Organisational Development: How Active Leadership Shapes Culture and Performance

What Is Organisational Development?

Key Terms

Organisational Development (OD)

A planned, evidence-based approach to improving an organisation’s effectiveness and health by intentionally developing its culture, structure, processes, and people. OD is distinguished from change management by its focus on the organisation as a whole system — and from training by its attention to the social, cultural, and relational dynamics that determine whether individual development translates into organisational performance.

How Active Leadership Drives Organisational Development

The gap between espoused values and enacted leadership behaviour is the single most destructive force in organisational development. When leaders say “people are our most important asset” and then routinely cancel one-to-ones, dismiss feedback, and reward short-term results over long-term development, the culture signal is clear — and it is the signal, not the statement, that shapes behaviour.

Related Organisational Development Resources

• ►Corporate Culture: What It Is and How to Change It
• ►Change Management Process: Intentional Culture Transition
• ►Transformational Leadership: Shaping Organisation-Wide Change
• ►Emotional Intelligence: The Leader’s Cultural Instrument

The following section contains our original guide to organisational development and active leadership.

Organisational development is about people. Have you ever noticed people from the same organisation often use the same language, phrases, clothing style or references when they talk?

Some groups of people can have a high level of energy and see many solutions while others express negativity or see things in black and white terms.

As a leader, you understand that organisational development is about people. Organisations are made of people. As with any living organism, organisations can have a climate or mood, display behaviours driven by values and model a culture in the way it ‘gets things done’, and use particular strategies to create change or growth.

Are you tired of the way people do things or the words people use in your team?

With a focus on organisational development you can directly influence the level of trust in your teams and the way things get done. Similar to the way Mark Zuckerberg lead Facebook’s assault on Google Plus¹, organisational development needs to be actively led from the top, with clear processes and measured targets. Facebook won and so can you!

Lead like Lewin

Widely accepted as the father of organisational development, Kurt Lewin began speaking with teams, companies and large organisations after World War II about how they did their jobs and how they bring change.

Lewin was personally involved as a consultant², furiously mapping out how planning, taking-action, and measuring results was done so he could distil the wide variety of practices into a set of rules that everyone could use.

Lewin came to understand, as many entrepreneurs and leaders do, that it’s not so much about the particular tactics but that people go through, it is the process of doing it together.

To lead like Lewin today, you lead from the top³ and ask several questions of your teams. You will follow up and ensure success is shared. Here are the three questions you will ask and why they are important:

1. ►What’s the best, most effective and enjoyable way you’ve planned with your team – an event, a new product etc.? One of the most effective ways to deeply know the members of your team is to have one-on-ones with each member on a quarterly or quicker basis. When your team members are leaders themselves, it is even more important to understand what they do, how they do it, why it is successful and how this success could be transferred across to other teams.

2. ►After planning, how do you map out the actions people will take when they follow the plan – by time such as weekly, by role or individuals etc.? When you know your team deeply, they will trust you and share with you the detail of their planning processes. It’s essential to understand not only the plan they have created but also how it was created. With the abundance of free, collaborative apps it would be easy to set aside the interpersonal time that has been traditionally be allocated to planning and choose to share a Google Doc, hold a Tweetathon or some other digital replacement for spending time in person with your team. Lewin understood that the time invested in planning with individuals and teams created a unity in purpose, commonality in language and shared expectations shown through behaviours. Lead like Lewin by giving time to your team and understand how they do what they do.

3. ►How do you measure success – against big goals, small wins, as a team or for each person etc.? Planning and mapping out organisational development are core to leadership, but without measurement and reporting on progress the entire process is futile. To lead like Lewin, you will be making explicit the goals for individuals, teams and the entire organisation. There will be specific times when the progress is shared, feedback is given and changes to the plan might be made. This is exactly what Google does with its TGIF meetings⁴, which are held on a Thursday so all their office’s time zones can be included. The leaders share plans, progress, results and gain live feedback from around the world; nothing is off limits and all input is respected. This takes courage, commitment and openness. To lead like Lewin you will ensure everyone knows where they are going, what their role is and how they impact organisational development.

Organizational development takes place when you, the leader, understand how these three processes are happening now. Why? Because you ensure that ‘what works best’ is used consistently by your teams. The best practiced can be captured by video, placed on e-learning platforms for sharing across different locations or during induction training for new hires or it can form part of ongoing staff training. Capturing and then broadcasting the answers to the questions above builds a common language and processes.

Want More Trust? Focus on Challenge, not Conflict

Have you ever had an employee or team look at you sideways when you’ve shared your vision, goals or targets for the year? It usually signals a lack of trust in them that you believe what you’re saying. It is important that leaders challenge a lack of trust and take direct action in changing a culture that has low trust; low trust is like poisonous to any living organism.

Trust is difficult to earn and easy to lose. Organisational development seeks to build interpersonal trust among employees because it is directly related to their level of satisfaction in their roles and their commitment to the goals you’ve shared as the leader. If you want more trust in your team, focus on these four areas:

• ►Challenge the problems facing you and your team, head on, with them and build a strategy to pursue, win or lose, doing it together
• ►Actively particulate in situations where there is conflict, sharing your perspective and supporting your expectations of behaviour – people will abide and stay or leave and you have the chance to add someone more aligned with ‘who’ you want your team to become
• ►Get peers, teams and departments collaborating, problem-solving and producing together, sharing ideas and cross-pollinating the processes so everyone understands and has experience in ‘how we do things’
• ►Make outcomes, goals and actions visible – charts, statements, measurements and progress should be easy to see and quick to use. When everyone knows the level of success, everyone understands the part they play in it

As the leader you can’t do everything, be everywhere and support everyone. What you can do is lead your organizational development by being the change agent from within.

Organizational development is not about building competition between people or teams, but it can be used to unify a team to compete with other companies, products or services. This builds trust between people and inter-team support⁵.

Benefiting from Organisational Development

From increased staff morale, reduced turn-over and higher profits to regained customer satisfaction and new innovations driven by employees, organisational development has a number of benefits that make it worth the investment of time and energy. When everyone on the team knows the goals and the process to get there, conflict becomes constructive⁶ rather than destructive because people push each other to reach forward, be more effective and achieve more.

Ultimately, everyone has a measure of control over what they do and how they do it, while leaders directly lead the organisational development process in a way that increases contribution of everyone.