Notes on organizational development
Organizational Development was always part of what I do. Many disciplines that I went through during the university years, being a double major student in Accounting/Finance and Software Engineering, developed my abilities to understand organizational structures and dynamics. It allowed me as well to continuously learn and change perspectives about how things work in an organization.
The learning years have rewired my brain to understand everything in a structured fashion. Accounting and Software Engineering are two rigidly organized sets of learning that are essential pillars for any organization to do business. My background allowed me to work in positions that profited from all the skills I learned during my study years. Even now, in my current job as an operations manager, the combination of skills and knowledge base gave me an edge, an advanced lookup on the optimistic ways to organize the work and obtain results. However, almost always the project management success remained partial, overachieving yet entailing tons of conflicts and internal challenges.
Realizing and admitting this fact, affected my self-esteem, made me doubt my abilities and mostly cornered me in a defensive position, playing the blame game toward others or circumstances holding them responsible for any failure. The experience I lived through the last two years clarified for me what was dictated into my mindset. The structure is overwhelmingly rigid concepts that draw the meaning and creativity in perception, leaving behind many crucial factors along the way.
Recently, I had an experience while partnering with a friend of mine, who works as a consultant for organizations aiming to develop their capacities, and who is coming from a totally different school of thoughts. We worked together on an organizational development project for a foreign company and this experience was an eye-opening for me on all the weaknesses of my reasoning.
It doesn't matter how many books about management, structures, human resources, business modeling, marketing, leadership, group dynamics, and whatever available developmental topics are there to be acquired and used to transform organizations. All these books are amazing tools. Yet, that doesn't mean the reader, by capturing the written wisdom will be able to run an organization smoothly while applying these tools. not necessarily!
The reason for this deficiency between knowledge and incapability to obtain peak results remains in the statism of these methods as ideas while organizations thrive by humans. Top leaders have the tendency to forget about this fact and focus on the functionalities, responsibilities, and tasks of key positions.
Humans are emotional beings and their functionalities are utterly dependent on the element of emotions. Thus, for any ambitious leader to flourish through his organization, he needs to integrate all the members into a developmental process, leaving behind all the assumptions about regulating the workflow. His team will do that for him when they become part of the process!
To conclude, my perspective on organizations has changed throughout the years, from seeing it a carefully assembled mechanical apparatus to an organic entity, more a plant rather a manufactory, that needs care, water, sun and it will do all the growing by itself!
Realizing and admitting this fact, affected my self-esteem, made me doubt my abilities and mostly cornered me in a defensive position, playing the blame game toward others or circumstances holding them responsible for any failure. The experience I lived through the last two years clarified for me what was dictated into my mindset. The structure is overwhelmingly rigid concepts that draw the meaning and creativity in perception, leaving behind many crucial factors along the way.
Recently, I had an experience while partnering with a friend of mine, who works as a consultant for organizations aiming to develop their capacities, and who is coming from a totally different school of thoughts. We worked together on an organizational development project for a foreign company and this experience was an eye-opening for me on all the weaknesses of my reasoning.
It doesn't matter how many books about management, structures, human resources, business modeling, marketing, leadership, group dynamics, and whatever available developmental topics are there to be acquired and used to transform organizations. All these books are amazing tools. Yet, that doesn't mean the reader, by capturing the written wisdom will be able to run an organization smoothly while applying these tools. not necessarily!
The reason for this deficiency between knowledge and incapability to obtain peak results remains in the statism of these methods as ideas while organizations thrive by humans. Top leaders have the tendency to forget about this fact and focus on the functionalities, responsibilities, and tasks of key positions.
Humans are emotional beings and their functionalities are utterly dependent on the element of emotions. Thus, for any ambitious leader to flourish through his organization, he needs to integrate all the members into a developmental process, leaving behind all the assumptions about regulating the workflow. His team will do that for him when they become part of the process!
To conclude, my perspective on organizations has changed throughout the years, from seeing it a carefully assembled mechanical apparatus to an organic entity, more a plant rather a manufactory, that needs care, water, sun and it will do all the growing by itself!
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