Organization Development

Thank you for listening to HRD Masterclass. It's a unique resource featuring over 130 HRD experts across 55 episodes. As a fan of the series you can help make season 6 happen. AHRD is crowdsourcing funding for the season and you can donate today at givebutter.com/HRD-Masterclass-FHRD. With your help the season can bring you 11 new episodes focused on major HRD research articles. Their practical implications, the need for further research and how researchers and practitioners can help each other to advance research and practice on the topics. It would be amazing to continue the series and I hope you'll consider donating today at givebutter.com/HRD-Masterclass-FHRD. Right, let's dive into the episode. It's not enough as an organization to be technically expert. We really have to think through how we engage people, how we engage our own people as well as when we face outward to customers and community members. Welcome to the Human Resource Development Masterclass, the new podcast series from the Academy of Human Resource Development, the organization that leads HRD through research. I'm your host, Darren Short, and throughout this first series of 10 episodes I'll be joined by leading authors, researchers and scholars to explore the fundamentals of HRD and how those are changing in the 2020s. Our focus for this episode is organization development and we'll be focusing on different OD interventions, the roles of internal and external OD consultants, choosing an OD consultant and much more. To help me I'll be joined by two leading scholars. Dr Gary M. McLean from Assumption University Bangkok and Professor Emeritus of HRD, University of Minnesota and Dr Toby Egan from the University of Maryland. In the first part of the episode I'll chat one to one with each of them and then for the second part, Gary and Toby are together to explore their shared interest in organization development. That discussion is brought to you with the help of the generous support of our sponsor, Interpretive Simulations. Find out more about their services at interpretive.com. All of the content you'll hear in this episode was recorded during March and April of 2021. Right, let's dive in to meet my first guest. My first guest today is Gary and McLean. It was a professor at the Assumption University Bangkok, Professor Emeritus HRD University of Minnesota, former senior professor at Texas A&M University, renowned scholar at International Islamic University Malaysia, adjunct professor in the HRD OD PhD program in NIDA Bangkok. He's a past editor of several referee journals and served as president of the Academy of Human Resource Development and the IMDA. He was president, McLean Global Consulting a family OD business. His research focus is international and national HRD, gender and OD. He authored an award-winning OD book and has published over 300 peer-reviewed articles. Hi Gary, welcome to the HRD Masterclass podcast. It's great to have you here in our episode focused on organization development. Thank you, Darren. It's good to be with you again, too. How about we start by exploring OD at a high level and then we can dig into some examples of OD interventions. So why don't we start by exploring the term HRD and what that means to you and how OD fits into your understanding of HRD? I take a rather broad perspective of both HRD and OD. I'll start with the definition that my son layered and I created back in 2001. I had been very concerned over how ethnocentric definitions of HRD had been. With that in mind, we interviewed people from 13 different countries. We created a definition that I will share with you now. Human Resource Development is any process or activity that either initially or over the long term has the potential to develop adults' work-based knowledge, expertise, productivity and satisfaction, whether for personal gain or group team game or for the benefit of an organization, community, nation or ultimately the whole of humanity. I'm known within the field for my emphasis on the ambiguity of life. And so when you ask how OD fits into this, my response is that organization development can have almost an identical definition to human resource development. I do not make the clear distinctions among some of the subsets of HRD that many people do. And so as we go on with some examples, you will see how I use this broader definition of HRD to cover my perspective of organization development. That sounds a good segue then into taking a look at a few examples of OD interventions. So do you have some examples you'd be able to walk through for us of common interventions that are found in OD? One of the fastest growing aspects of organization development is the field of coaching. Let me give you an example of a coaching experience I had. I had been working with a very large consulting company as a contractor. And my role was to help them improve their organization through total quality management and statistical process control. We had worked on that for about three years and we made good progress. And the CEO of the organization approached me and asked whether I would be available to provide coaching to him. He explained later as we begin to work that it was difficult for him to talk with individuals in his own organization because there was the possibility of him looking like an indecisive leader. So for a period of about eight years, I met with the CEO on a twice a month basis. Basically, he would share with me his plans for what he would do during the next two weeks and invite my observations and feedback. Another example I could share with you relates to the role of organization development in improving processes, the very beginning of the HRD definition. In this case, I saw a call for proposals from the Minnesota Department of Transportation. And I made an application, was hired and began to work with them on process improvement, again, using many of the TQM total quality management and SPC statistical process control tools. Their concern was that they were experiencing a high level of mortality as their construction workers were killed in accidents because the automobile drivers were not following state law, were not paying attention to the signs. So we worked in teams to try to identify why this was happening and what could be done. And based on employee input, we began to make changes both in state law and in the signage. We also began to make changes in how the construction sites were put together. Over a period of two years, we saw that number go down to zero. So we've had a couple of examples that just a quick follow up question and I'd love to dig into to some more examples. What I'm wondering is if is it is Anybody who coaches in the organization doing OD, or is there an approach to coaching from an OD perspective that makes OD coaching different? - Well, one of the things I worry about with coaching is that a lot of people put out their shingle as a coach without having qualifications, without knowing how to do coaching in a way that is likely to be most successful and most established within the organization. So your first question is anyone who does coaching doing OD? I would answer no if that's all that they're doing. - Okay. - Because a major component of organization development is systems theory, and I know that Toby's going to talk about that, but with systems theory, you have to look at the entire system, and you have to be trained to do that and experience to do that. If all you're doing is coaching, you don't see the full system and without seeing the full system, you're likely to make decisions or take actions that lead to outcomes that are not desirable for the organization. - We've heard a couple of great examples in terms of coaching and in terms of processing improvement. What other common interventions might be associated with OD? - Well, a couple of examples out of my history that I think OD has been slow in coming to, and HRD as well, but we're starting to see again a lot of interest and emphasis on the use of organization development, both for the purpose of community development as well as for national development. I have been working for a period of 16 years now with a small village in Thailand called Lumpaya. It is a community that requires tourism to keep the village going. And over the years, it had begun to die. Poverty had become a significant problem as kids grew up and went off to college, they never returned. And so by the year 2005, the village had been slowly decaying. A colleague of mine, Sarah Porn Yom Nul, from Mahidhan University, and I began to work with the village on a volunteer basis to try to help them through the use of action research to change the nature of their community. Now action research goes back quite a long time and is a common organization development intervention that really looks to the consultant as to be a facilitator and to look to the teams from within the organization to come up with possible interventions, try them out, measure their success, and come back on a regular basis to determine what they can do differently to continue improvement. So between 2005 until just last year before the pandemic, we would visit the community periodically, and so over a period of those 16 years, we have seen remarkable changes in the community. Tourism has been revitalized. The schools have been revitalized with the students taking an act of interest in the community. The number of floating markets has increased from fewer than 100 to well over 300 today. And so that's been a great opportunity out of doing pro bono work to help a community revitalize itself. National development, I've worked with several countries and the one I have had most influence with has been Korea, South Korea. I was approached in the late 1990s by a faculty member of education from Seoul National University to see if I would be willing to take him on as a visiting scholar. And in that role, we met once a week and talked about what was needed to help develop Korea and keep it going in the direction it had begun to become a highly developed country. So we did that for a year, little knowing on the side of either of us that the year later he would be appointed to be the first minister of human resource development and education. It's been again a wonderful opportunity to see how HRD and OD can operate into very different contexts than what we normally think of as an organization. Another growing area is the application of organization development to societal issues. The one in particular that I'd like to highlight is the issue of child labor. I did a lot of work in Bangladesh where child labor was at the time widely used. I was doing some work in a textile mill where most of the seamstresses were between the ages of 12 and 16. At that time, the US government passed the law that limited a country from being designated as a preferred country if child labor was prominent. As soon as that happened, the mills in Bangladesh had to shut down. As a result, all of those child laborers lost their jobs. For many of them, they were the primary income earner for their family. Well, the US Congress got the word very, very quickly. They rescinded that particular law. The mills opened the children had jobs again. But that's not the end of the story. As I was working with the mills, I said, "You don't know when this is going to happen again." So why don't you do this? Why don't you create educational opportunities for the child labor workers to participate in two hours a day? So at the end of their work day, get off two hours early and begin to extend their education through the industry provided education. They bought that idea and it has done marvelous things in changing Bangladesh. Listening to the examples, a number of them, I'm not sure whether it's all of them, but certainly most of them are interventions that run over a long period of time. Is that typical of OD or is that just typical of the examples that you've chosen to share? - I would suggest to you that any good organization development intervention is going to have longitudinal impact. And I think there are a couple of reasons for that. One, good organization development requires trust. Trust between the client and the consultant. Trust doesn't occur overnight. You also need trust so that the OD consultant can be open and honest with the client. I have seen too many organization development interventions where that a consultant has not been honest, because because they're afraid of losing the contract. I also think that good OD is longitudinal because the longer the client and the consultant work together, the more the client knows about the consultant and the more the consultant knows about the client. And the more you know about each other, the better you are in a position to work together. I'm wondering if we can maybe dig into one more area of OD before we hear from Toby. So I'd love to hear your experience around the use of training as a OD intervention. - I had the opportunity to teach in Saudi Arabia for a number of years. And that teaching was typically on the weekends. And so I had the opportunity during the week of doing consulting work. So about 15 years I did that. I got a phone call one day from a colleague of mine who was working in a refinery. And he said, Gary, we've had a horrible accident. One person has been killed. Eight people seriously injured. We've got to figure out what went wrong. Can you help? So I teamed up with a colleague who had expertise in the area of safety training. And the two of us went over who we spent about a week doing interviews with people in the refinery, trying to figure out what was wrong. And at the end of the time, we came up with two recommendations. One was that they needed more employees. The other recommendation we made was that the training that was being provided needed to be provided to everyone, not just employees, but also to contract laborers. All nine of the people involved in the accident had been contract laborers. When we made the recommendation to management, management said, well, we've just been notified that we need to cut our staff, not increase it. And we both went, what's going on here? Well, it turns out that they were part of a consortium of 150 refineries in the Middle East. And they submitted numbers at the end of each year. And the numbers that they had just received for the previous year showed that for a refinery producing as much oil as this one did, they should have 150 employees instead of 180. Well, this is where you see benchmarking, which is so popular, causing your huge problems. First, the refineries were not the same. The one we were working in was the oldest one of the 150. And so it did not have the same technology. Second, the oil was what they called dirty. And therefore it required extra pro-c procedures in order to prepare it for the market. Well, we were able to get them to agree to do training for everyone, but we were not able to convince them that we could not cut back on staff. - Well, Gary, I really appreciate you taking us through a number of interventions and providing some great examples from around the world as well. So I've really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you so much indeed. - Well, thank you. I appreciate the opportunity. - Nice, nice. So if you please stay with us, 'cause I'm gonna chat with Toby next. And then the three of us will be back together later in the episode. So for the time being, thank you so much, Gary. And we'll chat with you soon. (upbeat music) My second guest for the episode is Dr. Toby Eager, Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy and the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. He was a vice president of Corn Ferry International, a global consulting firm serving US-based Fortune 500, nonprofit, governmental and multinational firms. Toby has also founded several university academic and executive education programs at three universities and has received numerous best research and academic awards. His research emphasizes organization development, learning organizations, coaching, innovation and leadership. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Toby immediately teamed with physicians and medical technology consultants to launch a series of research studies which have been disseminated widely. Hi Toby, welcome to the HRD Masterclass podcast. It's great to have you in our episode focused on organization development. - Thank you, Darren. It's really pleasure to be here. - I'd like to start by picking up an area that Gary touched on, which is the importance of viewing organizations as systems and of designing systemic interventions. And I'm wondering what this means in terms of the theories that form the foundations of OD. - So you really have to look back into biology to really understand where system theory comes from. System theory has been informing organization development pretty much from the beginning or at least at the intersection between these two concepts. And especially over the last 40 years or so, if we think about our experiences in being introduced in maybe even an elementary school biology class, in learning about the dynamic intersections that happened between different parts of nature. So for me, recently I had the pleasure of being in the Masai Mara nature reserve in Kenya. So you can just see these interrelationships between trees and grasslands, buffalo, rhinoceros, and hippopotamia and elephants, and in turn, the intersections between these animals and lions and leopards. And it really is a good example of when we get closer to those principles in biology, about what we're thinking about in organization development as well. Some of that's really observable, but a lot of it is implicit or invisible, just not able to be within the vision. And so these things need to be thought of as well. So for instance, insects, vegetation, the micro-level creatures of that area, all are having an important impact on the natural system. But we don't necessarily see those things, but they're important for us to be aware of, especially when we're talking then of taking that example from nature and translating it to organization development. So then we're thinking about layers in which the organization's operating. These biologists who thought and extended the idea of systems theory, and those people who study organizations and borrowed it, really think in a basic term about inputs, the way organizations bring in resources or things that they transform in the organization and the outputs that lead to that. So one of my favorite examples there was actually working with a company called Ralston Purina, and they're a dog food company, so they make pet food. And literally on one side of the warehouse, they would pull up a rail car and have that raw material and that a huge process that they use to transform that into pet food, which they literally offloaded at the other end in terms of its being transformed and ready to ship. So we can think about that as kind of the inputs and outputs in real time, but we're also talking about that from a human perspective as well. So our inputs can be technology, they're certainly people, and they're all the things that the organization gather around in terms of its mission to make transformation happen. It's also about the layers in the environment. So again, if we use that natural example, it's about different ways in which the theories here help us to think about the interactions between parts. And that's where we can start to get in some complexity. So organization development kind of frames these in our relationships and uses it in terms of planning and changing practices. So it really asks organization members to consider their interactions. So my favorite example of this is a man named Mr. Conroy. He lived across the street from us and worked for a company called American Motors Corporation, which is now a defunct company. And this is the reason why. My parents used to walk down to the end of the driveway, my dad, my all the dads, and the stories that they tell us over what was happening at work. And Mr. Conroy used to complain. He put doors on cars. But Mr. Conroy would complain that the people up the line weren't putting the hinges on right. So he was putting the doors on and the hinges were not put on correctly. And so he didn't have any way to talk to anyone else about that. And so sure enough, these cars would come back with significant defects. So there was no way to think about the interrelationship between his role in putting this car part on. And others roles in supporting that. And so that's a very basic way of thinking about how how interrelationships are important in the workplace. And then we think about that at the top level of the organization as well as outside. And we begin to consider those interactions as part of what organization development practitioners can facilitate thinking about. - Given the complexity of organizations, it must be particularly challenging then for ODE consultant or an HRD consultant going into an organization to make sense of that complexity and to figure out what are actually the root causes of problems. So when you take a look at ODE consulting, how does somebody actually enter an organization and then go about understanding that complexity to figure out what's really happening? - Well, I think that that was an interesting thing in terms of Gary's comments because what you heard is similar to my own experience where we're bringing organization development perspectives to a variety of organizations. But an organization development practitioner is strong in facilitation. Has to download a tremendous amount of information and learn a lot about the organizations they're engaging and embracing. But they should also facilitate their approach in a way that brings in those members of the organization who have expertise. That diagnostic approach can really bring an organization development practitioner up to speed. So in the case where I've done a lot of interventions in terms of organization culture. So with those surveys and focus groups and interviews and try to learn more about the strengths and needed changes or gaps that the client might be seeing, these diagnostic tools help the ODE practitioner better understand the organization. But it's an interdependency and you don't have to be an expert in necessarily every aspect of the business on the first day. Again, Gary mentioned the long-term relationship helps you to do that as well. So ODE practitioners bring their skills and the broader skills they bring aren't necessarily dependent on them understanding the specific aspects of every industry they engage. But are more about understanding the processes and problem solving and solution generating areas that can really help organizations address the changes that they think they need. As well as present them, new information that might change their minds about exactly what changes need to occur. You talked earlier about layers. And I suppose if you look at organizations one way of viewing layers within organizations would be sort of like as individuals, there are teams. And then there's the organization as a whole. And when I look back at some of the examples that have explored so far in the episode, we've talked a bit about the individual level and a bit about organizations, but not much about the teams. Well, it's really an interesting time there and to be thinking about teams as so many organizations have suddenly been immersed in a new team experience, which is for most, I think, the experience of perhaps being fully online at a distance using teleconferencing for long, quite extended periods of time. So that's really brought in even some new questions about how we work with team development. But mostly when we think about team development, we could think about it at the level of team membership and behaviors so we can look at that in terms of awareness, feedback, and skills and development. That's often a training active process and also potentially a feedback oriented process. And that often is done with 360 feedback in terms of team insights. But I'll give you an example of a engineering company I work with that made custom machines. So every client who they contracted with actually had a specific need. And so every situation they were in was a new situation, a new product, a new design. So they actually gave each other feedback in person. So they would do 360 feedback live one person at a time. What this did is it created a lot of tension early as they explored how to do it. But they knew that they had a level of interdependence that relied on their providing that kind of feedback to each other. So this engineering group actually thought it was really important to do that. I think it's a good example of the possibilities that systems approaches the teaming can really bring in. And then another type is just thinking through in terms of the process relationships. So not so much how the team operates in terms of their communication, but also how they're sharing product. So this might be any kind of process where we have people who need to exchange information and providing customer service responding to defects or problems that are going on in the manufacturing area, that kind of thing. So that they're actually learning to build teaming. But the most traditional way of thinking about team building is training. So I think we're seeing more in terms of different training tools to help with that. And I think depending on the real buy-in of the team and really the necessity depending on the kind of work they do, we're seeing more electronic ways to provide feedback. As part of the example there, you referenced COVID and the complexity that that's added and the changes that's brought about to organizations. And as part of the podcast series, we're trying to focus a little on the challenges that HRD is facing in the workplace of the 2020s. And of course COVID is part of that. But when you look at organizations and what they're facing right now, how do you see OD helping? Well, I have two reactions to your question. One is, I'm going through my experience of doing what was my only real experience of doing a fully added distance COVID intervention. I worked with a team of medical doctors and medical technologists to support first one hospital and then a whole hospital system in developing safety procedures in emergency rooms for doctors that helped both patients and the community. And what, for me in terms of that experience, what it taught us, I think as a team, was not only the importance of thinking through the technical side and also the gaps as we literally were working on intervening and supporting safety in the hospital. New information would come out about what COVID was. And we have to continue to pivot and adjust to that. But we also ran into human attitudes, just new challenges that are coming in and people's reactions to them. So for me, in organization development, we use this term sociotechnical systems a lot. I think it's really important that we balance our understanding of technical needs with people needs. And I think COVID taught us so much about that. What it taught us is the importance of human attitude, of human investment, and really the importance of trust. So if you look at some of the challenges in my international comparisons between South Korea, a country that's had really very few deaths relative to its size. And the US, a lot of what you can do is explain that technically, the health care system, what's been happening in terms of their history with health care management, the fact that they had a similar virus attack their country before. But you can also see it in terms of attitudes, trust, and values. So the big difference between the US and South Korea is probably as much about people's attitudes and trusting of health care systems and organizations and it is anything else. So it really brings in this idea of it's not enough as an organization to be technically expert. We really have to think through how we engage people, how we engage our own people, as well as when we face outward to customers and community members. And I think that's really highlighted that. It's also shown us a lot of the weaknesses that we've had in terms of thinking through the most effective and vibrant organizational systems. It gives us a tremendous opportunity. And I think there's a lot of positive things we can learn from this COVID experience as it evolves. And so one of the things that I hope we do, Darren, is that we do more to think about international learning. Within human resource development, we talk a lot about different kinds of learning systems. I wondered the whole time that COVID's been going on, if there would be an ability for us and a willingness to bring spotlights to the most successful countries and places that really did a great job of mitigating COVID-19. And if there would be some possibility to spend the time to observe that, in a way that could really influence citizens, people's individual decision making, as well as develop trust in healthcare processes. So trust, I think, is something that we're really going to have to think more about over the next while. And I think COVID-19 has shown us so much about the importance of that. - Yeah, it's interesting when you look at COVID-19. I think it also highlights the challenges that we face in being able to learn quickly enough. And also as part of that, our ability to deal with vast amounts of data. - Yeah, I also think that it's certainly culture. I mean, I think that if you look at, are to home countries, the United States and the United Kingdom. And we think about them in terms of the reactions that people had. We're also seeing a cultural phenomenon. I think that we're seeing highly individualistic cultures, people who really want to make their own decisions and feel good about them at the individual level. But maybe are not in a place to think about having decisions, being more influenced by government or by people they don't know or policymakers. And now, I've had the pleasure of being involved in organization development, academic programs and human resource development programs in a school of engineering, in schools of education, in schools of public policy and in schools of business. And the time I'm now spending in the public policy domain has really showed me a different angle on organization development and human resource development. We've been talking about it as national HRD and international perspectives on HRD. But we don't often talk specifically about the idea of policy. Just what are the specific aspects in which policy formation, influence behavior and influence our decisions about, we talked about systems before. So the policy environment is something that organizations sit in that they also can influence. Individuals are really influenced by policy. So when we look at intercultural experiences, sometimes we forget to think about how policies might be shaping the very experience that people are having in terms of their identities with being, in my case, my Danish relatives being Danish American or whatever country you might look at to compare. And so I think COVID also helped us see that a little bit more just in terms of, how do we explain these differences in reactions? How do we explain the differences even in the way that we think about ourselves? And so for me, this idea of individualism and collectivism has been there. There's a researcher named Gelfand who talks about cultural tightness and looseness. So how much we adhere to rules and how much we don't. These are big impacts on the way we think about organizations. And certainly in terms of organization development, a new lens on how we might analyze the way in which organization cultures operate. So, Darren, I just wanted to highlight one more thing, which is just a trend that I think is important. Jervais Bush and colleagues have been talking a lot about this idea of diagnostic and dialogic organization development. And so I really point to this idea of diagnostic, which I mentioned before, which is really using tools to assess an organization, its processes or its culture, surveys, observation, process analysis, with an emerging area of dialogic, which is really the process of involving a mixture of people in discussions about their organization. He stakeholders. So the organization development practitioner moves from being a facilitator to being more of a producer and orchestrator, somebody who creates containers in which individual members of organizations can engage in dialogue about key issues. This came from the appreciative inquiry movement that was around for a while, looking at positive ways to have discussions about organizations. And dreams and areas of discovery that organizations have that are part of their values and dialogue, not necessarily a fix it approach to the organization, but more of an investment approach in terms of the way that people talk and describe. So we think about the future of organization development. These are the kinds of voices that are coming in and new ways of thinking about how organization development operates. And that really fits into my hope for diversity moving forward. So when we think about dialogue and dialogic approaches, so it's really about people talking and working to have deeper understanding with one another. And so I've had a good amount of time in my career to really engage organizations in thinking about diversity. As a matter of fact, I was with a colleague the other day, we talked about kind of our estimates of how many people we engaged in diversity training a few years ago when that was my full-time work. And we estimate that just individually, we trained about 30,000 individuals on diversity. So for me, it's been an important aspect. And really something that's coming up now in the US and worldwide in terms of diversity and anti-racism. So I see these things connected because having dialogue or taking a dialogic approach to OD, could really lead us to a place of better understanding one another through careful, thoughtful discussion. I feel like it feels like that sets us up nicely for inviting Gary back in and for the group discussion, I think. But before we do, I did want to say a big thank you, Toby, for our one-to-one chat. It's been great talking through these issues with you. It's really my pleasure, Darren. Thanks for the time. Up next, we have the group discussion, where my guests are together to discuss their shared passion for the episodes topic. This discussion is brought to you thanks to the sponsorship support of interpretive simulations. Since 2008, students and trainees have used interpretive simulations HR management simulation where participants are tasked to make challenging decisions at the HR director level in a simulated environment. Students must build a strong HR function at their simulated medium-sized organisation and wrestle with the challenges of staying on budget. The simulation makes the connection between concept and practice while students learn by doing. It comes with assignments, mini cases and quizzes to reinforce core HR principles. If you'd like to receive faculty access to review the HR management simulation, visit them at www.interpretive.com and fill out a demo request. Welcome back to the HRD Masterclass podcast. Our focus for this episode is organisation development. I've already met one to one with Gary McClean and with Toby Egan. For the final section of the episode, we're all together for our group chat. So welcome back, Gary and Toby. It's good to be back. Thank you, Darren. Thanks, Darren. So I'd like to start by talking a little about external consultants versus internal consultants. I was thinking about the examples that first of you shared in your conversations with me. And those examples were predominantly about external OD consultants coming into an organisation. So given that organisations have a choice between using an internal consultant and internal employee in an OD role or an external consultant, what do you see as the benefits and challenges of internals versus externals? The issue for me around internals is whether or not the expertise resides within the organisation. In many organisations with which I have worked, they do not have a designated organisation development person nor do they have someone who has experience or expertise in doing OD. However, my personal preference is whenever possible to marry up an internal with an external. And that's because as with most of life, there is some ambiguity here. We see sometimes the internal has knowledge about the organisation that will take years for the external to discover. On the other hand, the external has the ability to really stand up to the leadership within the organisation. And that sometimes can be very dangerous and very difficult for the internal. So when you marry the two, you have the opportunity to take advantage of the strengths and overcome the weaknesses of each. And the benefit that the external brings not only in terms of the things that Gary mentioned is the cross-organizational perspective, assuming they've been working in the organisation development area for a while, that lends across organisations, just the experience of vantage point that helps give executives perspective on decision making as well as the partnership internally, providing them with process options as well as ways to really fit the desired approach or the need to the organisation's specific structure and needs can be really amplified if they work well together and they both get each other up to speed. So of course, the answer is always going to be it depends. If an organisation hasn't used an external OD consultant before, how should they go about selecting one? Well, I'm involved in another consulting group called HR Connection. And their primary focus is facilitating small groups. And those small groups are across industry. and they bring together people with common backgrounds. So in the HR arena. So what I find happening there is that when someone needs someone with any specialty within the HR arena, they will simply ask the group, who have you used, who has been successful? Is there someone out there I should avoid? And through that networking, is the way they get their connection to an external OD consultant? Now are the particular types of OD consultant or certain OD consultants that specialize in certain methodologies or processes? And if so, if an organization looks out into the marketplace, what are those sort of buckets of OD consultant that they'd see? Certainly given the last year or so, diversity and anti-racism consulting consultants, which are also tied to organization culture consultants. Certainly have been predominant in terms of the kinds of contacts I'm getting. I'd say, lean black belt, that area, is also one that often is pointed out to you in terms of the need for specialization. Depends how you define OD, but I'd include executive coaching there, seems to be something that's very strong in terms of interest. And then I would also look at areas like reorganization, merging, and managing employee either size or workforce issues. Those would be some of the categories. Gary, what else would you say? The other one that I would add is virtual instruction with the growth of the Zoom area. People are trying to figure out how to use it most effectively in terms of providing training. The other piece that seems to be popular again because of the Zoom environment is how do we evaluate our employees? And that's not a new one. That's been around for a very long time. So many OD consultants out there. How would you advise an organization goes about selecting the right one to work with? Well, I think the question implies that there is a right one. And I don't think that's the case. There are lots and lots of people who can be effective somewhat different ways, perhaps, but they can be effective in the organization. I don't know how you really go about doing this. It's sort of like asking the question that I raised earlier about evaluating employees. Who is a successful OD consultant? And the only way I really see that playing out is through the networking. You ask other people who have used consultants and say, what was your experience like? Is this someone you would hire again? And I would just add, we sometimes have affections for the brand name consultancies and I think getting closer to what they're going to do and recognizing that in some cases, maybe more than we would like, these are actually not entirely customized approaches. I'm cautionary about that because of my experience with some of the large firms deploying consultants from the firm that have limited real work experience, lots of MBAs, recent MBAs who may not just have a lot of experience in the organization development realm and really rely on a templated approach. Now these templates can be great, but I think that it's really helpful to see what are you in for and what would you like to see in terms of outcome. And then I'd add ethics that I think that one of the dilemmas we have often in looking at any consultant is to what extent may they be assigning or prescribing work that is leaning more towards their benefit than the benefit of the organization. So that gets back to the issue of reputation. But I also think just talking in terms of the flexibility and even having a value space discussion with a prospective organization development consultant could be a benefit. I go back to one of the comments you made earlier, Darren, about knowledge about the industry. And I often have the experience when I'm being interviewed of being asked the question, what is your experience in X industry? So a recent example is what experience have you had in the mining industry? Well, I don't have any experience in the mining industry. But I think when I get that question, I am a red flag goes up for me because I'm concerned that they don't really understand what the OD process is. My expertise is in OD, not in a given industry. So I think it's fairly easy, especially if you've got an internal to work with, to move from industry to industry. So in other words, then your specialism is in the process that you're bringing into the intervention. Correct. And it sounds like some organizations then not knowing that are actually trying to buy solutions rather than buy a process. Yeah, and that's where I was a little cautionary around the templated approach that some larger organizations apply as well. Because in part, they're pointing in the direction that Gary's mentioning. They heard that so and so consulting firm did a good job for X-Firm. Maybe didn't get close enough to ask what was happening on the consulting side. So they ended up buying something that might from a surface level seem like the right thing, or might be at the executive level, the named organization, that just sounds like the right firm that our executives will want us to use without looking more closely at what's really going to happen here. And that's where I do think, particularly with firms, it's helpful to look at that portfolio in whatever way it can be described. To get a closer feel for how much customization is going to happen there so that the kind of process that Gary's laying out can really be implemented. How do you generally go about dealing with a customer who has a strong point of view of what they want? And you feel like, are you believe that's not what they actually need? Out of the box solutions, that's what we call this a lot of times, so they want to have something that they've seen before, and they think it's the right thing, and they want it fast. Well, I think that you have to appreciate the value of that from the standpoint of the client, but also have a critical conversation that reflects an alignment between your estimation of what will lead to a successful outcome in addition to what your client thinks is the right thing to do. And sometimes those diverge. And that is where you have to make a decision to not engage the client, but to do it directly, not indirectly, so that you're both clear on the reasons for either the startup of a relationship or the reasons why it's not going to move forward. I was approached by a university and asked if I would help in a conflict management situation, where deans were not getting along well and were not able to make much progress in terms of the vision and mission of the university. And as I talked with some folks internally, who I happen to know, I found out that there was a budget system in place, where the resources that went to an individual school within the university were based on the enrollment of students in courses in that particular college. Well, that automatically set up a competitive environment. So when I talked with the contacting person, I said, are you open to changing the budget system? And I was told in no uncertain terms, no, this is the way we do things, but we got to get over this conflict. Well, it was a lose, lose environment. And so I simply said, no, further, I asked how they plan to do this. And they said, well, we have a fall workshop with all the deans and we can give you an hour and a half. Well, again, it was obvious that was not going to lead to success. And so I simply declined the contract. I think that's a great example of time constraint plus prescription, meaning that the client has a good idea about what they want to have done without necessarily considering the reality of how the practice of engaging up front and the thoughtful process of a real intervention needs to be there before the outcome that desire can actually occur. And so I think that's a common thing where someone wants to come in for X number of hours or days or has X amount of money to spend all of things that are Realistic constraints and can be worked out, but they really do need to be sorted on both sides The ethics pieces cropped up a little during the conversation. I'm wondering do you have Conversations with clients about ethics up front or if the ethical conversation Something that happens when you hit a situation and you think okay, I now need to have a conversation with a client about my ethics I'll just start off by saying it's important to separate an Inemone and confidentiality and what I mean by that is if you're going to do any kind of needs assessment or any kind of engagement Indian in the work environment. It's important that the client understand and you agree on What are the ways in which information will be used and that in some cases When appropriate there may be confidentiality and in other cases and an enmity and I Know that in terms of consequences. There's actually a HRD ethics Advances from a few years ago that has some case studies that look at this exact issue and the dilemma When a client demands to know who said what or who Has a particular opinion or what the data are From a climate survey for instance regarding specific people So laying those things out front are really important to the success of the trust building process and I think more than ever Trust building in organizations is an important component. So those things need to be laid out up front I have lots of examples of what Toby just talked about. I had one intervention where I was doing a fairly extensive needs assessment in an organization where we were doing both surveys and interviews and in one of the interviews and employee shared with me anonymously that he was aware of an employee who was embezzling from the organization So that was shared with with senior management and they were of course very anxious to know well who is this? Where is it taking place? And I had to say look we had an agreement up front that when employees share something anonymously it stays anonymous And so you know what's happening you go about and finding out where it is You've got systems to do that you do it. That's not my role to be a police In the organization And one of the answers Toby gave earlier Toby referenced consultants who are working in the ODA area focusing in on diversity and inclusion and Diversity and inclusion a topic sort of cropped up in a number of the episodes for this first series of the podcast and so I'm wondering about the history of diversity and inclusion in ODA I've been involved in diversity work in organizations since the very beginning of my career so in the late 80s and What I would say is that what we see as we see in some other social movements is evolution so Diversity's been around for a long time in terms of organizational intervention So what I see happening now is another wave that's included more anti-racism in many cases because of the social issues that have emerged And it's really reflective of often how diversity gets focused in on in organizations Other thing I just point out here in terms of that is the work that I've done in diversity has always involved diverse backgrounds so If whether that's partnering internally or externally I think consultants need to come with a variety of backgrounds to do this work So independent consultants can do that. I have done it, but I always partner internally Often with a woman of color with people who represent different groups in the organization to make sure that not only in the assessment process But in whatever's delivered that there's a mixture there that's beneficial Last thing I'd say is I think that there's also in the Academy of HRD a Focus on a critical perspective which asks about the historical roots of diversity So that's another question just in terms of your values and your background and your vantage point But I certainly think looking in terms of privileges and important aspect getting familiar and more deeply familiar and embracing both the Best parts of the US history and the global history around diversity as well as some of the most tragic And I think that we Hopefully as HRD professionals and SOD professionals intervening in diversity do the work to think through our own identities And what we bring and the limitations to that as well as the broader historical perspectives of what might bring a particular organization or client to where they are at present in diversity Let me just add because I am so much older than Toby That my history in working on diversity and inclusion goes back to the early 70s And at that time my primary focus in diversity was probably on gender issues And gender has been a focus of my work both in practice as well as in research From that time We're making some progress but it's still not enough And so we need to keep our foot on the pedal around dealing with gender issues and creating equity in the workplace Other areas though that I've worked in in diversity that don't seem to get much visibility or leverage Sexual orientation We're starting to see that emerge in some of our literature But I still don't hear a lot about it in practice Another area is dealing with issues of The lots of politically correct terms here but those who are physically challenged or mentally challenged And how do we make a place for them in the workplace? I agree with what Toby has said that we seem to be so focused now on race Very important But in that process we can't forget That there's an intersectionality here around several of these components of diversity that are important for the workplace Well Gary and Toby we've reached the end of our time for today So a big thank you to both of you for our conversations And for being part of our discussion on organization development Thank you Darren Thanks Darren appreciate the opportunity Thank you so much for joining me for this episode It was wonderful spending time with Gary and with Toby If you enjoyed this episode check out our others to explore topics such as training and development Learning organizations, career development and much more New episodes release weekly for this first series of 10 episodes To learn more about the series check out hrdmasterclass.com And to learn about the Academy of Human Resource Development Check out ahrd.org By becoming a member you can access extra bonus materials not included in the podcast Also don't forget to look into our group discussion sponsor Interpretive simulations by visiting their website at interpretive.com I'm looking forward to being with you in our next episode Until then this is Darren Short signing off from the hrdmasterclass hrdmasterclass podcast is brought to you by the Academy of Human Resource Development And is a production of allbypodcast.com Thank you for listening to hrdmasterclass It's a unique resource featuring over 130 hrd experts across 55 episodes As a fan of the series you can help make season 6 happen AHRD is crowdsourcing funding for the season and you can donate today at givebutter.com forward slash hrd.hrdmasterclass.hrd With your help the season can bring you 11 new episodes focused on major HRD research articles their practical implications the need for further research And how researchers and practitioners can help each other to advance research and practice on the topics It would be amazing to continue the series and I hope you're considered donating today at givebutter.com forward slash hrd.hrdmasterclass.hrd