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Scooped by
David Hain
onto Organisation Development |
Blwyddyn Newydd Dda from Wales - have a wonderful 2013 everyone!
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From
social
Diversity and inclusion continues to be a top priority for business leaders around the world, and quite rightly so. After all, ecosystems thrive on diversity, and the world of business is no different. But, the journey to building a truly diverse and inclusive workplace can often be a long and daunting one. So, in this podcast episode we’re sharing practical tips and advice to help you drive forward the diversity agenda within your organisation.
David Hain's insight:
Making diversity happen, by someone who has done so.
![]() There is a clear distinction between changing a culture and shaping a culture, as Marino noted in his workshop. “Changing means you’ve got to be different. Shaping means there’s an element of what you’re doing that you want to keep, that you want to build on.” That is what Loblaw set out to do using both Human Synergistics’ assessments for measuring attributes of organizational culture and individual behavioral styles and Senn Delaney’s culture-shaping methodology to embed the desired culture.
David Hain's insight:
Excellent case study via Tim Kuppler on a deliberate attempt to positively move the needle on organisation culture, with very open discussion of tools and techniques used.
![]() With 161,000 employees in more than 150 countries, Unilever operates globally and at scale. The consumer-goods group’s brands range from Lipton tea and Magnum ice cream to Surf laundry detergent and Dove skin care. Under the leadership of Paul Polman, chief executive since 2009, the Anglo-Dutch group has sought to drive growth though innovation and by actively reshaping its portfolio while reducing operational complexity and focusing on sustainability as a key theme.
David Hain's insight:
Why Unilever puts people first.
![]() New CIPD survey suggests middle managers are particularly affected, while lower-paid staff lack training and development opportunities
David Hain's insight:
If healthy workers are happy workers, and happy workers produce better results, we've got a bit of work to do in the UK...
![]() This blog post is the second part in a series that shares our reflections on building an experimental culture in governments - see Exploring the unobvious: An overview for an introduction. In our previous post, we discussed how governments tend to explore only a small, fairly predictable subset of solutions. We argued that they need to get outside their comfort zone and explore the unobvious to develop better outcomes. So how do you go about exploring this space of the unobvious?
David Hain's insight:
It's not frameworks we lack to innovate, but developing the mindset to want to experiment and iterate! Useful public sector focused contribution from Nesta.
![]() Risk aversion, weak customer focus, and siloed mind-sets have long bedeviled organizations. In a digital world, solving these cultural problems is no longer optional.
David Hain's insight:
Cultural change is much slower to adopt than technological change. It also creates less noise. That's what makes it challenge number one in most organisations.
![]() In the near future, we should support students and young people in experiencing what it’s like to learn in online and in person spaces, managing projects and their own work, much like how they are living their lives.
David Hain's insight:
Written for educators, but applicable everywhere. If learning is the critical competitive advantage, how is it best fostered in the online age?
People Alchemy's curator insight,
January 29, 4:24 AM
Ultimately learning must be all about outcomes, how to apply it in real life. Just in time, rather than just in case.
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From
work
The traditional framework for brainstorms involves identifying a problem, listing solutions within a set of parameters, and then choosing the best.
David Hain's insight:
Kids do better than adults at creativity. We need to actively encourage and read divergent thinking, yet most organisations do the opposite!
Matthew Farmer's curator insight,
January 9, 1:58 AM
This is an interesting take on a management stalwart - the brainstorm. I'm involved in quite a few brainstorming sessions with different organizations and I'm often interested to see how groups norm around this kind of activity. I was always taught that 'any idea is a good idea' and no evaluation should be made until the 'storming' session is over but not everyone thinks that way.
What I like about this approach, is the acknowledgement of the power of colliding perspectives. Not only do they help us to see and think differently but they also help us learn as well!
Matthew Farmer
![]() You can't open a magazine these days without seeing something about "mindfulness." The concept has become so ubiquitous, a friend asked me the other day if its popularity was just a fad.
David Hain's insight:
Thoughtfulness on mindfulness!
![]() In this TED talk, Dweck describes “two ways to think about a problem that’s slightly too hard for you to solve.” Operating in this space — just outside of your comfort zone — is the key to improving your performance. It's also the critical element to deliberate practice. People approach these problems with the two mindsets …. “Are you not smart enough to solve it …. or have you just not solved it yet.”
David Hain's insight:
This has to be the base building block of any successful organisation development!
![]() We undertook a national survey to understand the reality of how mental health is experienced at work. The survey results tell us that progress is being made but there is a need for greater organisational awareness of the support required for better mental health at work. Significant and potentially damaging disconnects exist that demand an urgent response from business.
David Hain's insight:
Poor mental health at work costs £bfs! But it doesn't have to be that way, and we can all do something about it!
![]() When it comes to Strategic Management for decades the focus has been on Scientific Management - which was never scientific in the first place - and the idea business could be run and controlled like a machine. Such ideas ignored the fact businesses are social systems – the clue being in the term “company” - and operate within even larger social systems. And for decades management theories have been obsessed with performance, efficiency and competition. I am not suggesting they are unimportant factors, but as Colin Price, a co-author of Beyond Performance[v] said in an interview with me, “When it comes to achieving sustained excellence in performance, what separates winners from losers, paradoxically, is the very focus on performance. Performance focused leaders invest heavily in those things that enable targets to be met quarter-by-quarter, year-by-year but they tend to neglect investment in company health; investments in the organization that need to be made today in order to survive and thrive tomorrow”. Good strategic management cares about performance and health in the short, medium and long-term.
David Hain's insight:
When thinking about change, focus on organisations as social systems not science experiments! Useful warning from Paul Barnett.
![]() The field of positive psychology was born when researchers noticed that psychology was awfully negative—focusing on illness and suffering but mute on the topic of how to thrive and flourish.
David Hain's insight:
Insights from the latest wellbeing research. It's not as simple as following god/bad buzzwords! |
![]() There is an upside and downside for each type of organizational culture. Some people think one type of culture is better than others. But overemphasis brings out the downside of any culture, as Nose Dive demonstrated.
David Hain's insight:
Think of culture as balancing different ends of various scales, and you have an instant way of assessing things currently and a mechanism for identifying areas to move the needle. Useful model here form Jesse Lynn Stoner, but you can easily identify your own polarities,
![]() As the power of the individual grows, modern employees want more flexibility and autonomy in how they work and learn. We are now in the Age of the Individual.
David Hain's insight:
Turning traditional learning provisions on their head for the modern world. Authoritative article from Jane Hart.
![]() True or false: the principles of leadership development work regardless of location.
David Hain's insight:
Is this the future for leadership development? Focus on relevance, tailoring and learning from colleagues.
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From
hbr
Companies need to approach gender inequality as they would any business problem: with hard data. Most programs created to combat gender inequality are based on anecdotal evidence or cursory surveys. But to tailor a solution to a company’s specific problems, you need to seek data to answer fundamental questions such as “When are women dropping out?” and “Are women acting differently than men in the office?” and “What about our company culture has limited women’s growth?” When organizations implement a solution, they need to measure the outcomes of both behavior and advancement in the office. Only then can they transition from the debate about the causes of gender inequality (bias versus behavior) and advance to the needed stage of a solution.
David Hain's insight:
Gender inequality is caused by bias, not differences in behaviour. On International Women's Day, let's resolve to change that! HT Eve Poole.
Françoise Morvan's curator insight,
March 8, 5:33 PM
Companies need to approach gender inequality as they would any business problem: with hard data
![]() Humans are problem solvers - we are good at fixing things and we are compelled to do so as a means of survival. My favourite discovery in Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow was that humans have an in-built desire for shortcuts - a drive to solve problems using the least possible amount of effort. We prefer to use the information we have in front of us and don’t naturally seek additional information.
David Hain's insight:
This is why the best OD people I have worked with are much better at questions than answers!
![]() Developing leadership to improve relationships and accelerate change is a key goal in many organizations, so what’s the secret that helped 73% of leaders in this global tech company measurably improve?
David Hain's insight:
How to develop more emotionally intelligent leadership, and why it mattes!
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From
hbr
The mismatch between leadership development as it exists and what leaders actually need is enormous and widening. What would work better?
David Hain's insight:
Some very insightful observations on the state of leadership development in this article.
Jerry Busone's curator insight,
January 10, 8:49 AM
Great thoughts on developing leaders. a perfect example of this is our Emerging Leaders Experience ... Its engaging, experiential action based simulated learning . Guest faculty are spliced in to add real time leadership. ...
Ian Berry's curator insight,
January 10, 4:10 PM
Lots of good insights I particularly like "influencing participants’ “being,” not just their “doing”;" as in everything leadership development is who before do
![]() Former Surgeon General Vice Admiral Vivek H. Murthy recently wrote an article for Harvard Business Review titled, "Work and the Loneliness Epidemic." In it, he explains that loneliness -- the "subjective feeling of having inadequate social connections" -- can impact an employee's well-being and their work performance. He calls on organizations to make social connections a strategic priority. Employees should have genuine opportunities to foster friendships. Removing "coldness" from a workplace culture is the right thing to do, and it's a smart business decision.
David Hain's insight:
We all need to feel we have mates at work!
Tom Wojick's curator insight,
December 2, 2017 10:58 AM
One important factor and characteristic of resilient people is that they have a well developed support system. Americans are workaholics, by both necessity and preference, which leaves precious little time to develop support systems outside of work. Organizations can improve their resiliency and that of their employees by making social connections strategies a priority.
![]() Actions necessary to support longer-term corporate-performance objectives, on the one hand, and a rapid performance transformation, on the other, might seem at odds. But our research paints a different picture. When coupled with organizational health, long- and short-term performance can become interdependent and complementary—just as yin and yang in Chinese philosophy are inseparable, unable to exist without each other, despite their apparent opposition.
David Hain's insight:
There are short term needs, and there are corporate principles. Makes sense that the two need to dovetail! ![]()
Jose Luis Yañez's curator insight,
November 30, 2017 4:19 AM
The yin and yang of organizational health | McKinsey & Company
![]() I wasn’t receiving complaints from the people on the team. I could just see it in the their eyes. There was exhaustion and not the good kind of exhaustion from doing complicated and hard work. It was the exhaustion you see when individuals on a team have to do too much interpersonal yak shaving. Writing software, the core job of a software engineer, had become too taxing and it was taking a toll.
David Hain's insight:
Nice little mini-case on some downsides of matrix structures.
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From
hbr
I joined Pinterest as the company’s first Head of Diversity in January of 2016. By the end of that year, we had hit or exceeded most of our goals, improving hiring rates of underrepresented engineers from 1 to 9% and increasing underrepresented talent from 7% to 12% in other roles. But we saw limited movement for women engineers, only increasing our hiring rate from 21% to 22%, which fell short of our goal. While higher than industry norms, this flatness was in large part due to our focus on putting more women in senior roles versus in entry-level roles (more on that later). Over the course of my first year at Pinterest, I’ve learned four key lessons about how to improve diversity from within a company:
David Hain's insight:
Insights on tackling diversity.
![]() Are people in your organization energized and happy or anxious and stressed? Does it matter? New research offers important insights into people and what drives performance. Here are three key findings, and a link to download the full report.
David Hain's insight:
Evidence of the clear link between organisational EQ practice and performance. |
Blwyddyn Newydd Dda from Wales - have a wonderful 2013 everyone!
Blwyddyn Newydd Dda from Wales - have a wonderful 2013 everyone!
Blwyddyn Newydd Dda from Wales - have a wonderful 2013 everyone!