January 2021
As I write this article, I am teaching a graduate-level consulting skills course at a university business school. I designed and have taught this course before, but this time I am experiencing the course content differently, as I believe are my students as well. It is a deeply unsettling time in our country and our culture. Months into a pandemic, we are deeply divided along racial and political lines, our most pressing societal needs are seemingly intractable, and perhaps most disturbingly, we cannot even agree upon what reality is, let alone reach consensus on solutions to our problems! Any sense that reality is controllable or predictable has disappeared as completely as a missing sock in the dryer, inexplicably sucked up into some alternate and otherworldly oblivion. It feels as though the only thing that is certain is that the future is a very unpredictable, uncontrollable, and even unsafe place.
In the midst of this chaos, organizations are still trying to make organizational life work, businesses are trying to stay afloat, and consultants are still trying to help them meet these challenges. Now more than ever we need healthy organizations that provide people with a solid and supportive place to work and earn a living for their families. Unemployment, underemployment, and toxic employment are three great evils of our time, taking an unimaginable toll on human beings. Given the impacts upon very real people, the work of building healthy organizations that can succeed is more urgent than ever.
Organizations need skillful, empathetic help in navigating both the crises and the opportunities presented by our current reality. But good consulting work – work that enables leaders and their organizations to move forward, into their best future – is not easy or fast in the best of times. How can we join our clients to help build healthy and successful organizations now?
Author Max De Pree states, “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality” (Leadership is an Art), and if this is so, then the first responsibility of a consultant has always been to help the leader to define reality. This truth has not changed. We have done so by asking really good questions. And the need for good questions has not changed either. Especially now, clients need to engage questions of meaning and purpose rather than practical questions that invite prescribed, “expert” answers. Asking “How?” too quickly, notes Peter Block in his book The Answer to How Is Yes, shuts down possibilities and blunts our awareness of what matters most.
I tell my students that if we get the questions right, the answers will become clear. In light of our current reality, I believe that there are three critically important questions for organizations to consider:
- What is the most important thing that our organization exists to do? In other words, what is our “organizational calling”? This question reconnects us with the meaning and purpose of our organization and our unique place in the world.
- Do we believe that our people want to contribute to the success of the organization? If the answer to whether our people want to contribute to our success is yes, then we have something to build upon. We have hope.
- In light of our organizational calling, what can we create together with our people? In our time of great disconnection and chaos, we recognize our capacity to recreate both connection and meaning together to begin to navigate our future. We can begin to envision a desired future where the organization may look quite different but can find deeper connection with its purpose and a more meaningful contribution to make.
From here, anything is possible.
This month we are focusing on the podcast archives.
Ray did a series on Organizational Health. Ray shared the most important elements of Organizational Health from Ray’s unique and thought provoking perspective. If you haven’t listened to these older episodes, you might want to add them to your list. Find the first episode in the Organizational Health series here.
Episode Notes:
Clients often don’t want to change as much as they thought they did when they engage an organizational consultant. One tool that consultants can use to help clients overcome their resistance to change is an organizational health framework.
How To Address Resistance to Change.
What is the source of the resistance?
- There is a natural resistance to change that happens. Change creates disequilibrium and we naturally don’t like to be out of balance.
Another explanation in organizational context
- Organizational dysfunction: The organization isn’t able to change because of the problems that are at the heart of how the organization function.
Organizations operate by the same principles that humans do in their development.
Ray uses the book The Living Company by Ari De Geus as a guide for organizational health.
De Geus studied companies that lasted over 100 years. He found that organizations that lasted over 100 years viewed themselves as a living organism, which embraced change.
Where organizations are effective, they are healthy.
When organizations are not effective, there is dysfunction somewhere.
Reframing Organizations by Lee Bolman & Terrence Deal provided an outline for thinking about the elements of organizational health.
Frames outlined in Reframing Organizations
- Structure (how an organization is organized)
- People (human resource)
- Organizational Politics (decision making)
- Symbolic (meaning symbols, stories, rituals, activities, logos, etc.)
- Process (how things are done)
- Soul (mission, purpose, values, vision=essences of organization)
Each frame can be functional or dysfunctional. It’s the role of a consultant to help the organization identify where health and dysfunction is in these frames.
Organizational Health must look at each one of these frames. Status of health will have a direct impact on the success (or lack there off) of any consulting work.
What do we need to pay attention to?
Intuitive Questions that a consultant would ask about an organization:
- Are they clear about their identity?
- Are there issues about how they are doing things?
Organizational Decision Making (Clue to Organizational Health)
- To what extent is the way the organization makes a decision congruent with organizational values?
- Most organization decision making is personality centered rather than organizational centered which results in no accountability.
- Most organizations practice the golden rule: who has the most gold, rules.
Organizational Framework is an important tool for consultants to help create better results.
The guiding question for consultants:
- What is the status of their health? (However, you define that)
- If I engaged with them, to what extent can I help them to increase their health, rather than enabling their disfunction.
Intuition Questions:
- What do I know?
- What am I going to do about it?
The most dangerous thing for a consultant is to be in denial about the health of the organization.