Org-Fitness Today!

What is it I do?

Recently someone called me and was asking what I did for work. They knew I had the MSOD degree from Pepperdine University however they wanted to know more specifically.

Some of my friends think I do fitness related work within organizations. That would be nice, however it's not the case. Certainly fitness is a serious interest of mine, however that's not what I do everyday as a vocation.

So as I talked on the phone with this person, I described what I do:

"I am an organizational consultant who uses his training in OD consulting to provide management and leadership development training to organizations. I often times bring to my clients expertise and experience in team building, communication and dealing with strategic change. Additionally I provide executive coaching using assessments to provide a developmental framework for my clients."

After I finished the call and it went on for a while as we discussed this and some of the challenges this person was facing in their work environment, I realized this was a pretty good summary of what I do. For this reason, I wanted to capture it. We all have our niches and areas of expertise, this is mine.

High Performance Teams and The Five Dysfunctions of Teams

I have been reading a book based on Patrick Lencioni's, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. This is really more like a guide or how-to book titled: Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Field Guide.

If you have ever read any of Lencioni's books, you know he writes in an entertaining and I feel effective manner using a fable to tell his story. I first read the original Five Dysfunctions a couple of years ago and felt it was an excellent story and that he had effectively identified and labeled some critical stages teams go through. I've used some of his work in discussion with teams over the last couple of years.

According the Lencioni, the Five Dysfunctions are:

1. Absence of Trust
2. Fear of Conflict
3. Lack of Commitment
4. Avoidance of Accountability
5. Inattention to Results

In his book, the model used is shaped like a pyramid with Absence of Trust being on the bottom or at the foundation and Inattention to Results is at the top. There is also an assessment tool for teams to measure or see where they are in relationship to these five dysfunctions. Whenever I mention or go through these five dysfunctions, people seem to resonate with them and I see lots of heads nodding.

I am currently designing a 4-hour training called High Performance Teams using this and other models. I will also have a longer--one to two day off-site training available for teams that are really committed to going beyond the status quo. Creating a highly effective team is never easy, as we sometimes describe the HURT 100 course, "we wouldn't want it to be easy," It is doable though!

Please comment and let me know your thoughts and interest on this topic.

Tele-Seminar on Leadership Development

I recently posted about how organizations are going to be losing leaders due to retirement and the aging workforce. I received this announcement in my e-mail today--an on-line interactive webinar on how to develop leaders in the face of this looming crisis. Click here for the details. This is a free webinar offered by the Forum Corporation.

Leadership Development: How's yours?

How's the leadership development in your organization? Do you have a full bench of capable leaders ready to step up to the next level?

If you were able to answer both these questions positively, you are in the minority. Many organizations and entire industries are facing almost crisis-level shortages of leaders ready to step up to the next level. Unfortunately, it might get worse.

Demographics and the aging Baby Boomer generation are partially to blame. The following numbers are just an example of what we are facing: There are about 76 million baby boomers and only 46 million in the next generation, Generation X. Of those baby boomers, up to 50 percent of the management workforce will be eligible to retire over the next five years. So, what's a leader do today that can help make a difference?

The Hay Group offered up their ideas in the July 2006, Insight Connections. The seven steps are outlined below.

1. Encouraging leaders at all levels to create work climates that motivate everyone to perform at his or her best.
2. Making leadership development a priority for everyone involved.
3. Helping leadership teams work more effectively together in addition to helping individual leaders improve.
4. Providing job shadowing opportunities for mid-career managers.
5. Ensuring that high-potential employees receive 360-degree feedback for leadership development—early on.
6. Ensuring that mid-level managers have the time to participate in leadership development early in their careers.
7. Providing external coaches for senior managers.

These are all great ideas for building leadership capability and bench strength in your organization. If you would like to talk more about these ideas, feel free to contact me or click on Comments below. Click here to read the full Hay Group, Insight Connections.

Organizational Assessment Tool: Infotool

The best tool I know to find out what is going on in your organization is Infotool. Infotool is a web based organizational diagnostic tool. It is very easy to use, can be customized, and provides results back almost immediately. Here are some of the features:

An advanced, on-line organizational development diagnostic tool:

• Design and build a unique survey for your needs -easily customizable
• Instantly sort and analyze millions of critical data bits
• In-house analysis in minutes-not days
• Immediately isolate, with targeted precision, barriers to workforce productivity by each demographic

Instantly measure how effectively employees are engaged, managerial effectiveness and where there are opportunities for improvement.

Infotool is a diagnostic tool which precisely identifies critical pathways for changing a corporate culture from one of mistrust to trust, narrowness to openness, staleness to innovation, silos to collaboration and dilemmas to solutions.

Click here to see a partial list of Infotool clients.

Let me know if you would like to learn more about this great tool.

Why Use Assessments?

I am a strong believer in the use of assessments for developmental or executive coaching. Maybe I should say, I am a big believer in assessments for development and learning in general. In my own experience I have taken numerous assessments over the years and find the results of these assessments to be very informative.

Assessments help me learn about myself and confirm what I already know and sometimes I learn about blind spots or get feedback on areas of my behavior that I was not aware of. Regardless of the assessment, the important thing to remember is that assessment results are just data or feedback. What I do with that data or feedback is up to me.

Recently while engaged in coaching a client, I was doing some interviews with people around this client. I use interviews (kind of like a verbal 360-degree) to help me learn more about a client and to confirm (or not) assessment results. Asking some very straight forward and simple questions I learned from Marshall Goldsmith, these interviews are an easy way to verify information about the client.

I use the assessment results and the interview data to coach the client and provide actionable feedback. Actionable feedback provides the client with something they can actually use. Of course actually doing something with the feedback is all up to the client. As a coach, I can only do so much. It is up to the client or the person being coached to make the change.

Essentially a good assessment provides a faster way for clients to learn and understand themselves. One assumption I make is that most people want to do their best. Focusing on behaviors that people can act on is key. Assessments help in this area.

Facilitating Strategic Planning

For the past year I have been involved with several different clients helping them with their strategic planning. In some cases this has been for the whole organization and with other clients it has been with just a department or unit of the organization.

I try to use a similar process regardless as it provides a consistent framework to work with. Obviously each client is different and the results vary with what we are trying to achieve. The great thing about this framework I use is that it is scalable. In other words, it can be used for a large organization, a small department, or even an individual participating in executive coaching. The number one question we continually ask clients is to think about what is important. What's important? This question leads to the who, what, when, where, and how we will know. My colleague, Mike Jay says it this way; "How will Who lead Whom to do What, When, Why, and Where?"

The framework typically starts with a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) and surfacing assumptions. From this we get a good sense of where we are (present state)and then we start looking at where we want to go (future state). The future state is the vision for the organization. The vision is a descriptive picture of where the organization is headed.

The time frame for a vision, as with strategic planning, is shorter these days. With change happening so rapidly these days, it makes little sense to do planning beyond 18 months to two years. This is true for visioning as well. This also relates to my belief in the perspective of strategic planning being a dynamic versus a static process. In the planning process, I recommend that plans be revisited quarterly or semi-annually at the very least.

The next couple of steps help the organization understand its decision making process and how it will operate or behave. We take a look at organizational values and the other ways with which the organization makes decisions. Sometimes these are called unwritten rules or guiding principles.

Once we have identified all of these things about the organization, we can focus on what's important--the strategic objectives and plan the specific steps for achieving them. Organizations may go about this part of the process differently. Essentially this is where the rubber meets the road or where the real work takes place. It's important to focus on strategic objectives that really matter and to establish effective measures for each objective. The final step in this phase is to make sure adequate monitoring and follow-up is built into the system or plan.

The final phase in this process has clients look at a creating a purpose or mission statement that encompasses all we have learned and are implementing. Ideally, this statement includes the key values and overall objectives of the organization into 25 words or less. It is a powerful statement for all stakeholders to understand what this organization is all about.

If you would like to hear more about this process or have questions, please feel free to contact me.

Cool Site: Bob Sutton's Work Matters

Bob Sutton is an author and professor. He has co-authored several popular business books including The Knowing-Doing Gap and Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense. I'll add more later however if you are curious, check out his site Work Matters.

GE's Jeff Immelt Describes Growth and Leadership Development

In an article from the Wisconsin Technology Network, General Electric's CEO, Jeffery Immelt describes the new thinking for his company on growth. I want to focus on what he says about leadership development.

First, he describes the type of growth that GE is looking for is more organic or internally-generated growth. To describe this process Immelt told his top senior managers, "The business book that can help you hasn't been written yet." He then goes on to describe six areas of focus that will help drive this growth.

The sixth area is leadership development. GE studied companies such as Toyota and Dell to find out the key traits of their leaders who have been successful around innovation and growth.

The five key traits:

1. external focus
2. imagination and creativity
3. decisive, clear thinking
4. inclusiveness
5. deep domain expertise

These will be incorporated into all GE management and leadership training. Immelt even chose an area for himself to work on.

To find out which one and to read the full article, click here. What's your thoughts about this? Click on Comments to let me know.

Preaching to the Choir: Employee Development

For some of you, this is like "preaching to the choir" and for others it is just a reminder of what we need to be doing (or should be) with our employees. AllBusiness.com has a daily e-mail tip of the day and today's tip has to do with employee development. Titled Employee Development Is The Key to Success. Employee development has been mentioned several times by employees as the key to retention.

Here's a list of six ways to encourage employee development from the AllBusiness site:

1. Support employee development and training programs
2. Assign mentors to junior employees
3. Offer tuition reimbursement
4. Emphasize and encourage development
5. Recognize and reward employee growth
6. Promote from within

Do you offer a comprehensive employee development program? How do you encourage employee development in your organization?