ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (OD), A HIT IT DIDN'T NEED!

ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (OD), A HIT IT DIDN’T NEED!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 4, 2009

“Refined policy has ever been the parent of confusion, and ever will be so, as long as the world endures. Plain good intention, which is as easily discovered at the first view as fraud is surely detected at last, is of no mean force in the government of mankind. Genuine simplicity of heart is a healing and cementing principle.”

Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797), English statesman

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I was disappointed when former Senator Tom Daschle decided not to seek confirmation as Health and Human Services Secretary. I was confident he would do a good job. It may surprise you, however, I was more disappointed when Nancy Killefer withdrew her name from nomination as Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the new post of Federal Chief Performance Officer.

The performance post President Obama has created is an OD position. It is possibly the highest profile OD has ever enjoyed in its brief history. What theatre and what a platform for OD to display its smorgasbord of disciplines: science, art, engineering, history, sociology, psychology, anthropology and philosophy.

Killefer is a high profile consultant with McKinsey & Associates. My best friend in South Africa, an American with McKinsey, specialized in industrial engineering, which is closely related to OD. So, I have some appreciation of the quality of the firm’s people.

The reason for Killefer to drop out was the fact that she faced a $946 lien in 2005 for failure to pay unemployment compensation tax on household help.

Daschle’s withdrawal came after escalating criticism from watchdog groups, Senate colleagues, and the general public. He had failed to pay what became $146,000 in back taxes, largely for accepting the use of a car and driver donated to him by a private-equity firm that he served as a consultant.

That service was valued at $255,000 over three years. In the recent past, he has received more than $200,000 in after dinner speeches varying from $15,000 to $50,000 per appearance. In fact, in the past two years, Daschle has leveraged his former role as Senate Majority Leader into $5 million, including providing policy advice to corporate clients, one of which was a health insurance giant. He never registered as a lobbyist but for all intent and purpose he was such an animal. As health czar, he would, indeed, be regulating clients who had made him a rich man.

The irony is that he would most likely still have been confirmed even given his egregious breach of good sense, but for Nancy Killefer’s withdrawal for a $1,000 snafu.

Before you become judgmental about these folks, I can tell you from personal experience it would be easy to be complicit in such affairs. When I was in South Africa, our subsidiary wanted me to stay beyond my assignment, and offered to duplicate my salary without reporting it, and to build me a luxurious home, again without paying for it. I said “no” in both cases, but I can understand how someone might say “yes.”

It is my hope that President Obama does replace Ms. Killefer with an equally qualified OD or Performance Specialist. She would have been able to assess the people and the culture in terms of efficacy. Whatever deficiencies she might uncover, she could organize training, alternate processes, or develop strategies that would complement strengths and compensate for weaknesses. She could calibrate the culture in terms of requirements and performance by blind electronic surveys, unobtrusive observation, counseling, coaching, creating indices to measure what is expected to what is achieved, developing personality, geographic and demographic profiles, reviewing individual and group histories now against previous careers.

In a sense, her work could be an assessment center process gauging the handling of complexities, pressures, surprises and quick turnarounds. Morale is a group norm; motivation is an individual norm. She would apprise these and be alert to changes, as both are relevant to work.

The same goes for team building. Team building is good for creating a climate of consensus, communication and cooperation, but it is not known for its creativity. Then again, some people work better alone than in brainstorming activities. She would note this and act accordingly. Statistics would be important to her as she charts progress towards performance goals and the president’s agenda.

To give you a deeper appreciation of the power of OD, permit me to discuss one of my cases.

A major program at Honeywell Avionics was derailing and I was called in to investigate a brouhaha that ensued. A systems analyst had been reduced in grade, denied a merit increase and put on notice by his supervisor.

The reason? He never seemed to talk to anyone, just sat in his cubicle, smoking cigarettes, tapping his pencil on his desk, and humming, constantly humming. This was all in the performance appraisal report. “I haven’t seen him do a lick of work since I’ve been over here,” was the way the supervisor put it. He didn’t like the guy, thought he was a slacker, and decided to put him in his place. “Maybe he’ll get the message now!”

What the supervisor didn’t anticipate is that the whole program stopped. The engineers, program specialists, planners, administrators and the other systems analysts had a sit down, and threatened to leave.

They considered this was a serious breach of fairness. They saw the supervisor making an example of someone who didn’t deserve it.

In a preliminary conversation with the supervisor, I found he didn’t have the foggiest notion of what systems analysts did, or their role in this most engineering sensitive program.

Systems analysts are primarily mathematicians and key to engineering programs. Although an engineer himself, the supervisor had acted as a staff engineer most of his career with little empathetic understanding for this elite group. He confessed they made him edgy, especially the one he singled out, going by his desk every day and seeing him goofing off as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

Without further investigation, the supervisor decided the systems analyst wasn't contributing when, in fact, he was considered the brains of the group. Interviewing his colleagues separately, they confessed to me that they all fed off him. They knew it, didn’t dispute it, and reluctantly admitted it because it would put each of them in a lesser light.

Once the ruckus took over, worked stopped, and I started asking questions, the systems analysts as a group decided they had no choice but to admit their colleague was key to everything. Having discovered that, with the supervisor humiliated by the work stoppage, it was soon apparent the supervisor was not a bad person, he simply didn’t understand his people.

My next task was to persuade one of the systems analysts to become the supervisor -- all of them initially rejected the idea -- and to place the current supervisor in a comparable position where it would be a better fit. The latter was relatively easy to do the former seemed near impossible.

I confirmed one of the supervisor’s claims and that was that the systems analysts were prima donnas. They loved their work, loved the fact that no one else understood what they were doing, loved their independence, loved their critical role in the scheme of things, and being essentially a law unto themselves.

None of them had great social skills, and seemed to take a quiet pride in the fact. I had them write out their take on the incident, only to discover they couldn't express themselves well in words, either literally, conceptually, grammatically or spelling wise. That surprised me. Their basic language and competence was in mathematics and that was apparently good enough for them.

Going to lunch with the ultimate prima donna, who drove a Porsche convertible, where I learned he had a girlfriend half his age, and a seven-year-old daughter with serious medical problems, whom he was rearing her on his own, I couldn’t help but think how beneficial it might have been if the supervisor were here instead of me.

For the better part of two hours, I listened to his struggle to get an education, his love of math since a kid, his scheming to get grants to complete his Ph.D., his attempt to be an academic where his social skills practically road him out of town, and then finally landing with Honeywell, first on the West Coast, and then in Clearwater, where he liked the work, the weather, and where he felt comfortable with other misfits like him.

It occurred to me listening to him that it was his time to be a leader, and so I told him so. At first, in the middle of his soliloquy, I wanted to say it was his time to grow up, but am glad I didn’t. If I had not listened to his complete story – two hours for lunch is not normally acceptable – if I had said “grow up,” I’m sure I would have been back to square one, but I didn’t.

His face flashed a smile at the idea of “leader,” something that appealed to him and something, perhaps, that rolled around in the back of his mind. I’ve often found truly intelligent people think they have competencies in areas they have absolutely no expertise at all simply because they are intelligent.

I told him I would work with him, and I could tell he didn’t find it necessary, and so changed it a bit and said, “Let me buy you lunch every other week and meet like this,” which we did.

It was good that we did because he was at first more draconian than the former supervisor desiring the same perfection in people as he expected in his algorithms. Gradually, he backed off and gained the rapport necessary with the group with things getting back on track. The program, which was a contract proposal, came in on time and under budget.

The systems analysts who had been demoted was restored to grade, got his merit increase, and happened to be a buddy of the new supervisor, all of which melted into the success.

In OD, often the story line of the successful effort is counterintuitive, and this was no exception. All the indicators were that Porsche Man would be a terrible choice for supervisor, his being so full of himself.

But listening to him talk about his child, about the medical expenses, the times he didn’t know she would make it, the sacrifices he made at all costs, including his job and his career, and the look in his eyes, told me he hid the loving side of his nature, the tolerant side, the understanding side, the patient side, the accepting side, for his child, alone.

That meant that it was part of him. My job was not to put something in him that wasn’t there – I couldn’t do that even if I wanted to -- but to encourage him to use what was there in a more wide-reaching sense. He became an excellent supervisor.

I mention this case history because that’s the kind of problems a Performance Specialist is likely to encounter. A workplace is a system, and a systems approach is necessary to make it holistic and purposeful in order to hit on all cylinders. But herein lies a riddle wrapped around an enigma. To control the system, you don’t impose your will on the work but find a way of getting the collective will working. Systems researcher Russell Ackoff expressed this poetically and counterintuitively:

“If you take a system apart to identify its components, and then operate those components in such a way that every component behaves as well as it possibly can, there is one thing of which you can be certain. The system as a whole will not behave as well as it can. Now that is counterintuitive in Machine Age thinking, but it is absolutely essential to systems thinking. The corollary to this is that if you have a system that is behaving as well as it can, none of its parts will be.”

OD understands this and it is why it opposes having one department competing against another, or one individual competing and comparing him or herself to another. It is why I have written two books due out later this year on a marriage of “Creative Selling” and “Confident Thinking,” which are very much in line with this theme.