Awareness Phase I

How I Learned to Grasp the Situation

Early in my career, following receipt of my MBA from The Ohio State University, I went to work for a large paint manufacturer. I had worked at this job for about a year and a half when I was called into my supervisor's office and told that my services were no longer needed. When I asked why, I was told that my job was being eliminated. I later found out that my boss didn't think I had the smarts to solve the problems facing the company. I had no idea what I lacked in "smarts," and I thought it was the company's loss, not mine.

I found a good job in human resources with a small company where I believed that my efforts were paying off because I had introduced several new programs and systems that people liked, and they told me that I had helped solve some of the problems the company was facing.

After two and a half years (by then I was four years out of school and twenty-eight years old), I took a new position working for a large chemical company. My duties were to record and track the company's organization and staffing charts. The company president at the time was a former army general, and he was big on "tables of organization." I have to tell you it was one boring job. For the life of me, I could not see how what I was doing had any impact on the performance of the organization. In fact, I thought it caused a drag on the company. Within about a year, the president retired, and a member of the principle owner's family took on the top position of CEO/president.

At this point, things really started to change; he wanted a new HR function for the company that showed interest in the development of human resources. This brought a new opportunity for me. I was offered the position of college recruiting and management development. I took on this job and expanded the company's college-recruiting program to a point where we were getting an acceptance rate of one out of every three offers. This meant we were bringing in a steady stream of talented engineers and chemists, thus providing a large pool of talented potential leaders. We matched these young graduates with the best-of-the-best senior leaders in the company to develop leaders for the top positions in the organization.

I kept working with the company, and ten to twelve years later, we found a large number of these people in key management positions. In the meantime, we had been busy conducting management development training programs designed to improve the performance of the present management, to prepare them for promotion to more senior positions. All of our management development activities and programs were based on the following guides for effective management:

• Build a strong organization by selecting and developing outstanding people.

• Follow sound organizational practices.

• Communicate to all levels within the company.

• Develop an atmosphere for creativity.

• Instill the importance of profits in the minds of all employees.

• Develop short- and long-range plans and strategies.

• Measure results against predetermined standards of performance.

• Keep the overall company point of view clearly in mind.

• Present a good image of the company to all employees and the public.

• Conduct business with integrity.

About eight years into my employment, my boss, the vice president of human resources, assigned me the task of assessing the retirement situation for the top leadership staff in the company. What we found in our study shocked the president. We were going to lose sixteen members of our twenty-five-member Management Advisory Council (MAC) within ten years! The following caricature drawing was used to awaken the sleeping giant:

The drawing was designed based on actual retirement data and actuarial death/illness rates. The remaining members of the MAC were all within five years of their normal retirement dates.

The drawing worked, and the organization and its leaders began to prepare Individual Development Plans (IDPs) for high-potential midlevel managers. During the next five years, most of those for whom we developed IDPs moved upward in the organization. However, much to our dismay, the older, talented managers, in whom the organization had heavily invested, were not moved upward to higher-level positions. Instead they were being passed over for the new, young college recruits. What a blow; we had poured millions of dollars into management development with little to no return on the investment. This failure led to the following conclusion:

Management development in a large number of organizations tends to be relatively ineffective — and in some cases a counter-productive process that, in fact, might be doing an immeasurable amount of damage to the organization. Oftentimes management development (MD) tends to be based on the notion that "if it's education, it has to be good." Usually in such cases the investment in MD produces results which are not measured and often turn out to be the opposite of those intended.

— An Organization Development Approach to Management Development, 1976,

Addison-Wesley

What I learned from this experience was to get people to grasp the situation by whatever means necessary.

After twelve years with the chemical company, I accepted a new job with a small chemical compounding company as the senior HR officer. I was probing around for a graduate program when I was introduced to the PhD program in organization development at Case Western Reserve University. Faculty and students told me that the field of organization development (OD) had the answers to organizational improvement because it used a systematic...