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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.
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Inspiring Employee Creativity
Amit S. Mukherjee, MIT Sloan Management Review
In a thought-powered world, planning and execution are merely table stakes for leadership. Real leaders must unleash creativity.
History, I argued in a prior article, suggests that technologies shape leadership. Today’s digital technologies, in addition to requiring companies to adopt culturally neutral leadership standards, are also forcing a reassessment of core leadership principles.
Prior technological revolutions largely enabled physical work to be done better, faster, cheaper. In contrast, digital technologies are making work increasingly thought-driven; at the core of good work are ideas, concepts, intellectual property, and symbols to be manipulated on computer screens. Consequently, unleashing people’s creativity and inspiring them to contribute must become a central goal of leadership.
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Use Stories from Customers to Highlight Your Company’s Purpose
Erica Keswin, Harvard Business Review
Leaders commonly try to influence their company culture with a lofty statement of purpose. But despite the time and money an organization pours into crafting its own special statement, the result is often vague and generic — it sounds like every other well-meaning company’s purpose statement.
One simple way around this is to highlight specific stories that illustrate the values leaders want to emphasize.
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Leading to Become Obsolete
Zhang Ruimin (Haier), interviewed by Paul Michelman, MIT Sloan Management Review
Haier CEO Zhang Ruimin is transforming a manufacturing giant into a platform for entrepreneurship — and his employees into self-governing entrepreneurs.
We live and work in an age when the need for corporate reinvention is treated almost as a given. Countless CEOs talk about reducing hierarchy and increasing agility, flexibility, and connectedness to the market, and virtually every large company is “transforming for digital.” Yet in most organizations, lip service to change remains more the order of the day than real change itself.
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How to Communicate Clearly During Organizational Change
Elsbeth Johnson, Harvard Business Review
A former colleague liked to remind leaders of their impact by telling them, “There are children you’ve never met who know your name.” The point was simple: Their followers were also moms or dads who were going home and talking about their day in front of their children. And you, their leader, had a starring role in that story. As leaders, we are far more visible than we realize, and we are sending signals to followers all the time — even when we don’t realize it.
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Managing Change in Government IT Organizations
Katherine Barrett & Richard Greene, Government and Technology
When employees at Chesterfield County, Va.'s Department of Revenue go into work on Monday and boot up their computers, they'll face a new IT system for carrying out their jobs. It's been in development for over a year, but the agency realized only last month that there were no plans to make sure the people tasked with using the new system actually know how.
“It was poor planning, but the department was under the impression that the vendor was going to supply the training,” says Kevin Bruny, director of Chesterfield County’s Learning and Performance Center, which rushed to help the department create a training program.
This is far from an uncommon situation.
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What Every Communicator Needs to Know About Change Management
Jaya Koilpillai Bohlmann, OD Network Member, PRSA Strategist
As human beings, we literally have change in our DNA. Every cell in our body, every hair on our head, is changing all the time. Change is in our environments, too — this year dramatically so, as we try to understand and keep up with changes in our nation’s capital and their ripple effects on our clients and companies.
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The Talent Pool Your Company Probably Overlooks (Podcast)
Harvard Business Review
Robert Austin, a professor at Ivey Business School, and Gary Pisano, a professor at Harvard Business School, talk about the growing number of pioneering firms that are actively identifying and hiring more employees with autism spectrum disorder and other forms of neurodiversity. Global companies such as SAP and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are customizing their hiring and onboarding processes to enable highly-talented individuals, who might have eccentricities that keep them from passing a job interview — to succeed and deliver uncommon value. Austin and Pisano talk about the challenges, the lessons for managers and organizations, and the difference made in the lives of an underemployed population. Austin and Pisano are the co-authors of the article, “Neurodiversity as a Competitive Advantage” in the May-June 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review.
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Neurodiversity as a Competitive Advantage
Robert D. Austin and Gary P. Pisano, Harvard Business Review
Meet John. He’s a wizard at data analytics. His combination of mathematical ability and software development skill is highly unusual. His CV features two master’s degrees, both with honors. An obvious guy for a tech company to scoop up, right?
Until recently, no. Before John ran across a firm that had begun experimenting with alternative approaches to talent, he was unemployed for more than two years. Other companies he had talked with badly needed the skills he possessed. But he couldn’t make it through the hiring process.
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Gender Diversity on Boards Doubled in Organizations with Female Leadership, Says Deloitte
CFO Innovation
Asian Women are still largely under-represented on corporate boards, despite continued efforts to improve boardroom gender diversity, according to the fifth edition of Deloitte Global’s "Women in the Boardroom: A Global Perspective" publication.
The report explores the efforts of more than 60 countries to promote boardroom gender diversity, and reveals that women hold just 15 percent of board seats worldwide. These numbers show only modest progress from the 2015 edition of Women in the Boardroom.
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How to Integrate Data and Analytics into Every Part of Your Organization
Carl Carande, Paul Lipinski, and Traci Gusher, Harvard Business Review
Many conversations about data and analytics (D&A) start by focusing on technology. Having the right tools is critically important, but too often executives overlook or underestimate the significance of the people and organizational components required to build a successful D&A function.
When that happens, D&A initiatives can falter — not delivering the insights needed to drive the organization forward or inspiring confidence in the actions required to do so. The stakes are high, with International Data Corporation estimating that global business investments in D&A will surpass $200 billion a year by 2020.
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How AI is Shaping Organizations
Malavika Sacchdeva, DataQuest India
Indian companies and start-ups are focusing on developing conversational bots, speech recognition tools, intelligent digital assistants and conversational services to be built over social media channels.
Artificial Intelligence will undoubtedly reshape the business, making our lives easier and more sufficient. AI is seen as an indispensable tool for supporting humans in every aspects of life. In future, it will be the driving force for Industrial revolution mainly driven by data, networks and computing power.
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Reasonable Leaps of Faith: Learning about Demonstrating Impact from the Nonprofit Sector
Laura Johansson and Linshuang Lu, OD Practitioner
Demonstrating impact is challenging for organization development (OD) practitioners because we work in complex human systems. Job fulfillment, employee engagement, improved trust and collaboration are influenced by multiple factors, which unfold over the long term, and are difficult to isolate into causal relationships. As practitioners, we want to know that we are making a difference; and our clients want to see evidence of the value of our work. While we can point to helpful short-term outputs — anecdotal client feedback, improvement in 360 assessments, greater productivity output in a team — it can be difficult to prove the long-term benefits of our interventions on larger organizational health factors, such as employee engagement, profitability, and growth.
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Five Ways to Measure the Productivity of Virtual Teams
Frédéric Gillant, HRM Asia
Many managers remain averse to the idea of remote working, but they dont have to be.
The nature of employment is constantly changing, and today's workplace is a lot more virtual than in the past.
A recent study from Microsoft found that nearly 50% of employees in Asia surveyed say they have the option to work remotely.
In the US, over 60% of workers say their companies already have some form of flexible working structure.
Take Automattic, the company that owns Wordpress. The web development corporation has decided to shut down its San Francisco office after realising only a small number of employees come into office since they are able to work off-site.
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Statistical Thinking for the OD Professional
David Schwinn, OD Practitioner
“The difference that makes no difference is no difference at all,” a quote often attributed to William James, the father of modern psychology, speaks to the dilemma faced by responsible OD professionals everywhere. As the theme of this issue of the OD Practitioner suggests, our profession must take on the challenge of providing evidence that the difference we make for our clients actually makes a difference that is critical to their performance and their success. In this article, I will suggest ways that OD professionals can use statistics to determine “The Difference We Make,” in order to ensure our relevance to the organizations and communities we serve.
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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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