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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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When to Solve Your Team’s Problems, and When to Let Them Sort It Out
Joseph Grenny, Harvard Business Review
After careful review of her harried work life, Charla, an IT manager, discovered that 20% of her time over the previous two months was spent managing escalations. It seemed that each interaction with her team ended with her feeling a need to exercise her authority to rescue them from a crisis. For example: - Sarah complains that Ken — a peer — repeatedly fails to include her on group emails.
- Geri can’t get the data he needs from another department.
- An internal customer is two months late with requirements but is pressing Pat not to push back his delivery date.
- A VP is bypassing the approval process and directly cajoling Brittney to add functionality.
- Sunil is distracted from his commitments by another team’s periodic informal requests for his help.
Charla routinely ended her day having accomplished almost none of what she intended to do in her attempt to be responsive to her team’s demands for rescue. As she inspected her calendar, she concluded her team’s motto had become, “When in doubt, escalate.”
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The Four Ways to Manage Digital Talent and Why Two of Them Don’t Work
Kristine Dery and Ina Sebastian, MIT Sloan Management Review
Digital has not only forced us to reimagine where and when work is done, but also who is going to do it. Digital leaders are experiencing new challenges as they compete for digital talent that is in high demand. They are dealing with three key shifts: (1) a shortage of talent with the requisite digital and social skills, (2) the need for flexibility to scale according to project requirements, and (3) skilled digital workers often choosing to work as freelancers. Digital marketplaces for freelance IT talent, such as Topcoder, Upwork, Kaggle, are rapidly growing as more people are choosing alternatives to full-time employment. Forbes estimates that 35% of people are choosing freelance work and this is rapidly growing, particularly among millennials. Companies that design workplaces for flexible approaches to both work and workers are more likely to succeed in the world of digital.
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The Urgent Need to Educate Present and Future Leaders in Organization Development and Change
D. D. Warrick, OD Network Member, OD Practitioner
Organization development and change is a field that leaders urgently need to know more about. For organizations to thrive and remain competitive in today’s times of dynamic change and fierce competition, they will need to have leaders that are skilled in building high performance organizations that are a quality place to work and that have organization cultures that attract and retain talented and highly motivated people. Leaders will also need to be skilled at building teamwork at the top, within teams and between teams, at effectively managing change, and at creating opportunities to continuously improve and prepare the organization for future success. These are all OD related issues.
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Let’s Stop Talking about ‘Resistance to Change’ Already
Koen Smets, New Organizational Insights
What is it that makes organizational change difficult? More likely than not, when you ask this question, the answer you hear will be ‘resistance to change’. Common wisdom has it that we are, on the whole, born conservatives, people who would instinctively oppose change rather than embrace it. Googling the phrase produces something like 30 million hits.
And ‘resistance to change’ is a hardy perennial. Even if you restrict the search to the last 24 hours, Google finds more than 150 results. Blogs and serious journals alike keep discussing it with relentless regularity.
But there is a serious problem with the concept.
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Unexpected Lessons In Sales Transformation From Little League
Tracy Thurkow, John Kanan and Melissa Burke, Forbes
If you’ve ever watched your kids at a little league game, you know that the coach can make all the difference. If, on the first day of the season, you heard a coach say things like "throw strikes, buddy," you knew you were in for a season of frustration. The kids would never be able to live up to their full potential with that kind of coaching. But if the coach gave clear instructions like "put your shoulder up, look at the catcher, check first base," you could look forward to a good season. The kids were bound to learn more, play better and have more fun. The first kind of coach had good intentions, but those vague instructions and focus on outcomes gave the kids nothing to work with. Kids couldn't just will themselves to be better; they needed knowledge and tools, as well as encouragement.
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Why an Agile Process is Great for Digital Transformation
Kuntal Shah, Dataquest
Agility is imperative to the success of any business looking at successfully competing in a rapidly changing environment. The aim for all of us is to become an organization that can respond to new opportunities or competitive threats as quickly and effectively as possible. Organizations that are unable to change quickly are the ones bound to be slow to capturing market shifts and face the threat of becoming irrelevant.
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How the Imagined “Rationality” of Engineering Is Hurting Diversity — and Engineering
Joan C. Williams and Marina Multhaup, Harvard Business Review
Just how common are the views on gender espoused in the memo that former Google engineer James Damore was recently fired for distributing on an internal company message board? The flap has women and men in tech — and elsewhere — wondering what their colleagues really think about diversity. Research we’ve conducted shows that while most people don’t share Damore’s views, male engineers are more likely to.
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When Companies Get Serious About Diversity, They Call Her
Alexis Sobel FittsAlexis Sobel Fitts, Wired
For a while, it seemed like Silicon Valley had decided it was perfectly fine to fail on diversity and sexual harassment. The very white, very male, always-hoodie-clad club of founders was the core of the tech industry—and its members were down for some perfunctory bias training and lip service, but not a mea culpa. Then came the deluge. With reports of sexual harassment now rolling in at regular intervals, it seems like maybe the Valley is on the precipice of shift.
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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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What China Reveals About the Future of Innovation
Chris Biggs, Amee Chande, Liyan Chen, Erica Matthews, Pierre Mercier, Angela Wang and Linda Zou, Alizila
When many Western consumer companies develop a new product, they set out on a long, slow process with an uncertain outcome. That’s because innovation typically starts internally, with ideas that flow from the business to the consumer (B2C). A full rollout could take several months, and during that period, executives are haunted by a single question: “I wonder if this thing will sell?” All too often, it won’t, because by the time the product is finally available, the market has already moved on.
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Deloitte Global Chairman: We Need to Redefine Globalization
David Cruickshank, Business Insider
For many, calling someone a “globalist” these days is not a compliment. In our societies, there is a mounting animosity around some aspects of globalization, perpetuated by a laser sharp focus on what economic indicators tell us. With the release of US GDP numbers this week and recent UK GDP numbers showcasing sluggish growth in comparison to the rest of the Eurozone, it is an opportune time to reflect on the true value of numbers at such a critical juncture in our history.
So what happens when we look beyond the standard numbers globally?
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Developing Leadership: Using Triggers as a Wake-Up Call Rosalind Spigel and Beulah Trey, OD Practitioner — Practicing OD
Julie, a colleague of ours, was struggling with Emma, her co-worker. Emma was someone Julie considered a friend, had known for years, admired, was mentored by, and worked with on many projects. After years of creative and successful collaborations, tensions were surfacing.
When Julie turned to us for coaching, we were tempted to ask her about the juicy details of her possible falling out with Emma, but, instead of getting into the story, we decided to apply Mussar, an ancient approach to Jewish character development, which includes awareness, compassion, and humility. We have been studying Mussar, and Beulah has been teaching and developing the contemporary practice of Mussar for the past few years. As leadership coaches and organizational consultants, we have been intrigued with the efficacy of applying Mussar with our clients. We believe that at its core leadership development is a form of moral and character development.
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Seventeen Syndromes of Organizational Dysfunction
Dr. Karl Albrecht, OD Network Member, Karl Albrecht International
Psychiatrists and psychologists have a handbook, titled the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which exhaustively lists and explains the full inventory of human maladjustments. In the consulting business, we also have a "DSM," although a somewhat less formal and rigorous one. We recognize the same kinds of organizational disorders recurring across all industries, all types of organizations, and indeed all national cultures.
While collective sanity tends to involve relatively simple and consistent patterns, craziness is entertainingly diverse. The range of primary organizational disorders is both broad and varied. I've identified some seventeen primary patterns, or syndromes, of organizational dysfunction. Some organizations have more than one; some have many. They all impose significant entropic costs on the resources of the enterprise.
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What Spinning Off a GE Business Taught Me About Managing Ultra-Fast Change
Margaret Keane, Harvard Business Review
Change management can be a test for any organization. Several studies by Towers Watson show that just 25% of change management initiatives are successful over the long term. I wouldn’t be surprised if the statistics are worse in my industry, financial services, where so many companies are large, global, regulated, and structurally complex.
So four years ago, when I was CEO of GE Capital Retail Finance and tapped to lead a mega change initiative — splitting off our unit into a new, publicly traded company, Synchrony Financial — I’ll admit I viewed it as a huge challenge. Major organizational changes, covering everything from recruiting and branding to regulatory approvals and marketing, happened in rapid succession, with a hard deadline of 12 months to get it all done for the IPO — and 18 months from the IPO until our full separation from GE.
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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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