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How I typically work with clients - Organisational Development
I work from the principle that to generate sustainable change within organisations, the change needs to happen from within the organisation itself; I see my role as working in partnership with the client to develop the organisations inherent capacity for change. Change can only occur when people start being or doing something different - When working with clients I help create a participative process that engages those who will be, and are, affected by any change. If people are truly engaged in the change process, it is more likely that a transition will evolve in the general direction of what was intended.
Rather than see organisations as a mechanistic machine which managers can control and re-engineer; I see organisations as a social process and believe that change occurs through the actions; behaviours and conversations between people.
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While working with clients to bring about change I encourage and support leaders to create an environment that promotes purposeful, thoughtful conversations. The intention is to air the many different points of view and opinions of the members of the organisation creating new insights and ideas which will in turn will bring about the opportunity to do things differently.
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Although every piece of work and outcome will be different, I have found that a process similar to the one below can set the foundation for a creative, effective partnership.
1. Initial contact and Inquiry:
The purpose of this phase is to establish the reasons and scope of the challenge or opportunity. This could involve conversations with the 'leadership team'; various people across the organisation; and key stakeholders. Patterns and themes are likely to emerge; these can then be explored to identify and agree the key issues and priorities for change. Just by having these conversations will lead to change occurring.
| 2. Generating a change process:
This phase focuses on exploring ways of addressing priorities for change. Working with the appropriate people we challenge existing assumptions; and establish a process to engage people in the organisation with the intention of creating new ways of working.
3. Engaging the organisation in change activity:
During this phase, the 'leadership team' and key 'change agents' invite the rest of the organisation to join them on their journey of change. All opinions and views are fed back ensuring an emerging process. This process supports the notion of developing the organisations capacity for change.
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How I typically work with clients - Developing Teams
I work with the leaders and the teams, creating an awareness of how the team can become more effective in delivering the business aims. This is more than a one-off team-building event; this is about spending time learning about how each member thinks and works in relation to the organisation; this is about making team-development integral to the business processes.
Although every piece of work will differ, it will generally follow a similar journey to the one below:
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1. Initial contact and inquiry – I believe it's important to invest time at this stage to have honest conversations with the leader, the one who generally has made contact, to ensure they are genuinely committed to investing effort in developing the team and understand the work (and change) that is required from leaders as well as the team. To have an effective working relationship, investing time in building a strong mutual relationship based on trust; has given a foundation on how the leader can role model their relationship with the team.
2. Team inquiry - This is about having conversations with the team and other relevant people. This ensures that any planned intervention includes the views and opinions of all the team involved. These conversations have two other benefits; the conversations themselves will generate a change in behaviour as people will have had purposeful,
| thoughtful dialougue which has caused them to think about the environmrnt they are working in; and issues other than the those the leader has observed may surface as more prevalent to the team behaviour.
3. Facilitate team event/s - I have found that for the majority of the time, a team off-site meeting has been the best option to explore and work on team processes. Every off-site meeting will differ depending on the issues within the team. From expereince I have found that the best way to work on team processes is to work on key business issues facing he team. The off-sites are demanding and focused on both team processes and commercial results.
4. Ongoing team communication - This phase is ongoing. It is critical that the team has a robust communication process in place to support team and individual performance. I work with the team and the leader to develop a communicaiton process that is relavant to them.
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