THREE CHANGE STRATEGIES IN ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT: DATA-BASED, HIGH ENGAGEMENT, AND GENERATIVE BY GERVASE R. BUSHE & SARAH LEWIS

Please find below an article co-authored by Gervase Bushe and myself recently accepted for publication in the Leadership and Organization Development Journal, Jan 2023 - Sarah Lewis

Bushe, G.R. and Lewis, S. (2023), "Three change strategies in organization development: data-based, high engagement and generative", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/LODJ-05-2022-0229

Copyright © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited. This AAM is provided for your own personal use only. It may not be used for resale, reprinting, systematic distribution, emailing, or for any other commercial purpose without the permission of the publisher.

Take a coaching approach - 7 top tips for developing talent in your team

A key challenge for leaders and managers is developing the capacity of their staff or team. Taking a coaching approach allows you to focus on drawing out motivation rather than trying to push it in!  It allows you to create energy and motivation and it is usually experienced as an empowering process by your coachee. It helps people develop their initiative and sense of ownership of their work and tasks, and, in general, converts potential into capacity.

Here are seven tips to help make your coaching conversations highly productive.

The TIPS

1) Be clear what you are coaching for

It’s important to be clear why you taking a coaching approach rather than just giving information, orders or instruction. Generally it is worth taking a coaching approach when we want to invest in skill development.

Examples might be:

• To improve problem-solving skills
• To improve emotional intelligence when interacting with customers
• To increase confidence in own abilities and so ability to be pro-active and use initiative
• To increase team collaboration and mutual support
• To develop expert excel skills

It is also important to know when not to invest in a coaching approach.

For example while for one person developing expert excel skills might be key for their job, for another their engagement with excel may be a very rare occurrence. In which case other ways of solving the problem might be more effective and appropriate.

2) Select appropriate opportunities

Coaching is only one of a number of management interaction styles and is not right for all occasions. In emergency situations for instance, you are better off just telling people what they need to do.

Some indicators of a possibly good opportunity for coaching are when:

• Whatever the person is struggling with, or asking for help with, is going to be a recurring challenge
• There is no panic. Heightened emotional states, such as panic, can lead to unhelpful learning. For instance they ‘learn’ that you are an obstructive unhelpful so-and-so rather than that you helped them develop a new skill or think for themselves.
• There is time to assure yourself that they are good to go after the conversation and that you are happy with their next steps. This needn’t take long, but there needs to be time to conclude the conversation.
• Someone is asking for help
• Someone comes to you with a problem, and its clear they have a solution in mind
• You are trying to help someone and they are resisting all your suggestions

3) Use Turning Questions to get into a coaching conversation

If people come to you expecting you to give them the answer, then you need to turn the conversation into a coaching conversation. These questions will help:

• ‘That sounds interesting/challenging/important, what do you think might be the way forward? What ideas do you already have?'
• 'If that is what you are worried about, what do you want to see happen instead?'
• 'If I wasn’t here, what would you do about this?'
• 'I can see you are looking for help with this, what is the most helpful question I ask you to help you with your thinking in the 30 seconds we have here?'

After asking any of those, or a similar question, put an expectant expression on your face and stop speaking! Create a big space full of expectation and hope for them to answer into. Hold your nerve.

These questions work to turn the question away from your resourcefulness towards theirs. It also helps move them from passive recipient waiting for an answer, to active agents in finding a way forward.

4) Help them draw on their existing resources

Questions you can usefully ask to achieve this include such questions as:

• ‘When have you tackled something similar? Not necessarily here but in other places you’ve worked or in other situations? How did that work out? How could what you learnt from that be relevant here?’
• ‘Who else knows something about this and might be interested to work with you on finding a way forward?’
• ‘What ideas do you have?’
• ‘Where else might there be some information on this that might stimulate ideas? Websites, in-house training, forums, professional associations?’

5) Help them explore and develop possibilities. Reality check.

This is where you finally get to feed your knowledge, problem-solving skills, and expertise into the conversation, but in a different way. You use it to help shape up the idea into the best it can be, making sure they retain ownership of it. For example:

• ‘Explain to me more about how that’s a good idea? How do you see it working?’
• ‘Have you considered/ taken into account/ thought about...?’
• ‘So what will you do if....?”
• ‘Hm, I’m just wondering how that might go down with... what do you think?’
• ‘Great, what do you see the risks as being? How will you deal with them?’

This is also where you set any boundaries on action. This might range from ‘It’s a great/interesting/novel/exciting/challenging/provocative idea and I truly am sorry to have to say I can’t support it as it will be too expensive/take more time than we have/be seen as too risky.’ Then move swiftly too ‘However, I think the bit about ... could work, lets explore that more.’ Or ‘what else have you got?’

6) Road test for readiness

This is a crucially important part of the process where you are testing to see how committed, ready and energised they are to make this happen. Questions you can ask at this point include:

• ‘What’s your first step?’
• ‘Who else do you need to talk to?’
• 'How will I know you are making progress?'
• 'On a scale of 1-10 how ready are you to get going on this?'
• 'What else needs to happen to increase your readiness?'
• 'How can I support you to make this happen?'

Offer encouragement and support, express belief, and agree a ‘progress check’ process.

7) It’s not for every situation and it doesn’t work every time

Coaching is not suitable for every occasion. Sometimes people do need to be told. For example when:

• They don’t know enough to even start to engage with the challenge
• They are missing a vital piece of information, and need to be informed of it
• Its an emergency, you have the answer and speed is of the essence
• Its not worth the time or energy e.g. it is doesn’t fit the criteria of point 1

Also sometimes particular people or even groups of people get stuck in patterns of belief that makes it hard for them to engage in coaching, for instance

• They believe its your job to think, not theirs
• They’re still smarting from some previous managerial behaviour (this can go on for years)
• They have zero confidence in themselves and their ability and are highly dependent on others
• They are severely depressed, anxious or otherwise cognitively incapacitated
• They are fully preoccupied with other challenges, maybe outside of work, and have no capacity to engage with being creative.

In this case you need to address these challenges before you can hope to get very far with coaching.

In conclusion

So be aware that coaching isn’t for everyone and every situation. Beyond that though, on the whole, once people genuinely believe that you want them to contribute and you will support them in their adventures of learning, they relish it; and they will grow in ability, confidence, initiative and general switched-on-ness before your very eyes!

Other Resources

More on this, and details of how to practice Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space, World Café and SimuReal can all be found in Sarah’s latest book Positive Psychology and Change

For more on Leadership Skills visit our knowledge warehouse

For case studies on Leadership at work visit our case studies collection

Or, click through to learn about or to order our positive psychology based positive organisational development card pack and other support resources

APPRECIATING CHANGE CAN HELP

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715. A selection of strength card packs are available from our online store.

Ten Tips for Effective Strategic Development

This blog article has two accompanying case studies: Making Strategy Real and Open Space For Strategic Development

What is Strategy?

Organisations often think of strategy as a plan for achieving a specific future. This plan is created by a small group of people who then inform others of the vision of the future and how it will be achieved.

A Compass, Not An Alien Artefact

This process can result in the production of a strategic document that appears opaque if not irrelevant to the rest of the organization. I have sat with many a group attempting to ‘decode’ the strategic document just handed down from on high into something that is meaningful, useful or compelling in their local context. Generally the connection, the relevance, is more created than uncovered.

Strategy is the lodestar of organization: it creates direction and holds things together. Without a sense of the over-arching purpose, direction and values of the organisation it is difficult for people to prioritise amongst the many competing demands on their time and energy. A good strategy acts like an internal compass for all employees, enabling them to prioritise their activities against a common understanding of ‘the most important things’, even when working in isolation.

It is possible to create strategy in a way that understands it not as a plan handed down by omniscience others, but as a co-created organizational story of future direction and intent. Here are some tips for working with strategy in this way.

How To Build Your Compass

1. Invert the usual process

The usual pattern for strategic development is that a small group of people design ‘the strategy’ which they then attempt to get the rest of the organization, the large group, to adopt. It is quite possible, as our case study ‘Making Strategy Real’ shows, to invert this process by involving a large group of stakeholders in initial strategic conversations, which a small group then write up as the strategic document. This approach allows data analysis, theme identification, creation of new initiatives, commitment to outcomes, common vision, motivation and energy for change to be created simultaneously rather than in staged sequences. Given this, change is likely to happen much more quickly.

2. Create positive energy for change

Large group co-creative approaches such as Appreciative Inquiry or SOAR create energy for the change right from the start. However, if the organization is doing strategy more traditionally all is not lost. We know that inducing positive mood states and helping people identify their strengths helps people engage with change, even if it is imposed rather than self-generated. So create opportunities for groups to identify what they are doing that points in the new direction, the successes they are achieving, the changes they are making, and the resilience they are demonstrating as well as the endless opportunities for identifying shortfalls, delays etc. Spend time helping people identify their strengths and working out how to apply them every day.

3. Recognise that strategy is what people do

Strategic becomes a ‘lived’ process as people make different decisions, moment-by-moment, to those they made in the past. While big ‘strategic’ events are important for various reasons, it’s micro-moment differences and decisions that add up to change. Every conversation, every decision, every action is either pointing towards the desired future direction or away from it. However habitual behaviour, aligned to past strategy, is strong. Therefore attention has to be paid at the granular level to the language used and the way things are talked about, as well as to what is being done, to create new patterns.

4. Use ‘word and deed’ to create new organizational fields

Drawing on quantum physics, Wheatley identified that effective leaders implement new strategy by their words and deeds. They choose words and deeds that fill the conversational, meaning or  social space with clear and consistent ideas about the new strategy, for example how the customers are to be served. This kind of behaviour creates a new system ‘field’, one strong in congruence, influencing behaviour in only one direction. In effect they create a field of influence that make certain behaviours more likely.

5. Help people understand what ‘strategically aligned behaviour’ looks like

People often have difficulty translating the words on the page of a strategic document into ‘what it means for us’. One way to help people create a stronger vision and sense of what the new strategy looks like is to seek out early examples of behaviour that is ‘pointing in the right direction’ and to pro-actively amplify and broadcast these stories. These are stories that exemplify ‘yes, this is what we want, this is what we mean’. It’s hard for people to imagine things they have never experienced. Sharing stories that act as models of what is required helps people to ‘get it’.

6. Recognise strategy as an emergent process

Strategy becomes a lived reality in an organization through an emergent process. People have to feel their way into ‘doing’ the new strategy. Sometimes organizations act as if strategy can be dictated and people can start working in this new and different way with never a false step being made. This expectation hampers progress as people are afraid they will make a mistake, whilst also quickly creating the sense of things going wrong. Recognising the enactment of strategy as a discovery process, with false starts, blind alleys and a general iterative ‘two steps forward, one step back’ process, helps greatly in creating and sustaining momentum for change.

7. Retell the story of strategy around the organization

The strategic ‘story’ needs to be shared in many different ways in many different contexts with many different groups. We work out what we mean by what we say through this process of telling and retelling. The creation of strategy is not a uni-directional communication process, it is a collaborative co-creating dialogue process. Organisational understanding of what the words on the paper mean in practice emerges through shared dialogue.

8. Create a strategy that is both familiar and different

We can conceptualise strategy as a fiction. It is a fictional account of a possible future. Ideally it is a co-authored story (see point 1) but often it is a story created by some people that they need others to believe. To grasp and hold our interest stories need to be both credible and unfamiliar. Appreciative inquiry is perfect for this. The articulation of the best of past in which we recognize ourselves offers the ‘credible’ part of the story, while the following three stages, dream, design and destiny, offer the generative part of the story. During these phases, the organization creates a picture of itself that is built on the familiar yet is importantly different, new.

9. Make the strategy tangible

The way this is usually done is to produce a report. The printed word is more tangible, carries more weight, than just words. When we hold the document in our hands we can see that we have done something, much more so than when we emerge from a dialogue event with ‘just’ different ideas in our heads. The challenge is to go beyond just a document. How else can the organization make the new strategy tangible? Pictures, logos, diagrams are all part of this process. Encouraging people and groups to physically model (with Lego or plasticine for example) the past and the future, and then talking about the difference, can help with this.

10. Strategy is a verbal activity

Finally, as a summary of most of the above, it is important to recognise that strategy is a verbal activity. How we talk is different to how we write. The written strategy document is unlikely to be a direct source for effective verbal explanations. Different groups and different people need different approaches if they are to ‘get it’. Ideally the talking comes before the writing, so people can see their words in the document. But it is quite possible to reverse the process, helping groups create a verbal account of the handed down written word. Which I believe brings me back to where I started.

More on these and related topics can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on this topic here.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership and Culture change.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Using Your Positive Organisational Development Cards: 10 Ideas To Get You Started

So you've got some of our Positive Organisational Development Cards - now what? We have produced a list of 10 ideas for ways in which you could use the cards to add value to your work with different audiences.

In General

You can use these cards in a number of ways to stimulate discussion; create commonality and motivation; and to identify agreed action. Some general ideas are:

• Use the cards as they stand, the questions and the action points
• Use a rating scale ‘To what extent is this present in our team/organization/group at the moment on a scale of 1-10? What would we like to be? How can we move towards this?’etc.
• As a prioritizing tool. ‘Which five of these are most key to our future success/our development/our strategy?’
• As playing cards. Each person has some. Someone starts by laying down a card they think is important (to the topic under discussion) explaining why they think so, the person who thinks they can build on this with one of the cards in their hand lays it down with ‘yes and...’. This is a cooperative card game, with no winners or losers.

With Senior Executives

1) Leadership

Use the Authentic Leadership card as a stimulus to the initial discussion.

Ask them to identify what other cards they see as being relevant to being an effective, positive leader (e.g. affirmation and positive deviance, mindfulness, engagement, virtuous practices, positive energy networks and strengths). Use the questions to stimulate discussion and the further notes to create possibilities for initiatives or personal development

2) Organisational Culture

Take the five culture cards (pink). For each card consider and discuss the questions and then make a rating for each concept (where are we now?) on a scale of 1-10. Then ask – Where do we want to be? Look at the action points and pick a few as a basis for planning how to start moving in the right direction

Leaders and Managers in General

3) Using micro-moments as a leader

Select the cards that leaders can have an impact on in every engagement they have (e.g. positive deviance, virtuous practices, authentic leadership, high quality connections, positive emotions, flourishing, mindfulness). Use the questions to stimulate discuss to raise awareness of the importance of these concepts to creating a positive organisational atmosphere. Then use pointers for action to help create action resolutions.

4) Performance Appraisal

The yellow cards (with the possible exception of the Appreciative Inquiry card) form a good basis for a performance appraisal conversation. Also include the blue cards engagement and flow and maybe the flourishing card. The key question is ‘When you do you experience this at work? What are you doing, who is around?’ and so on to help them learn about when they are at their best.

Alternatively, you can spread the cards out and ask them to pick a few cards that exemplify what they would like more of in their work. Or what they find most exciting at work e.g. using strengths, being affirmed, having great conversations and so on.

5) Career Counselling

Pick a few appropriate cards like affirmation, strengths, positive deviance, authentic leadership, engagement, generativity, and ask them which of these features might be important to them in a job or their next career move? How can they find out whether a job or organization offers these? Alternatively get them to pick the five that seem most important to them to allowing them to give their best at work.

Groups – Development

6) Culture / Organisational Development

Take the pink culture cards and add any others you like, such as positive deviance, affirmation and flourishing, asking ‘What is important to us in our culture? Where is this already present?’ and so on, use the questions on the back of the card as well. Get the group to make a current rating of where the organization is, then use the suggestions on the cards to stimulate discussion of actions to increase positivity of the culture. These cards help individuals identify what they can do to move things forward.

Take the green cards and repeat the process. These give ideas as to how to create cultural change at the collective level.

7) Identifying our strengths as leaders and managers

Start with the strengths card, identifying what strengths are and working with the questions and suggestions on the back. You can then delve further into the individual and collective strengths using a strengths card pack (such as the Strengthscope cards or the Positive Insights strengths cards), or work with rest of the positive psychology concept cards to identify organisational positive psychology strengths. E.g. as an organization we are good at... ‘affirmation’ and the evidence is....

From here the discussion can move to how to build on the strengths we have and, how to discover hidden organisational strengths.

8) Divisional Groups or Teams – our local culture

Use the cards to help the group address the question of what kind of atmosphere do we want to create in our local part of the organization? How can we do this?

9) During Redundancy and Other Difficult Times

Take green cards and positive emotions and high quality connections as a basis for a discussion on, ‘How can we consciously work to boost all of these in our organisation even as we have to do this difficult thing?

Take yellow cards and ask ‘How can we build these into our process for doing what it is we have to do?’

10) Increasing Motivation and Morale

Take positive deviance, positive energy networks, positive emotions, flourishing, strengths, engagement and appreciative inquiry cards as a basis for discussion asking, ‘How can we increase these in our organization?’ Use green cards to help identify collective processes to engage and motivate.

These are just 10 ideas to help you get started, I hope you find them useful, please do write and let us know how you do use the cards, and any ideas you have for improvements to them.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715