Change is the law of life. And those who look only to
the past or present are certain to miss the future.
Week four and we are almost half-way through another busy semester. It is has been a great week and this class hasn’t let me down yet; I am loving learning so much about OD and what consultants have to learn to balance. There is more and more thought I keep placing into what I want to be when I grow up; I have never felt the finance world that I have been in was really “it”, and the more I learn about consulting and the balancing of intricate relationships, the more intrigued I become. I definitely reinforced this week that when it comes to planning interventions, I certainly have the “pathfinder style” wrapped up because I lean towards a more interactive and participative leadership style. Pathfinders tend to use a collaborative approach to help “…the organization to focus on its most critical issues and questions” (Brown, 2011, p. 92).
This week we discussed the importance of understanding the epic levels of responsibility when being an OD consultant. My favorite portion of this, however, was teaming up with an internal OD champion. The practitioner-client relationship is so incredibly important, and what a better way to do this by teaming up with an internal champion that already understands the culture, the norms, and the ropes. This ties greatly into the importance of our decision making capabilities – how will we know what needs to be addressed and how to address it if we don’t have vital information and understanding of the organization? The answer, I believe, is that we simply can’t; in order for us to make better decisions, we have to have better information and the resources in which to carry out the desired results. I had mentioned in one of my discussion postings this week that one way we can do this is to rely upon the maturity of our emotional intelligence. We need a certain amount of emotion, or potential empathy and sympathy to become great leaders. Without emotional maturity and intelligence, chances are that the quality of our decisions will be impacted.
Research has demonstrated that better decision making has helped leaders of organizations achieve better organizational results and higher yields of financial performance (Harvard Business Publishing, 2010). It has also shown us that better decision making and execution of those decisions are positively correlated to higher levels of employee engagement; when leadership is able to make “good, high quality decisions” and do so in an expedited matter that allows for positive impacts throughout the organization, people tend to become more connected with their work and commit to higher levels of performance to get things accomplished (Harvard Business Publishing, 2010).
Obstacles getting in the way from us doing this include lacking appropriate leadership talent, the complexity of the organizational system and org charts, as well as international growth opportunities in attempts to reach more consumers has led to more complicated ways of conducting business. Because of the added layers of complexity, it becomes a greater challenge to figure out who should be making what decisions, as well as what are the meaningful decisions that have to be made, and what do we all as a team have to do to make things happen (Harvard Business Publishing, 2010). More complicated hierarchies have also meant less accessible information to the decision makers. This ultimately means that those who are tasked with critical decision making responsibilities may be making decisions in a vacuum or without critical information that would inform them greatly on what is most appropriate for the situation at hand.
Five steps for leaders to make better decisions include conducting a self-awareness assessment regarding our current capabilities, being able to identify what are the “critical” decisions to be made, take the critical decisions into an action plan that includes “the what, the who, the how, and the when” (Harvard Business Publishing, 2010), then making sure all other organizational systems and resources are focused on carrying out the critical decision action plan, and lastly, includes embedding this focus throughout the organization (Harvard Business Publishing, 2010).
This is not to diminish the daily questions and decisions that need to be readily made regarding daily operations. Those need to follow suit as well in order to guide us closer to our strategic goals and initiatives; it is the overall decision making process that leaders need to improve upon to bring about higher level of organizational improvements and HBP has certainly opened our eyes a little wider towards the importance of making better decisions.
Until we blog again!
References
Brown, D. R. (2011). An Experimental Approach to
Organizational Development, Eight Edition. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.
Harvard Business Publishing. (2010, October 13). How
Companies Can Make Better Decisions. Retrieved from youtube.com:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbxpg6D4Hk8&feature=player_embedded
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