Throughout this program we have researched and reviewed leadership development, winners of a prestigious award called the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, which is the importance of teams, developing high performance teams, anticipating change, the culture of an organization an its affects on change, overcoming resistance to change, implementing change, and improving individual excellence. All of these evolve around one practice called Organizational Development. OD is making it possible for organizations to remain relevant while globalization becomes the new norm. We are no longer competing with our next-door neighbors; instead we are able to collaborate with diverse cultures around the world. The new norm is holding meetings with people in China while working form home as a teleworker or taking an organization and never actually meeting co-workers because they are spread out across the globe in different continents. Somehow organizations are expected to remain successful in uncharted territories using technology as the main resource of running the entire operation. All all of this valuable information has led me to believe that OD isn’t going anywhere.
Organizational development is changing the way people are doing business one company at a time by forcing them to become more aware of their employee and customer’s needs. Brown was able to describe OD as a “long-range efforts and programs aimed at improving an organization’s ability to survive by changing its problem-solving and renewal processes” (Brown, (2011). Throughout his text he writes about the beginning of the OD application and how it continues to develop as continuous changes emerge everyday. For example what we once viewed was a hierarchy structure where each employee had to follow a certain protocol that involved asking their supervisor for permission to make a decision they were well equip to make so that their supervisor could ask their manager if their employee could make a decision, and so on all the way up the chain of command. By the time the employee was given the okay to make the decision so much valuable time was loss that it was almost irrelevant to make the decision in many cases. With growing concern from employees the focus began to shift on empowering employees so that many management responsibilities could devolve to other capable employees allowing the managers to focus on important issues. This is where the need to develop better practices and employee proficiencies became very critical to an organization’s success; thus OD surfaced.
There is a growing concern that OD applications are not evolving as fast as they need to in order to remain up-to-date with organization’s needs, or that the OD practitioner is not adequately trained to perform. Reviewing Brown’s points on how others in the world tend to view the topics of OD as resembling a fad instead of a serious practice only brings me to the conclusion that organization’s need to do their research prior to bringing in an OD practitioner. I also believe that anyone possessing the title of an OD practitioner needs to have satisfactory training and education prior to earning the title, and also ongoing training should be mandatory in order to stay up with the times. In an article I found involving the growing concerns of OD, the author noted a very key ingredient in the development of an OD practitioner is that “individuals entering the field either need to have amassed a significant amount of work experience or, in the absence of experience, need to have internships or other supervised field work to understand the intertwined nature of practitioner, practice, and theory” (Worley, C. (2002). This rings true with most mastery positions in any field because it is not impossible to perform a role or responsibility with lack of experience; however it is impossible to do it well.
I am considering taking a stroll down this avenue professionally and I plan on working my way towards becoming a practitioner, but prior to making any strides I plan on doing a lot on training and preparatory steps. For example I have started looking at different internships or looking for an HR position at a company because I believe you need to work your way up so that experience can be a guidance tool. OD of the future in my opinion will be a necessity in every HR department in every large organization. What I foresee is a continuous change in structure as far as hierarchy and processes because of all the increasing advancements of technology. For example Amazon was in the news recently advising they are looking at using drones to deliver packages cutting out the middleman. This alone shows that just when everything settles down something new and innovative will take the world by storm and cause a chain of events to follow. No one can predict the future, but they can plan and prepare by having trained and certified OD practitioners on board their teams ready to impalement all of the needed changes for their company to remain successful and flourish.
References
Worley, C. G. (2002). Consulting today. Retrieved December 8, 2013, fromhttp://www.consultingtoday.com/downloads/Consulting%20Todayarticle%20-Is%20OD%20Still%20Relevant.pdf
Brown, D.R. (2011). An experiential approach to organization development (8th ed.).Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall
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