| This month we're proud to feature articles by our Lifetime Achievement Winners, David Cooperrider and Peter Sorensen!
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This month's issue features two articles by OD Network members. Have an article you’d like to share? Something you have written or read recently? Email us at communication@odnetwork.org.
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How to Help an Employee Who Rubs People the Wrong Way
Rebecca Knight, Harvard Business Review
If you’ve ever cringed in a meeting when your direct report was talking, you know how tough it can be to watch a team member undermine themselves. Maybe the person is interrupting colleagues too often. Or being condescending, or even combative. No matter the specific behavior, your employee is clearly rubbing people the wrong way. As the manager, you know it’s your job to address the issue, but you’re not sure how to start the conversation. What should you say? How do you broach the topic?
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How to Become a Game-Changing Leader
Doug Ready and Alan Mulally, MIT Sloan Management Review
In recent years, we have come to believe that it is increasingly important for business leaders to learn how to build companies that are simultaneously purpose-driven, performance-focused, and principles-led. We developed this point of view from two quite different perspectives: One of the authors is an academic and adviser to C-suite executives on building enterprise leadership capability, and the other is an executive, board member, and CEO coach who, as CEO and president of Ford Motor Co. from 2006 to 2014, led a successful turnaround at that company.
At a time when the pace of change in business is faster than ever, we believe that building organizations with these three characteristics is no longer a choice. Being performance-driven is clearly essential to success; continuous disruption, rapid technological innovation, and turbulence require that today’s leaders build agile organizations with resilient employees in order to achieve superior performance.
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Misunderstanding The Point Of Leadership Development
Micah Solomon, Forbes
The point of the many leadership development tools that the modern world has to offer–leadership training, mentorship of future leaders, leadership keynote speakers with their take on the subject–may not be what you think it is.
The goal isn't to grow great leaders: refined, articulate, generous, charismatic leaders. At least that's not the ultimate goal.
The goal is to build great organizations. Great companies. Great results.
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Globalization is not Ending, It’s Changing
Arindam Bhattacharya and Rajah Augustinraj, livemint.com
In India, as in other parts of the world, people have grown accustomed to the benefits of globalization. Access to global products, transformation of consumer and business technologies, and falling barriers to trade and travel have redefined life over the last 20-30 years. That “phase” of globalization appears to be over. The dominant narrative now in political circles, corporate boardrooms and the mainstream media is that nationalism and protectionism are on the rise, and globalization is in retreat.
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Fewer Than 50% Of Executives Believe Their Organizations Clearly Define Diversity
Business Insider
Russell Reynolds Associates, a leading global executive search and leadership advisory firm, today announced the findings and recommendations from their survey, Diversity and Inclusion Pulse: 2017 Leader's Guide. The study surveyed over 2,100 male and female executives around the world to understand how companies align around diversity and inclusion (D&I). The study examined how executives perceive their organization's D&I strategy and the barriers faced in executing it effectively. The study shows that the success of a D&I strategy is primarily dependent on committed leadership. The final results of the study provide actionable insights leaders can use to maximize the benefits a diverse workforce promises within their own organizations.
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All Diversity Trainings are not Equal
Emmanuel Ngomsi, The Kansas City Star
This is a two-part column: This paints the bad and the ugly of diversity and inclusion training, and the second, in this space next week, brings to light the good of it.
In my two decades in diversity and inclusion research, education and consulting, I have seen and heard a lot about why some diversity “trainings” lead to unintended consequences by aggravating participants’ perception of differences.
Diversity should be the celebration of differences in individuals and in organizations. Inclusion is the integration and bridging of these differences to form a single corps in which some differences are accepted and nurtured to the benefits of all, while individuals still keep their identity.
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Having a Diverse Workplace is a Worthy Investment
Lizzie O'Leary and Paulina Velasco, Marketplace
It may feel like the topic of diversity in the workplace pops up all the time. So many industries seem to struggle with it — Hollywood, media, Silicon Valley. And then we have the now-infamous Google memo controversy, which is still getting strong reactions.
But when companies do hire a diverse workforce, it can be linked to better business practices and outcomes, including helping a company’s bottom line. It takes a lot of work, but that's where we can tap into the expertise of Katherine Phillips, a professor at Columbia Business School. She's been researching organizational and leadership behavior for nearly two decades. Her research shows that diversity makes us smarter by creating stronger decision-making groups. And she challenges organizations to try harder to make diversity actually work. She joined us to discuss the issue.
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All Platforms are not Equal
Jonathan A. Knee, MIT Sloan Management Review
The dramatic influence of the internet on how businesses operate and the emergence of a handful of gigantic, digitally enabled corporations have led to breathless pronouncements regarding the importance of a peculiar new class of monopolies built on digital platforms. These platforms, it is argued, fuel network effects that lead inexorably to winner-take-all marketplaces.1 This perspective is invariably coupled with infectious optimism and investment euphoria regarding the extraordinary scale and strength of network-effects businesses.
In theory, the key attribute of a network-effects business is its momentum-driven flywheel. Every new participant increases the value of the network to existing participants, attracts more new users, and makes the prospect of a successful competitive attack ever more remote — thereby bolstering the relative attractiveness of the business. The imagined innate indomitability of network effects stems at least in part from the breathtaking strength of notable platform businesses, like Facebook’s social network or Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
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Will, Skill, and Velocity: Survival Skills for a Digital World
Paul Michelman, MIT Sloan Management Review
As CEO advisor Dan Ciampa explains in a column in this issue, successful organizational transformation requires a compelling vision — a tangible and engaging view of the future that people can believe in and find energizing. What will success look like in our new world? How will we achieve our organizational goals? Vision gets a change effort started.
But change is not executed by a vision; it is executed by individuals. No matter how smart the strategy and how well articulated the plan, only people can bring about actual change. And given that we live in a world in which the unknowns have no end in sight, our ability to embrace the demands of change — and of personal transformation — are prerequisites for professional survival.
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Catch the Wave: The 21st-century Career
Josh Bersin, Deloitte Review
In an age where skill sets can become obsolete in just a few years, many workers are scrambling just to stay current. How can organizations encourage continuous learning, improve individual mobility, and foster a growth mind-set in every employee, year after year?
Offering employees a rewarding career used to be easy: You’d hire a bright young person out of college, plug him into an entry-level role, and then watch him climb the corporate ladder over the years as he progressed toward retirement. The company could plan for this continuous process—hire people based on their degrees, help them develop slowly and steadily, and expect some to become leaders, some to become specialists, and some to plateau.
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What I Learned About Coaching After Losing the Ability to Speak Mark Rosen, Harvard Business Review
I was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) in 2001. By 2003 I could no longer speak intelligibly or walk, and any muscle control became more difficult as the disease progressed. I knew I couldn’t keep facilitating team meetings and giving strategy presentations — staples of the consulting services I had provided for many years. But I still loved my work and needed to stay active, and my clients were open to trying a new approach, so I began managing my coaching relationships exclusively through written dialogue in instant messages, emails, and other electronic documents.
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The Quest for a Flourishing Earth is the Most Significant OD Opportunity of the 21st Century
David Cooperrider, OD Network Member and Lifetime Achievement Winner, OD Practitioner
Nearly two decades ago I was honored to be invited to bring the large group Appreciative Inquiry Summit method (“AI”) to a UN World Summit with Nobel Laureate Kofi Annan, and hundreds of CEOs from corporations such as Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Daiwa Asset Management Ltd, Siemens AG, Tata Industries, Novo Nordisk, China Mobile, Royal Dutch Shell, Dow, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Novartis, IBM, and others (Cooperrider, 2013). Unexpectedly at this business and society Summit in the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations, we learned that we all shared a common conviction: that business has the opportunity to “stand up, step up, and scale-up” and be one of the most positive forces on the planet—and that the epic transition to a world economy of “full spectrum flourishing” is no longer a utopian urge or mini-trend, but an observable and astonishing trajectory.
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Organizations, Education, and Predictions
Peter F. Sorenson, OD Network Member and Lifetime Achievement Winner; Therese F. Yaeger, OD Network Member; Rachael L. Narel, OD Practitioner
More than a half-decade ago, management guru Douglas McGregor stated, “We live today in a world which only faintly resembles that of a half century ago. The standard of living, the level of education, and the political complexion of the United States today profoundly affect both the possibilities and limitations of organizational behavior.”
Now another half decade later, we too are attempting to predict the possibilities for organizations and education.
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There's still time to register for the 2017 OD Network Annual Conference! Join us October 14-17 at Loews Chicago O'Hare.
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Chair
Martha Kesler
Vice Chair
Jamie Kelly
Treasurer
Amy Cowart
Trustees
Lori Blander
Marco Cassone
Sherry Duda
Jean Hartmann
Cindy Miller
Sanjay Naik
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