Organization Development is an umbrella term for the processes I use to help organizations recover from the ill effects of downsizing.  I recently responded to a question on the IO psychology site on LinkedIn.  The question was “What is OD anyway?”  It asked how it differed from OE and OI.  Here is the answer I posted.

 Like all labels, Organization Development, Organizational Transformation, Organizational Effectiveness, Organizational Improvement, and Organizational Behavior, are subject to a number of interpretations and perceptions.  There are some basic differences.  Organizational Behavior is an academic discipline and usually a course taught in MBA programs.  OI and OE usually have a measurement and objective productivity improvement orientation.  OT (organizational transformation) was somewhat of a flash in the pan in the late 70’s and early 80’s.

 Organization Development – it is “organization” not “organizational” development, reached its peak popularity in the sixties and seventies.   It involves using an “intervention” to change an organizational system.  One common definition is “planned change.”   The classic reference is a 1970 a book by Chris Argyris called “Intervention Theory and Method: A Behavioral Science View” Argyris also laid the foundation for most of the concepts of what is now called organizational learning as more popularly articulated by Peter Senge.

OD in its pure form is based on a set of core values.  Words like collaborative, non-hierarchical, open, democratic, and humanistic, have been used to describe these values.  Interventions usually take the form of team-building, survey-feedback, processes, appreciative inquiry, and many other techniques.  Where OD differs from OI and OE is in its humanistic and value base.   In the early years a core technique was sensitivity training.

 As in all disciplines, there are various schools of OD.  Some remain grounded in the 60’s mantra of love, trust, openness, and collaboration.  There is a school of large systems intervention which involves getting many people and many perspectives aligned into a total systems change effort.  Recently, there is a cult of measurement that really blends into some of the OE and OI stuff. 

 There are Masters and Doctoral programs in OD and, they too, vary in their focus.  There are more than a few clinical psychologists in the field and there is some debate as to where OD (systems approach) and psychology (individual approach) compliment or cancel each other out.  Recently, many OD consultants have moved into executive coaching, both because they can make money doing it, and because it often compliments system-wide approaches.

 A large number of past OD consultants operated outside formal organizations, usually as individual practitioners or as a part of small groups.  There are now many internal OD consultants, but there is debate as to whether an internal can be as effective as an external and how someone can change a system of which they are a part.  The best practice seems to be a blend of internal and external practitioners

 Although OD has been criticized as “soft” and  too “touchy-feely,” most people who have experienced the work of a quality practitioner see their intervention as an extremely powerful and meaningful part of their lives.  OD, done well, is very powerful.  When working with organizations to help layoff survivors return to productive and meaningful work, I use OD techniques.  

 Many practitioners don’t use the term OD when they contract with clients.  This is because the term carries too much baggage from cynical managers and from non-professional practitioners.  I have both a Master’s and a doctorate in the field and very seldom use the term in my work.

The BP oil leak mess provides a relevant metaphor for leading organizations through troubled times.  The message is simple: blaming is not leadership – it is an escape from true leadership.

The US government, in response to political pressure, is blaming BP and spending more time grandstanding than trying to help get to the root of the problem.  BP is blaming its vendors and other oil companies are now blaming BP.  The state government is blaming the federal government and local municipalities are blaming the state.  Democrats are blaming Republicans and vice versa. 

In the meantime, the oil continues to gush and gush and too few people are focused on the root cause – first finding a way to stop the bleeding, and then to solve the underlying systems issue of minimizing the dangers of deep sea drilling.

True leadership involves ignoring the escape into blaming and having the courage to help people focus on the basic root cause. 

In an era of layoffs, cutbacks, and economic downturn, blaming corporate “greed,” lack of government regulation, or the concept of free-market capitalism does not deal with the basic, root cause issue.  That issue is the need to embrace the fact that we live in an interdependent global economic environment and that the paradigm in regard to long term, stable, employment security has irrevocably changed.

The lesson that came out of the total quality movement is operant: blame the system, not the individual.  True leaders do that.

I write in Healing the Wounds about the value of making the psychological employment contract more explicit.  The reason I think this is a good idea is that it reduces the ambiguity and erases the, often not valid, assumptions about job security. 

 This concept of “putting it in writing” is counter cultural to many organizations.  I think this is in order to give the organization flexibility and not tie them down.  Sometimes I hear organizational spokespersons saying something like, “We’ve worked for years on a handshake.  Why reduce it to writing?  Don’t you trust us?”   The unfortunate answer is no!  Even with the best intentions, organizations can’t really predict the future and employment continuality.

 My recent experience on a cruise ship reinforced my belief in the clarity and value of contractual relationships.  Everyone in a cruise ship – including the captain – has a clear contract that spells out all aspects of their employment relationship.  This explicit contracting does not hinder their focus on customer service.  In fact, the clarity frees them to focus on their jobs, not their security.

 Business organizations can formulate renewable contracts with the agreement of the employee and the organization.  This would actually be much better than the current performance appraisal process since it would be much clearer and more focused on the specifics of the work.

It has been a couple of weeks between blogs.  The reason is that I took a 12 day cruise through Italy, a couple of Greek Islands, Egypt, and Israel.  The cultures were amazingly diverse and, from a leadership perspective, very interesting.  What I found even more interesting was the culture of the cruise ship itself.

 Like most cruise ships the staff is made up of many different nationalities, often clustered around types of jobs.  Despite their diversity, they manage to focus on the customer (guest as they call them), and provide seamless service.  How do they pull it off?  How do they overcome their differences both in culture and in job status, avoid conflict, and work in harmony – at least from the guest’s perspective? 

 They are all – literally – in the same boat and I think we can learn a great deal about how to lead diversity and create a customer focused culture from cruise ships.  I will write more in future postings on these subjects.

Many organizations forget that people in supervisory roles are also employees and not immune to survivor issues simply because they manage others.  “Physician, heal thyself,” is the rule and for those in leadership roles, the first priority is to deal with their own survivor issues. The next thing they need to do is help their employees.

 Leadership in a time of paradigm change is more of a helping relationship than of command and control management. Leaders in many organizations find themselves in a bind. The only way to deal with the emotional blockage that constitutes survivor sickness is to get employees to talk about their feelings, yet this necessary catharsis is seen by many organizations as disloyal or coddling employee complaining. 

 To be effective a boss needs to have the courage to take a risk.  In some organizations this has taken the form of group meetings that stimulate frank discussions of feelings and emotions.  Others have required supervisors to have one-on-one meetings with employees and listen to their feelings.  In my experience the most difficult activity is listening and not getting defensive.  In many situations, managers need to be trained in basic listening, empathy, and reflection skills.  This training has a dual effect:  it helps the boss to deal with his issues and equips her to help her employees. 

 Sponsoring special programs that help leaders develop the skills and perspectives to lead downsized organizations is a unique opportunity for both HR professionals and top managers.  Managers of all levels are employees too, and because of their key role in helping the organization recover, special attention needs to be paid to their own recovery from survivor sickness.

Here are four very powerful guidelines for coaching organizational leaders in troubled times.  I’ve written about them in other contexts, but I think it is appropriate that I summarize them here:

 Help is defined by the helpee not the helper.  I learned this deceptively simple phrase from the late Pat Williams, founder of the Pepperdine MSOD program and, over the years, have increasingly come to appreciate it’s relevance to a coaching relationship.  When a client is caught up in a crisis of purpose, competence, and self-esteem; facts, figures, models, 360 degree feedback reports, and flow charts don’t help – in fact they get in the way.  The currency of the realm is feelings and emotions, not facts and figures.  Logical analysis and rational planning may help the coach feel competent, but they will only make the coachee feel worse.  Anyone who has had an argument with a significant other and attempted to defuse their emotional issues by logical analysis to prove that they “shouldn’t feel that way” will understand that you don’t solve a “heart” problem (emotions and feelings) by a “head” (data and logic) process.  In a coaching relationship, the more a client’s “heart” issues are responded to by the coach’s “head” solutions, the wider the empathy gap. What is necessary before helping the client move forward are the basic skills of empathetic listening, reflecting feelings and emotions, and the ability to form an authentic, non-judgmental, helping relationship.  I deal primarily with top managers, and I’m, including their family, frequently the only one they feel can open up to.  In these unsettling times, we can often be of more service to our clients by simply giving them empathy rather than our “scientific” tools.

Don’t be compulsive about boundaries.   I once worked with a bright but inexperienced coach who lost a valuable client by, when in a very teachable moment, disengaging and indicating the client needed to talk to a licensed clinical psychologist.  Business coaches should not practice therapy, most are not licensed or trained, and that is not our business purpose.  If we are doing our job correctly, we are, however, engaged in a client centered helping relationship and that is, in itself, therapeutic.  We don’t have to be licensed clinicians to be good listeners, reflect feelings and emotions, and help our clients articulate debilitating feelings.  It is essential to know and adhere to our limits but it is also important that we don’t let artificial boundaries limit our abilities to help our clients.  Another Pat Williams saying is “to meet your clients where they are, not where you want them to be.”  In a time of business discontinuity we need to have the skills to meet them in the messy and unpredictable world of uncertainty and personal doubt.

Don’t be a solution in search of a problem.  Most business coaches have a favorite technique or approach.  Whether it be a diagnostic tool, an analytical process, or a structured behavioral rehearsal process, we all have preferred mental models that guide us.  Unfortunately, I have found that, despite diagnostic evidence to the contrary, too many coaches seem locked into a single technique.  I recently followed a coach into a textile manufacturing company.  My client was the vice president of manufacturing and was facing a massive downsizing triggered by a strategic decision to move operations to China.  What he needed was help in dealing with the layoff survivors and teaching his managers to facilitate venting sessions and formulate a positive vision for the remaining work force.  What his original displaced coach kept pushing was a 360 degree feedback process.  No doubt 360 degree feedback would, at some point, be useful for this vice president, but given the current environment, it would at best be a distraction.  In order to be relevant to our clients, we need the discipline to engage in a diagnostic process and the skills to have a contingent repertoire of coaching interventions.

Make the client an individual, not an organization.  Almost always helping the individual client helps the organization in the long term.  However, in the short term, as when the best solution for the client is to help them leave the organization, the connection is not so clear.  I have very few iron clad rules but one that has been of great help is to always contract with the person.  I don’t turn down assignments if my fee comes out of a “corporate” account but I strongly prefer it come from the budget of the individual client and, if not, I make my costs very visible.  In a time of restructuring, mergers, downsizing, and financial crisis, most executive clients are examining their life and career goals.  It is not possible to engage in an authentic helping relationship if the coach has divided loyalties between the organization and the individual client.          

Gunnysacking is a term for storing up hurt feelings, anger, affronts, and unresolved conflicts, and, when the weight of the psychological gunnysack becomes too heavy to bear, unloading it, often to an inappropriate degree in an inappropriate context.  We all gunnysack to some extent but, most psychologically healthy people find ways to keep their bags relatively light.  Unfortunately, organizational leaders are not immune to gunnysacking. 

I have discovered that a surprising number operate for many years under the oppressive burden of a heavy bag and use a crisis mode of operation as an authorization to unleash long repressed feelings of anger and frustration by figuratively beating their fellow employees about the head with their overloaded gunnysacks.  In layoffs this takes the form of those in power “getting” both functions and people that frustrated them in the past but were protected by a more tolerant organizational culture.  A newly promoted general manager, for example, used the downsizing culture as a way to “get” some long term rivals in the marketing function. 

 Gunnysacking is unhealthy for both the leaders who practice it and for the prognosis of organizational survival.  Leaders who see it happening need to move quickly and stop it. They need to help those wielding those heavy bags find better ways to lighten them. If that won’t work, they need to carefully consider the costs in terms of productivity and morale, of retaining people who are more concerned with pursuing a personal vendetta than helping the organization recover.  If, in the heat of the battle for organizational survival, you are tempted to form a coalition to “get” a person or a function for the wrong reasons, resist it. It won’t help you, the person you are targeting, or, most importantly, the organization.  If you find yourself the victim of gunnysacking, don’t try to get even; that only compounds the problem.  Try to discover what past event lies unresolved in the other person’s bag and muster up the courage to directly confront the issue.  Gunnysacking is alive and well in today’s downsized organizations.  Effective leaders need to move rapidly to confront it and personally refuse to succumb to its temptations.

Organizational leadership is much more complex, gut wrenching, and emotionally draining during times of economic decline than in boom times.  I’ve written several books and numerous articles on leading organizations in ways that will help them survive the trauma of downsizing, rekindle morale, and rebuild and productivity.  If I were to shift gears and write about how not to do it, here are three leadership behaviors that contribute to layoff survivor sickness.

Leaders Who Don’t Walk Their Talk.  In times of economic turmoil, reduced revenue, and cost cutting, leaders are under an intense spotlight. Their behavior is scrutinized by their employees who are particularly sensitive to gaps between what they say and what they do.   When employees are asked to do more with less, and cut or eliminate projects they value and have spent their careers advocating, it does not give them a warm fuzzy feeling to learn that their leaders are spending money on attending conventions or giving themselves large bonuses. In times of crisis, leaders need to exhibit an image of restraint and self-sacrifice.        

Leaders who Under Lead and Over Manage.   Many top managers are guilty of managing without a license..  They are way too involved in the nuts and bolts and are, thus, disempowering those employees who are paid to manage and putting their own priorities in the wrong place.  The role of senior leaders is to set direction, formulate strategy, inspire excellence, and hold managerial employees accountable.  It is not their role to do line item budgeting and become personally involved in operational decisions. In periods of economic decline a key top leadership role is to assure that there is a strategy for re-recruiting a demoralized work force.  Many top managers do not perform this vital function.

Leaders who Collude to Perpetuate a Dysfunctional Team.  A bickering, fragmented, non-aligned top management team is toxic to organizational recovery and individual initiative.  When times are tough and people are asked to stretch to do more with less, seeing a leadership team embroiled in their own power struggles and turf issues pours cold water over any spark of risk taking and extinguishes creativity.  Too many organizations have top managers who are engaged in secrecy,  back-room deal making, and using a crisis to get even with past rivals. The unfortunate result is a self-serving group of non-aligned individuals, not a leadership team that is of any value to the recovery and productivity of their employees.

Most managers got where they are by excelling in the classical managerial “ings” of planning, organizing, controlling, evaluating, and directing. The overwhelming consensus of research is that today’s organizations are populated by employees exhibiting the symptoms of layoff survivor sickness: a toxic combination of anger, fear, anxiety, and frustration.  They don’t work harder because they feel lucky to have a job; they hunker down in the trenches and respond with much lowered productivity. They don’t automatically snap back.  They need help, and that help does not take the form of increased control, direction, or evaluation.  In over a quarter century of working with organizations attempting to rebound from layoff survivor sickness, I have yet to hear an employee describe her or his best boss as being the best director, controller, or evaluator.  In times of organizational stress and turmoil, the best bosses are described as those who are good listeners, have the ability to form empathetic relationships, and possess coaching skills.  

Training line managers in basic helping skills – empathetic listening, non-judgmental reflection of feelings, and coaching – is enormously beneficial in facilitating a return to productivity. It has a dual benefit: it equips managers with the tools necessary to authentically communicate and re-recruit their employees, and it helps them deal with their own layoff survivor symptoms.   There are four conditions that will insure this training reaches its potential:

• Trainers need to make a strong link between the application of helping skills and an increase in productivity. This insures managerial motivation.
• Role plays and cases should be specific to the organization, its products, and culture.  Managers have a low tolerance for artificiality in today’s environment.  
• Although the workshop is intended to give managers skills to apply to their employees, managers will concurrently be dealing with their own survivor issues. Trainers should expect and be skilled at processing emotions and venting. If this does not happen, it is a sign that something is not working.
• Video taping individual role plays is exceptionally powerful. Processing individual tapes in a group environment provides rich learning and builds positive norms. 

I had an article published in the “Soapbox” column of the higher educational section of the Financial Times recently.  It is a little long, but I think it is important that business schools teach the right stuff to help employees and organizations to survive the trauma of layoffs and heal the wounds.  Here are excerpts of that article:    

 Management as a profession of scientific, clear, and antiseptic methodology was a myth in the early days of Fredrick Taylor’s “Scientific Management,” and is totally irrelevant to the needs of today’s organizations.   Many new managers, particularly newly minted, inexperienced MBA’s and undergraduate business majors come to the business world with the expectation that it is a place of rationality, subject to objective analysis and thoughtful, quantitatively based decision making.  This is somewhat a result of their own naiveté, but more from being subjected to quantitatively biased curriculum and the teaching of management professors who have spent their entire lives in classrooms – from grade school through graduate school, then into the role of teacher – and have never actually worked in a business.  Those business professors who have industry experience, too often gained it during the “good old days” when things were more predictable and people were seen as long term assets to be nurtured and developed over a career as opposed to the current paradigm of people as costs to be reduced.  Here are three things business schools need to do in order to be relevant to today’s business organizations.

• Move beyond the traditional – usually fragmented and disliked – organizational behavior course, into actually teaching the two core competencies increasingly valued in today’s business environment: self-awareness and interpersonal skills. Faculty must have the ability to help students examine their motivational patterns, reduce their blind spots, and develop and practice coaching, and transition facilitation skills. This requires getting past academic turf issues and partnering with disciplines such as psychology and sociology as well as a much more experiential pedagogy including internships and practicums. 
• Rectify the lopsided imbalance of head skills with an equal dose of heart skills.  As safe and sterile as it may seem, managers can’t analyze people out of their pain.  They need to connect with them at the heart and not the head. When employees are in the midst of a crisis of identity and purpose, they are not interested in strategic analysis, demand curves, or decision trees.  They need “high touch, low tech.”
• Find faculty who have the ability and desire to understand and deal with the real issues faced by organizations. Business organizations are struggling to come to grips with a new, short term, provisional, psychological employment contract. Unfortunately, tenured, research oriented, quantitatively focused, business school faculty members are often unable to generate the necessary empathy and requisite transition facilitation skills to be of much help to students who will face this “real world.” 

              If business schools are to avoid the fate of dinosaurs and automobile manufactures, they need to equip their students with the skills and perspectives that will be of value to today’s business organizations. The untenable alternative is to keep their insular, tenured, quantitatively orientated, analytical heads in the sand, and not even have the visibility to see the world passing them by.