|
BUILDING HIGH-PERFORMANCE ORGANIZATIONS FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Description: This seminar is concerned with the theory and practice of large-scale organizational change. It assumes that: (1) after years of observation, seminar participants are "experts" on their own organizations, but (2) they may not have been exposed to an extensive organizational theory background and so need a framework (a diagnostic change model and analytical approach) to structure and amplify their knowledge and suggest how to use it to effect change, and (3) they want to be part of a positive change process continually driving their organizations toward becoming "higher performing organizations" (defined as simultaneously delivering high product and service quality, outstanding "customer value," and sound financial performance—"Pick 3").
The organizational change approach that forms the basis of this seminar seeks to "cast a net" over what has been learned from the past 100 years of academic theory and practical applications and to synthesize that knowledge base into a change model explaining why some organizations are high-performers but many are not. The seminar does not attempt to "tell an organization what’s wrong with it" or to deliver a "cookbook" of what to do to improve it. Rather, the seminar introduces a series of "lens" through which participants can view their own organizations and decide for themselves what changes may be necessary to improve it’s performance.
We will begin by focusing outside the organization and asking such "outcome-oriented" questions as: "What is high-performance for us?" "How would we know if we were high-performance?" "According to whom are we high-performance?" and "Why do we want to be high-performance in the first place?" Then we will look inside the organization and ask: "What are the change levers available to help us move the organization toward higher-performance?"
Because this seminar is based on a change approach and materials designed for use by "intact" work teams over a relatively long period of time, the seminar will not try to cover all parts of the change model in detail. Rather, we will begin with a thorough overview of the model's six interdependent change levers and then focus our time primarily on the first "lever:" the critical nature of organizational leadership. Experience has shown that unless an organization gets leadership "right" nothing else "downstream" in the model matters.
Organizational leadership in the HPO model will not be defined the same as "individual leadership" in most management courses. Rather, for us, leadership will be defined as consisting of three parts: (1) a set of functions -- the "work of leadership" -- that must be performed at all levels of an organization, including the first level contributor, if the organization is to become high-performance; (2) a belief set -- a leadership philosophy -- about the nature of people and their attitudes toward work, about how people are motivated, about the distribution of knowledge and creativity, and about how we see the nature of work; and (3) a new set of "forms" -- formal and informal ways to share power -- required to get the work of leadership done. In the process of exploring organizational leadership, we'll discover the need for a fundamental "mental mind-set" or "paradigm" shift by everyone in the organization -- moving our "mental view of organizations"
from the older, steeply hierarchical, autocratic, control-oriented industrial model to a more inclusive, less-hierarchical, team-based "networked talent model."
The other five change levers -- vision, values, strategy, structure, and systems -- will be discussed as outgrowths of this first lever, but less thoroughly. Participants in the seminar will be asked to help direct the flow of the material presented to best meet their needs. We will use applied examples of how the model is being used by teams in actual client organizations to help guide their change efforts. Clients include federal government organizations (e.g., the Navy's shipyard corporation, it’s SPAWAR System Center, San Diego, and it’s Naval Medical and Dental facilities around the world; the EPA's Inspector General, National Center for Environmental Assessment, and Region, II, V, VII, and IX, the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, and Army's Corpus Christi Army Depot), municipal governments (e.g., Cities of Norfolk, Portsmouth and Lynchburg, Virginia; Dayton, Ohio, and Guelph, Canada), and private sector organizations (e.g., G.E.-Fanuc, Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, and McKee Foods).
A key assumption of the HPO model and change process is that participants must gain the theory/practice-based "profound knowledge" and skills to diagnose their own organizations in order to begin identifying opportunities for introducing positive change. Although some discussion of implementation techniques (e.g., self-directed teams, re-engineering, TQM, etc.) will be included in the seminar, the majority of class discussion will center on the theoretical principles, which must be mastered in order to make any of these techniques work.
|
