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ORGANIZATION OPTIMIZATION

Organizational Development

Organization Development is a set of strategies generally designed by change management experts and executed to help an organization gain and / or sustain a competitive advantage.

When change management experts are designing organizational development strategies, it is important they have a clear understanding of the goals of the organization. It is also equally important for change management experts to understand the culture, i.e. beliefs, behaviors, attitudes, and values. Additionally, an organization’s core competencies, products and services, and target customers, is valuable information to have.

Organizational Effectiveness

Effective organizations demonstrate strength in the following key areas:
  • Level 5 Leadership – effective organizations have level five leaders as defined by Jim Collins in his book Good to Great. According to Collins there are five attributes that characterize Level 5 Leaders:
    1. They are self-confident enough to set up their successors for success.
    2. They are humble and modest.
    3. They have “unwavering resolve.”
    4. They display a “workmanlike diligence – more plow horse than show horse.”
    5. They give credit to others for their success and take full responsibility for poor results. They “attribute much of their success to ‘good luck’ rather than personal greatness.“
Level 5 leaders have a unique combination of humility and fierce resolve
  • Culture – it will always be about the beliefs, behaviors, attitudes, and values of the people that comprise an organization. The people that comprise effective organizations know why the organization is in business, what it is the organization does, and how the organization does it. Effective organizations have a culture of unwavering commitment to best practices, being accountable and working to live versus being on the  hamster wheel of living to work.  Effective organizations get this, and they hire and cultivate a work environment that is fun, serious about excellence, and dedicated to providing the best service and / or product to their marketplace.
  • Work Processes and Systems – an unwavering commitment to continuously improving processes and discovering best work practices, i.e. always trying to find ways to do the things an organization does today, better and faster tomorrow. By doing so, an organization is  in a continuous mode of effectively and efficiently competing in the marketplace.

Planning

Planning for organizational effectiveness requires the input of all stakeholders. This is the crux of what constitutes an organization, i.e. a collective of persons working together to achieve a specific set of goals. This in turn requires senior leadership to guide and shepherd the development of a strategic plan that will operationalize the organization’s goals, tactics, and progress. There are numerous models and approaches used in strategic planning, and senior leadership is responsible for choosing the model they believe will work best for their organization.

Key to planning organizational effectiveness is inclusiveness!

There is a continuously expanding repository of invaluable nuggets of wisdom in the collective populace of every organization. This collection of invaluable nuggets of wisdom can be considered an organization’s “memory” . How an organization manages its memory is paramount to it’s success.