Organization Development - How to Diagnose Organizations
What you'll learn
- How to diagnose an organisation in order to get a thorough understanding of the strengths and weaknesses to be able to develop OD interventions to improve overall organisational performance.
- Utilize interviews, observations, questionnaires and unobtrusives measures in a structured manner.
- Understand the importance of systemic assessments of different organizational dimensions, such as shared values, structures, strategy, systems, style, staff, and skills.
Requirements
- You should have knowledge on principles of organisation behaviour and theory.
Description
Have you ever wondered what organizational development practitioners really do during the first weeks when diagnosing an organization? The books all say: Interviews, Observations, Questionnaires, and Unobtrusive Measures. But how can you really create a comprehensive and systemic understanding of an organization, and that all within a few weeks.
This course will provide you with Tools and Methods just as we also apply them when organization diagnosis.
You will be able to go out and do semi-structured interviews to gain understanding of the organizational values, the organizational structure, the vision and mission of the organization, or gain knowledge of the day-to-day problems managers and employees face.
I will also provide you with the knowledge and tools you need to do structured observations to know more about how supervisors spend their time, analyze the effectiveness of meetings, or also how effective employees organize their daily activities.
You will have the opportunity to learn and try out various types of surveys to gain understanding of the organizational culture, employee values, or leadership styles.
There are many more tools and methods you will get to know and be able to apply.
Providing structure to the course I used the McKinsey 7S Model, which leads to following design of the course:
Section 1 will provide you an overview of the course outline and objective, the McKinsey 7S framework, as well as the context by taking a quick look at Kurt Lewin's change model, and the action research model.
Section 2 shortly presents an overview of the fours main methods used during an organization diagnosis: interviews, observations, questionnaires, and unobtrusive measures.
Section 3 is all about Shared Values and will show you how you can take a culture walk, do interviews, use survey tools to gain an understanding of the underlying values.
Section 4 is looking at Structures and you will learn on how to analyze an organizations structure, the formal as well as the informal one.
Section 5 will look at Strategy, and you will get to know how to gain an understanding of the oganizations strategy and long term goals, as well as the alignment and the goal agreement within the organization.
Section 6 will provide you with the tools and methods to analyze and visualize Systems and processes, mainly by learning more about the brown paper methods or flow charts. Some real life examples will help you to develop a better understanding of these methods.
Section 7 is all about Style - leadership and management style, and how you can utilize interviews, observations and surveys to gain good understanding.
Section 8 provides you with tools and methods to diagnose all you need to know about Staff. Like surveys to understand values, interviews, observations to know labor and time utilization. Also learn to map human capital and evaluate the effectiveness of the talent management in place.
Section 9 is about Skills, and will provide you with the know-how in how to develop a skills matrix and further on gauge the skills with the training needs.
Section 10 is about Unobtrusive Measures and will provide you with some real life examples to support your next search for data.
Section 11 will provide you with knowledge about content and characteristics of the information you should present during this final Feedback meeting. And how you manage the energy in such a way that the organization gets ready for the change.
Who this course is for:
- People who are working as juniors in consulting firms and want to broaden their knowledge and skills on organizational diagnosis activities.
- People who want to join internal change agent teams involved in organisation development.
- Organization development practitioners who want to expand their know-how and get to know additional tools and methods.
Featured review
Instructor
- 3.7 Instructor Rating
- 181 Reviews
- 1,045 Students
- 1 Course
Gaining a comprehensive picture of any organization within increasingly complex environments is quite a challenge, but done well will lead to effective change interventions.
Thirty years ago I started out as a trainee in management consulting on a team of OD practitioners initially doing mostly diagnostic activities. It was stressful and I probably managed to make every single blunder. As we know, however, we learn from our mistakes.
A few years later I was promoted to project manager, where I had the opportunity to execute OD projects not only in almost any country in Europe but also in many different industries. Apart from many medium sized, often family owned businesses I managed projects also with some of the large corporations, like Nestlé in Austria, and SVIT in the Czech Republic. All of these projects had one thing in common: to look at the organization as a whole and to work with all employees towards common goals for improving overall effectiveness.
Within a few years I became a unit vice president, as well as a member of the management team of Central Europe.
After seven years I started my own company with the mission of supporting businesses develop their organizations. I am still working all across Europe with medium sized and large organizations, e.g. Hitachi in Germany, and often collaborate with other consulting firms.
I have been teaching at the IMC University of Applied Sciences Krems, Austria for 15 years. My first courses were on Organizational Behavior and Organization Theory, which are still some of my most favorite topics. Now I also teach courses in Intercultural Competence, Change Management as well as Network and System Dynamics in Collaboration. I am at times invited to do guest lectures in countries such as The Netherlands, Ukraine, Mexico and Argentina.
The privilege to combine practical experience with academia allows me to regularly question tools and methods applied in the industry and keep developing and applying new methods.