CARACTERÍSTICAS DEL PROCESO DE APROBACIÓN

The OD process involves a collaborative relationship between a practitioner and a client system. OD practitioners may have a variety of styles, philosophies, and approaches;

they generally perform a certain set of functions with regard to the client system. These functions include (1) helping the client determine its current level or state (data-gathering), (2) assisting in a collaborative analysis or problem areas and planning strate-gies of change (diagnosis), and (3) intervening and facilitating change from the current level to some ideal or desired level. See OD in Practice for an example of the consult-ing process at Bain & Co. Like McKinsey, Bain is a management consultconsult-ing firm that sometimes does OD-type work.

The Readiness of the Organization for OD

Upon first contacting the client system, the OD practitioner begins evaluating its re-ceptiveness for an OD program. It is a mistake to assume that all organizations must, and should, have an OD program simply because most organizations can benefit greatly from one. Ironically, the very organizations most in need of such programs are precisely the least receptive. Their inflexibility and insensitivity to the need for change seem al-most proverbial: “There are none so blind as those who will not see.” Rather than im-pose organization development upon them, the practitioner needs to wait until key personnel, typically top management in an organization-wide program, decide whether change is really needed. The motivation for a change program is then built in, not arti-ficially contrived. To gauge the preparedness of an organization for an OD program, there are four questions the practitioner needs to answer before venturing further:

1. Are the learning goals of OD appropriate?

2. Is the cultural state of the client system ready for organization development?

3. Are the key people involved?

4. Are members of the client system prepared and oriented to organization devel-opment?¹⁶

Once these questions have been satisfactorily answered, then, and only then, should the practitioner proceed.

The Intervention

Practitioners, whether external or internal, actually begin to intervene when they con-tact the client system. Intervention refers to a coming between or among members or groups of an organization for the purpose of effecting change. More specifically, inter-vention refers to an array of planned activities participated in by both the practitioner and the client, including shared observations of the processes occurring between The company CEOs may know their organization

and their industry, but may not be able to bring in new ideas from across a multitude of industries and countries.

WHY BAIN IS DIFFERENT

According to Bain, some of the things that make this consulting company unique are:

• Rejecting the old advice model to focus on strat-egy and implementation.

• Accepting equity in lieu of fees to align incentives with client results.

• Founding the Bridgespan Group, the first major nonprofit strategy consulting firm.

• Sharing client, incubated, and private capital coin-vestments among all professional staff.

QUESTIONS

1. Do you agree with the relationship-consult-ing approach?

2. Visit Bain’s Web site (www.bain.com) and ex-plore the firm’s current approaches to con-sulting.

3. Contrast the approach of a company trying to solve its own problems versus bringing in outside consultants. What are the pros and cons of the two approaches?

ISBN: 0-536-63893-4

An Experiential Approach to Organization Development, Seventh Edition, by Donald R. Brown and Don Harvey.

Published by Prentice Hall. Copyright © 2006 by Pearson Education, Inc.

members of a group or of an organization for the purpose of improving the effective-ness of the processes. The intent of the intervention is to alter the status quo. OD prac-titioner and writer Richard Beckhard suggests that a planned intervention consists of

“moving into an existing organization and helping it, in effect, ‘stop the music’; exam-ine its present ways of work, norms, and values; and look at alternative ways of work-ing, relatwork-ing, or rewarding.”¹⁷

In a very broad sense, stages 2 through 5 of the OD process (explained in Chapter 1 and in the succeeding chapters of this book) describe the intervention process. Dur-ing the course of an OD program there will be many interventions: interventions for gathering data, team-building activities, and so forth, but here we are concerned with the practitioner’s initial contact with the client system. The initial contact with the client system is an intervention if for no other reason than it is a message to the organization members that the climate of the organization is under scrutiny and that new and more effective ways of doing things are being sought. The promise of a better future, in itself, can effect change and therefore constitutes an intervention.

The external practitioner generally intervenes through a top manager or a human resources director. It is easier to bring about change when the intervention is made at higher levels of the client system, because greater power to influence others is concen-trated there. Bain & Co., for example, insists on working directly with the top manage-ment team. Change programs have been initiated at lower levels, and some OD practitioners feel that change will only be real and lasting if it begins at the lower levels of an organization, but the lack of top support increases the risk involved.¹⁸

The practitioner faces many different types of situations when intervening in an or-ganization. These may be categorized in terms of client system support. In the most fa-vorable type of situation, every level of the organization recognizes the need for and supports change programs. In another type of situation, top management recognizes the need for change and provides support, but lower levels are nonsupportive or resistant.

Still another type of situation occurs when lower levels of the organization are sup-portive whereas top management is resistant to change.

Who Is the Client?

“Who is the client?” may at first may seem to be an unimportant question, or one with an obvious answer. In reality, it is one of the most critical questions facing the practitioner.

This is because dealing with the wrong client or a misidentified client may lead to inef-fective or even disastrous consequences. The decision of who the client is becomes more complex as the practitioner intervenes into more segments of the organization. At some point, the practitioner needs to determine who the client actually is. Is it the organiza-tion? Is it certain divisions, departments, or groups? Or is it the individual who con-tracted for the services? The answer sometimes looks easy at the beginning of an OD program but becomes increasingly unclear as the program develops. The client will ini-tially be the person with whom the practitioner first makes contact. But it may soon be-come apparent that the organization is more realistically the client. The practitioner’s concern may thus extend to include work groups or subsystems of the organization and even the individual members of the system.

The OD Practitioner Role in the Intervention

The OD practitioner (as noted earlier) can be categorized into five general styles: sta-bilizer, persuader, analyzer, cheerleader, and pathfinder. Practitioners tend to work in the pathfinder style. This style is similar to that of the process practitioner, documented by Schein in his Process Consultation: Its Role in Organization Development¹⁹and dis-cussed in Chapter 7 of this book.The OD process practitioner operates on the belief that the team is the basic building block of an organization. One of the newer innovations is the self-managed work team, which gives workers more autonomy and control over their immediate behavior. The workers are organized into teams on the basis of task functions. Self-managed work teams are discussed in more detail in Chapter 13. They make decisions on many key issues, including work schedules and assignments and how

ISBN: 0-536-63893-4

to deal with quality problems. Therefore, team behavior is analyzed in terms of (1) com-munications, (2) members’ roles and functions in groups, (3) group problem-solving and decision-making, (4) group norms and growth, and (5) leadership and authority.²⁰

OD practitioners are concerned with how these five processes occur in an organi-zation. Their role involves sharing observations of these five processes and thus helping the client to improve the organization’s effectiveness. Simultaneously and equally im-portant, the client is learning to observe and improve its own process skills and problem-solving abilities for use in the future as well as in the present. In learning to make process interventions similar to those made by the practitioner, the client is also learning how to solve its own problems without having to rely on the practitioner.

A basic assumption underlying the OD practitioner’s role holds that the client needs to learn to identify problems, participate in the diagnosis, and be actively involved in problem solution. The practitioner recognizes that the client either has useful skills and resources but does not know how to use them effectively or does not have the requisite skills but has the capacity to develop them. As a result, the client solves its own prob-lems with the practitioner “helping to share the diagnosis and in providing alternative remedies which may not have occurred to the client.”²¹The OD practitioner operates on the notion that assisting the client instead of taking control will lead to a more last-ing solution of the client’s problems. Meanwhile, the client will have increased its skills so that it will be able to solve future problems. The process practitioner teaches the client how to diagnose and solve its own problems but does not advise or suggest solu-tions. Initially, the client may fumble a bit and take longer than it would with expert as-sistance, but in the long run the client will grow and mature.

Although most writers on OD support the idea of OD process consultation, they also recognize that clients have various needs and maturity levels, and therefore it may be necessary at times to provide expert and technical advice. The need for working in a style other than the pathfinder style may be more apparent at the beginning of the re-lationship. As a rule of thumb, however, the OD practitioner should not encourage and perpetuate a dependency relationship. As the maturity of the client increases, the prac-titioner tends to operate more in the process consultation or pathfinder style.

OD Practitioner Skills and Activities

The role of the OD practitioner is changing and becoming more complex. Ellen Fa-genson and W. Warner Burke found that the most practiced OD skill or activity was team development, whereas the least employed was the integration of technology (see Table 4.1).²²

The results of this study reinforce what other theorists have also suggested. The OD practitioners of today are no longer just process facilitators, but are expected to know something about strategy, structure, reward systems, corporate culture, leadership, human resource development, and the client organization’s business. As a result, the role of the OD practitioner today is more challenging and more in the mainstream of the client or-ganization than in the past.

TABLE 4.1 OD Practitioner Skills and Activities

Activity Average Use

1. Team development 2.97

2. Corporate change 2.91

3. Strategy development 2.60

4. Management development 2.45

5. Employee (career) development 2.04

6. Technology integration 1.97

Note: Ratings on 5-point scale with 5.0 being high.

ISBN: 0-536-63893-4

An Experiential Approach to Organization Development, Seventh Edition, by Donald R. Brown and Don Harvey.

Published by Prentice Hall. Copyright © 2006 by Pearson Education, Inc.

Practitioner Skills Profile

Leadership Skills

Communication Skills Problem-Solving

Skills Interpersonal Skills

Personal Skills

Project Management Skills

FIGURE 4.2 Practitioner Skills Profile

Susan Gebelein lists six key skill areas that are critical to the success of the internal practitioner. These are shown in Figure 4.2.²³The relative emphasis on each type of skill will depend upon the situation, but all are vital in achieving OD program goals. The skills that focus on the people-oriented nature of the OD practitioner include:

• Leadership.Leaders keep members focused on key company values and on op-portunities and need for improvement. A leader’s job is to recognize when a company is headed in the wrong direction and to get it back on the right track.

• Project Management.This means involving all the right people and departments to keep the change program on track.

• Communication.It is vital to communicate the key values to everyone in the organization.

• Problem-Solving.The real challenge is to implement a solution to an organiza-tional problem. Forget about today’s problems: focus constantly on the next set of problems.

• Interpersonal.The number-one priority is to give everybody in the organization the tools and the confidence to be involved in the change process. This includes facilitating, building relationships, and process skills.

• Personal.The confidence to help the organization make tough decisions, intro-duce new techniques, try something new, and see if it works.

The OD practitioner’s role is to help employees create their own solutions, systems, and concepts. When the practitioner uses the above-listed skills to accomplish these goals, the employees will work hard to make them succeed, because they are the own-ers of the change programs.