I have recently been doing sleep training with my 9-month old baby girl and in my sleep deprived state at 3am in the morning, it occurred to me that teaching a baby to sleep has similar challenges to supporting a client through an organizational development programme.
I was sitting by my daughter’s side, watching her get increasingly frustrated and fed up that she wasn’t able to put herself to sleep without my help and I had to stop myself from scooping her up and cuddling her to sleep. Effectively doing it for her, and not only ruining all the hard work of the previous nights, but also disempowering her from being able to learn this vital skill for herself.
Equally, I have sat in numerous client meetings and watched the leaders or managers get impatient with the pace of progress and the fact that change is gradual and may require two steps back for every three steps forward. The temptation is equally great to ‘fix the problem for them’, whether this is implementing a proposed solution without co-design and genuine buy-in, or ‘telling them’ what to do.
For me, the beauty and power of organisation development is to be a mirror for the client – to constructively challenge them so that they can find the path that is unique to them and right for their future vision. As OD practitioners, we need to pay attention to the ‘here and now’ during any intervention to track whether the intended outcomes are being achieved, and if not, adjust them. We need to act as a ‘safe haven’ for the client so that they can learn in their own time, vent their frustrations and give room to learning and survival anxieties that naturally arise during periods of change. We need to help our clients treat resistance as something to be understood and worked with as experience, rather than to be conquered. We need to share responsibility and co-design rather than build dependency and prepare our clients to be independent to support and renew themselves by the time our work with them is complete.
At the same time, there are of course practical day to day things that we very much do do for our clients. We run diagnostics to get a true understanding of the issues and challenges the client is facing – navigating ‘political’ aspects of data collection. We design the most suitable approaches and methods and work out different intervention options to discuss, and further co-design with the client. We help the client calculate the resources required, design the communications plan, set up monitoring mechanisms and a troubleshooting team. We coordinate the work of the different implementation teams and stay watchful of slow adopting groups so that we can support them in order to be more engaged with the change agenda.
There is a fine line to tread, to know when to step in and confront difficult issues, and when to support and nurture others, influence, listen well and empathize. But that, for me, is the fascination and attraction of OD. I truly enjoy supporting clients on their journeys to becoming better places to work and stimulating their people to perform brilliantly. It is wonderful to discover and mobilize human energy and create learning opportunities for individuals and organizations alike. And, as with all things, maintaining a sense of humour when the going gets tough. That, I think, is something I will definitely need when I am faced with my sleepless baby girl at 3am tomorrow morning. I just hope she learns relatively quickly…