Church, OD Practitioner
How do we evaluate the impact of our organization change programs, processes, and initiatives? What are the best ways to measure success or failure of various interventions? How do we know we have really made a difference? While the field of organization development (OD) has its origins in action research and enhancing the growth and development of organizations and their people, if we are honest with ourselves, our focus as a field on formally evaluating the impact of our work has lagged far behind. The level of emphasis collectively placed as a field on the debate around having a clear and consistent definition of OD, the right set of core OD values, and creating new types of tools and techniques has far overshadowed the rigor and share of mind given to measuring the impact of our efforts.
| |
|
