Future of Organizational Development

What is it Organizational Leadership can do, frankly must do, to guide employees (or others in non-business organizations) when a critical environmental change takes place -- the pandemic is a prime example, but what about others that may be extreme and totally unexpected - an astroid will soon hit the earth; the US is attacked by a foreign nation; an earthquake hits a major city; etc.?

The answer to this is so clear to me- I'm not sure if that speaks more about my headspace (positively or negatively) or the 2022 standard of organizational leadership. Leadership must treat their employees as people first and employees second. It is only after an employee feels an emotional connection to their role, manager, company, or company's vision, that they will feel connected to and loyal towards the organization. This needs to be established outside of "critical environmental challenges," however, during them is still an opportunity to win over that trust from employees. When times are uncertain, people will remember who is concerned about their well-being. During critical environmental challenges, organizational leadership must react to the human feelings towards the threat first before discussing the work implications. Earn your employees' trust and provide them a resource (work) to allow them to get their minds off of the threatening environmental challenge.

P.S. If an asteroid is expected to hit the earth, the advice is to relinquish any work responsibilities.

The chapter reviews sustainability as one area where OD is increasingly playing an important role. Can you think of other opportunities for Leaders and/or OD practitioners to apply the skills, values, and concepts you have learned in our course?

Sustainability covers the "triple bottom line" of social, economic, and environmental awareness. In addition, focuses should be explored in the following areas:

Training: Provide employees with more resources to explore and grow professionally. This would need to go beyond training for a specific "role" or providing tuition reimbursement- these are expectations for much of the knowledge worker-force. Provide training opportunities that allow employees to explore a variety of functionally transferable skills. By doing so, you are providing a human resource and empowering your employees to think critically, creatively, and potentially connect dots to inspire organizational innovation.

Health: This must go beyond medical, dental, and vision insurance. Focus on mitigating barriers that hinder employees from bringing their full selves to work. Some of these barriers deal with mental health (stress, anxiety, depression, overwhelm, personal conflict, etc.), while others could be financial health (understanding retirement, budgeting, general financial literacy).

Effective Communication: In the best scenario, communication inspires individual contentedness and organizational innovation. In the worst, negative mental health and turnover occur. I firmly believe an uncaptured opportunity within O.D. is the focus on human interaction. Training managers to see their employees as human first and workers second will lead to less turnover (when effectively demonstrated)- at least in the interim. When a larger movement adopts this recommendation, it will level the market, but we have some (A LOT) time before seeing that.

What is it that Leadership can do to assure that leaders, managers, and employees at all levels learn and practice the most critical learning points from our course? Is it really possible to teach a workforce to manage and lead change effectively?

Leadership needs to create a culture of effective communicators. With more frequent and correctly targeted communication strategies, organizations could mitigate the silos that exist within their organizations. Further, effective communication could remove "Us vs. Them" thoughts between departments or hierarchical levels within the organization.

We have today a bunch of employees (no matter the level on the org chart) speaking from their perspective, not paying much attention to other perspectives that may exist around them. There is no wonder why conflict exists. Add in that the receiving audience is being asked to change, well, why wouldn't there be resistance. What I see is a larger problem within today's organizations- few people are considering the needs of their audience. If we can address this issue first, I believe that the conversation around managing and leading change looks a lot different.