Author: naomiorgdesign

Too frequently in the case of organizational problems arising the first response is to look to the organization chart i.e. names of jobholders in boxes that show a formal reporting relationship between the jobholders.

When people are trying to decide the 'best' structure for their organization they often forget that work has to flow through it, and that different structures have different attributes. For example, that adaptability is poor in a traditional hierarchy but good in a network. Instead structure decisions are made based on personalities, politics, and expediency. This is a mistake on two counts. First, failing to explicitly recognize that structure choices impact organizational capabilities, and second that getting work done efficiently in order to meet organizational goals is, or should be, the purpose of the organizing frameworks and structures.

On the first point – that structure choices impact organizational capabilities – Conway's law says the technical architecture of a computer system reflects the bureaucratic structure of the organization that produced it. Think about Microsoft as an example. It has the Windows Group, the Office Group and the XBox group, and their systems are isolated from each other. Although at one stage Office and Windows were 'joined at the hip', trust-busters made Microsoft erect a Chinese wall between the two organizations, so their architectures had to bifurcate.

On the second point – that getting work done efficiently in order to meet organizational goals is, or should be, the purpose of the organizing frameworks and structures – organization charts offer almost no insight into how work is done. Work occurs in what is commonly called the "white space" in the chart – and can be mapped by organizational network analysis, and social network analysis. In most cases the organizational network analysis chart showing how work is getting done via information flows and collaboration bears very little relationship to the formal organization chart.

The possibilities that technology now offer for charting the way work actually gets done in organizations and the advent of new business models raise the question about the future of the traditional organization chart. Are they of any real value? Three different but common scenarios make it a question worth thinking about.

Take the way work gets done. In many organizations employees play multiple roles, for example, working on project teams, (perhaps more than one at a time), contributing expertise and skills in a variety of forums, and they often work for more than one boss. In these cases, and even using dotted lines, it is not so easy to allocate them to a slot in an organization chart.

Now consider the business model of a new organization. LiveOps, established in 2000, deploys cloud computing to virtualize their business services. It is a cloud-based call centre service that manages a network of more than 20,000 independent at-home agents. Companies use the service on a pay-as-you-go model, either as a fully outsourced call center or to augment their own. The technology enables an on-demand, scalable service to subscribers. The relationship of the stakeholders – LiveOps, the independent agents, and the companies buying the services of the agents via Live Ops is not easily depicted in a standard chart. Nevertheless the three parties together form an organization that delivers a service to a customer.

In other organizations fully employed members of staff work side by side with contractors, consultants, and temporary workers. It is difficult to argue this type of staff augmentation is not part of effective organizational functioning and success (why pay for their services if not to contribute?) yet these people do not appear on a standard organization chart.

In all three instances – and others like them – organization chart development and maintenance could well be a redundancy that is better not introduced in the first instance, or if it is already established should be reviewed for its value. Is it enough to spend time, effort, and money to produce and maintain something that shows in broad terms the level of formal authority of various positions, their numbers, and their presumed reporting relationships?

Sun Hydraulics is an example of an organization, established in 1970 and profitable from the start, which decided not to have an organization chart. Its website explains:

Our workplace is as distinctive as our products, and provides just as many advantages. We have no job titles, no hierarchy, no formal job descriptions, organizational charts or departments. We have open offices, promoting open communication. This environment encourages innovation and helps develop a spirit of entrepreneurship throughout the organization. The result is a workforce inspired to satisfy every customer, no matter the challenge.

W. L. Gore, also very financially successful, takes the same approach

Gore has been a team-based, flat lattice organization that fosters personal initiative. There are no traditional organizational charts, no chains of command, nor predetermined channels of communication.

If the decision is made that it is of value to spend time, effort, and money to produce and maintain something that shows in broad terms the level of formal authority of various positions, their numbers, and their presumed reporting relationships then the start point is to determine the work flow, the activities, and the work volume that needs to be done to deliver the business strategy from this the number of people and their grade levels can be gauged.

Are organization charts as we know of any organizational value? What's your view?

(Thanks to Michael Stanford for contributions to this content)

In my research on organizational health I've been reading Warren Bennis's book Changing Organizations definitely a golden oldie. In it he has a quote from Wilfred Brown, Chairman and Managing Director of Glacier Metal Company (1939-1965) who said 'Optimum organization [forms] must be derived from an analysis of the work to be done and the techniques and resources available.'

This strikes me as eminently sensible, and is a precept I teach in the organization design training programs I facilitate. But it is highlighted by looking through the lens of organization health. Boiling down the many definitions and lists of characteristics that I gathered it seems that four attribute emerge. A healthy organization is one that has:

o Effective performance or functioning
o Well managed adaptation, change and growth
o A strong sense of alignment interdependency and community
o A spirit of energy, vibrancy and vigour, perhaps what the on-line shoe retailer Zappos defines as WOW

This being the case then what form should its organizing structures and forms take? Too frequently organizational forms are equated with the organization structure chart i.e. names of jobholders in boxes that show a formal reporting relationship between the jobholders.

What these structure charts lack is any acknowledgement of the work that has to flow through them. This is a mistake as failing to explicitly recognize that getting work done efficiently in order to meet organizational goals is, or should be, the purpose of the organizing frameworks and structures. Too often this formal structure chart is focused on personalities, politics, and decisions made that are divorced from a careful consideration of the business model and the work.

The business model is the 'what and how' of a business in terms of the choices and decisions made in relation to its specific operation. Think about Walmart (or Asda in the UK) for example. The choices and decisions that Walmart makes about its offer, partner networks, distribution channels, and so on make the company distinctively Walmart and not Tesco or a similar competitor. Walmart operationalizes a business model that is noted for:

o Low labor costs (it is a no union company)
o An authoritarian structure
o Hyper-centralized managerial control
o Requiring workers promoted to the managerial ranks to move to a new store in a different location
o Workweeks around 50 hours or more, which can surge to 80 or 90 hours a week during holiday seasons.
o Cutting out the middlemen and shifting costs and risks onto the manufacturer.
o Bringing warehousing, distribution and trucking in-house
o Building new stores around distribution centers
o Harnessing retail information through high-tech barcode and product-tracking software
o Revolutionizing the relationship between merchant and vendors.

These business model choices and decisions mean that the customer gets the lowest possible price for a product.

Through the formal organization chart that depicts hierarchies and formal relationships. It includes (in relation to job descriptions and level) formal allocation of accountabilities and authorities.

Through the informal organization chart that is revealed through social network analysis and the way people learn how to do their work in relationship with others. It includes networks of influence, and sources of informal power and authority.

Through a combination of explicit and informal in patterns that could be revealed by investigation and analysis. (For example why does person A ask her supervisor to make a decision, but person B in the same role but with a different supervisor makes the decision herself).

A healthy organization is one in which the four elements of business model, formal work organization, informal work organization, and the combination of formal and informal work organization are closely aligned.

Does this make sense to you? Have you seen alignment in your organization? Let me know.

I was on a flight last week reading the European Wall Street Journal. The front page (October 31) had a great photomontage showing that

1. Truck maker Scania plans to pare production by as much as 15%, beginning in November.
2. Volvo intends to scale back truck manufacturing next year.
3. PSA Peugeot Citroën plans to suspend production at a plant in Slovakia. The company also said it would lay off 6,000 workers, mostly in France.
4. Liquor maker Diageo restructured its European operation by centralizing certain functions and shifting investment away from Western European markets.
5. Saab Automobile agreed to sell Saab to Chinese companies Pang Da and Zhejiang Youngman for $141.9 million, following a two-year struggle to turn the company around after decades of losses.

On the next page were a further set of news items:

6. BT Group said it will complete the rollout of its fiber broadband network to two-thirds of U.K. premises by the end of 2014, one year earlier than originally planned.
7. Yahoo has been exploring a potentially tax-free way to dispose of its roughly 40% stake in the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba.
8. Google announced the creation of about 100 online video "channels" on its YouTube website that will have new original programming involving celebrities such as the singer Madonna.
9. Meg Whitman is moving to stabilize H-P after 14 months in which the company removed two CEOs. Some seem to think her efforts are working, so far.

All of these major shifts in company strategy were attributed, for the most part, to the financial turmoil and the aftermath of the recession going on in Europe at the time. Reading this I wondered what was going on behind the scenes. The companies mentioned all presumably have strategists, organization design and development people, and line managers all geared up and ready to implement on the strategic change in direction.

Or do they?

Later in the week I facilitated a webinar for the Human Capital Institute on the ten myths of organization design. In the scene setting piece I mentioned the WSJ piece, commenting on the range of business strategy decisions and asking the participants, predominantly HR practitioners:

What is your response to this type of news item:
a) As a reader?
b) As a line manager in one of those organizations?
c) As an organization designer/consultant working with one of those organizations?

Then asking: Do these strategic business decisions require an organization design piece of work?

To my mind each of the strategic decisions requires an organization design/redesign series of activities and a commonly question came up from one of the participants – why is it that we get asked to implement on a decision that has been made, without having had input to the original decision?

This participant wanted to know what kind of questions to ask to demonstrate that his involvement earlier in the strategy decision making process would be helpful. This is a tricky one because once the decision has been made the options are more limited. In this case the types of questions that are useful run on the lines of :

Context questions.
This includes an awareness of what's happening in the context of the situation, including values, cultural issues, and environmental influences. Sample questions include:

• What is going on in this situation?
• What else do I need to know? What information is missing?
• How do I go about getting the information I need?
• What about this situation have I seen before? What is different /dissimilar?
• What's important and what's not important in this situation?
• What are the risks and rewards in this situation?
• How quickly to we need to act?

Assumptions questions
This involves analyzing assumptions about the situation as well as examining the beliefs that underlie choices. Sample questions include:
• What has been taken for granted in this situation?
• Which beliefs/values shaped any assumptions?
• What assumptions contribute to the way we are handling this situation?
• How can we challenge our assumptions to come up with other, potentially better responses?

Exploring questions
This involves thinking about and imagining other ways of looking at the situation, Sample questions include:
• What are two different responses to this situation?
• Are there others who might be able to help us develop more alternatives?
• Of the possible actions which are most reasonable?
Why are the others not as reasonable?
• Are there other resources that need to be mobilized?

A better route, that gets you into the dicussions earlier, is to develop organizational skills, political savvy, and business knowledge so that you are in the position of flagging things going on in the environment that are likely to require an organizational response. This means taking action yourself to keep up to speed. Things that I look at include TechCrunch, Science Daily, The Economist, Fast Company, McKinsey Quarterly, Strategy+Business, Harvard Business Review, WSJ, and the business pages of the FT and NY. Yes it's a lot but it does mean that I can be active in saying 'these are the things going on in the context that we need to be ready for when they hit us'.

How do you keep up to speed? How do you get in on the strategic decision making process?

Different point: I came across an excellent website with two training modules one on organization structure and one on organization design. Take a look – they're well worth it.

This week I've been traveling and experiencing all kinds of levels of customer service and I've been wondering exactly what customer service is. What is it that I respond to and what makes the interaction between agent and customer a good one? One of the complicating factors is language. I have been with French, German, and Italian native speakers. If you haven't guessed, I am in Switzerland. I can understand French for the most part (lack of practice means I can barely speak it) but the other two languages I have only a hazy grasp of.

So I am delighted, and somewhat chagrined, when nearly all the people I'm in contact with are able to speak English and wondering if my own customer service is lacking because I don't speak their language. 90% of the interactions I am having are with hotel staff, café or restaurant staff, shop assistants, and bus drivers. The other 10% are with fellow guests, shoppers, and travelers.

What I'm expecting is a welcoming smile and/or greeting, and then the ability to process the transaction effectively and efficiently. And that seems to be the general definition of customer service – at least as far as consensus on the web definitions that come up on the first page of the enquiry. Although as one person pointed out they are generally from the organization's perspective rather than the customer's so they miss the one to one transaction in favor of things like 'allow your people to be extraordinary'.
I think that's fine and it made me laugh too. Here's my experience of a one to one transaction at the National Capital YMCA Fitness Center. But first a bit of background.

Until September this year each of the four changing rooms was staffed by a receptionist who greeted members – the regulars by name, handed them the locker keys remembering who liked which locker best, dealt with queries, and generally provided the friendly face of the YMCA, giving great customer service. Suddenly, the management team decided, without consulting the members or communicating the reasons for the decision, to withdraw receptionist staffing for each changing room.

This decision resulted in the main reception staff, with no increase in numbers of them, having to both check in members (as there's no automated swipe system), give out locker keys for four different changing areas, and handle member and prospective member queries.

This has infuriated the members many of whom have left because of this issue and the refusal of the management team to reinstate the previous system. The members who have stayed are wondering how to get the system back to as it was as there seems no adequate rationale for the new system – there was no reduction, in force for example.

Last week I went to the Y and witnessed extraordinary behavior. I got to the main reception and there was only one person on duty. I handed her my card to be swiped, and asked her for a locker key. She said 'I don't do keys, I just do the card swiping'. I asked her who did the keys. She said the person who did had just gone for a bathroom break. She didn't know how long he would be. I stood aside and watched the same exchange with three or so other people. All of us baffled as to why she couldn't reach down and hand us each a locker key, and frustrated by her repeated response 'I just swipe cards.'

Then a woman back in the line leapt forward completely furious and said 'I work here, and I can give out locker keys'. It turned out she was a staff member but not on duty and had come to work-out. She'd witnessed the receptionist refusing to hand out keys and took matters into her own hands. The receptionist's response "Good – you do that." So we have two forms of extraordinary behavior – the first a refusal to give adequate customer service and the second a leaping in to the rescue.

Think about this situation. There was no language barrier involved. In Switzerland I'm happy to accept that a rather surly 'Everything is closed' in response to the question in a gas station, 'Is there a café in the area?' is perfectly fine customer service.

But where there is no language barrier I do have an expectation that I should be viewed as valued customer and treated in a courteous and efficient manner with an effective transaction resulting from the interaction.

However, thinking about the Swiss experience and the YMCA experience led me away from my first reaction to the Y's receptionist which was to complain about her attitude. I wondered if there was some kind of hidden 'language' barrier or at least communications gap. Maybe the receptionist swiping the cards felt she'd be reprimanded by her supervisor if she did someone else's job. Maybe she didn't know (or care) that it was within her power to show some initiative; maybe she didn't know how the locker key system worked.

This got me wondering what it is about a real language barrier that makes one less quick to judge a perceived attitude or experience, and try to learn more about the situation, or be less judgmental than in a situation where one is assuming something. In one of the Swiss post offices I had to watch how people were getting counter service (by taking a number from a central point and then looking at a screen to see that number being 'called' to a particular service agent).

On a mental replay I wondered whether I, and others behind me in the queue, could have been more helpful to the receptionist – saying something affirming like 'I see you're on your own right now – that must make thing more difficult if people are expecting you to do the full range of jobs by yourself.' I recalled a quote I got from somewhere "Without hope and without fear may I be decent in my actions and kind to all people".

So the questions I'm now left with are: "Is one to one customer service actually a two-way interaction? If customers go in open minded and with a pleasant demeanor, treating the agent with respect and without expectation more likely to result in good customer service than going in with expectations of how a customer service agent 'should' behave?' How is customer service best designed in to an organization? What are your views?

We were in a meeting last week talking about virtual working and how often people who are in virtual teams should/could come in to meet each other face to face, and for what reasons. We had some debate on this and then someone said that his concern was with the Gallup question on the employee engagement survey that we use. One of the questions respondents are asked to rate is 'I have a best friend at work'. His concern was something on the lines of if it is important for motivation and productivity to have a best friend at work then how would people find a best friend or develop a relationship that would qualify as such if they weren't meeting face to face as often or even at all.

The Gallup Management Journal has a short article about having a best friend at work saying:

Human beings are social animals, and work is a social institution. Long-term relationships are often formed at work — networking relationships, friendships, even marriages. In fact, if you did not meet your spouse in college, chances are you met him or her at work. The evolution of quality relationships is very normal and an important part of a healthy workplace. In the best workplaces, employers recognize that people want to forge quality relationships with their coworkers, and that company allegiance can be built from such relationships.

The development of trusting relationships is a significant emotional compensation for employees in today's marketplace. Thus, it is easy to understand why it is such a key trait of retention, and is one of the 12 key discoveries from a multiyear research effort by The Gallup Organization

But the article does not comment about the virtual team or a distributed/dispersed workforce. This may be because it was published in 1999 and the technology and/or remote working possibility wasn't advanced enough to make the eventuality even worth raising.

Making an assumption, that it is important to have a best friend at work what are we (organizations) in danger of losing if people who are working remotely from each other respond to the employee engagement question that they don't have a best friend at work.

First it seems that we are in danger of losing the staff themselves to other companies. Indeed, I was talking with a person last week who used to work for Salesforce, working out of her home, and she left to join a company with thriving face to face office environment that she could go to every day. She said that she left Salesforce because she felt isolated and missed a feeling of community. Not only she left but one of her colleagues left with her to join the same firm.

Second we might lose the collaboration and knowledge sharing that comes both from casual face to face contact (in the US called the 'water cooler' contact)

Third we might lose the sense of trust people build in each other when they are interacting face to face and see the way each acts in meetings, conversations, responsiveness to requests, or proactive actions. Trust in others is an essential part of an well functioning organization. A book that someone recommended me – that I haven't yet read – when I was casually talking about this topic is Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity, by Francis Fukayama.

Fourth the health and well being of our employees might start to deteriorate, and more sick days bring more cost to the organization. As I started to mull over this aspect of having a best friend at work the RSA Journal landed in my mailbox with a fascinating article in it "Lonely Planet" The authors make the point that:

Technology has made it possible for people to connect in ways never imagined, and people worldwide have jumped at the opportunity. Social networking, once the domain of family influence, college fraternities and local business groups, has gone global and online. The dramatic rise of the mobile phone and broadband connectivity has made it possible to follow what others are doing 24 hours a day and to maintain friendships across time and distance. Although meeting new friends online remains the exception rather than the rule, online social networking is associated with an increase in number of friends, though what it means to be a friend is also changing.

The world is becoming less welcoming of fully embodied social connections in the traditional sense, with committed, enduring social identities being replaced by shorter-term, more instrumental collaborations.

Note the phrase "though what it means to be a friend is also changing", the authors go on to discuss the risks inherent in 'shorter-term, more instrumental collaborations' on social connection, isolation, and quality of relationship. If people feel social isolated there are medical ramifications:

Research in social neuroscience indicates that a feeling of social isolation is reflected in different neural pathways in the brain that affect social cognition and executive function, and can contribute to rises in stress hormones and blood pressure, and even genetic expression that promotes inflammation and impairs immunity. Feelings of social isolation engender hostility, impair sleep and, over time, seriously accelerate age-related decline in health and wellbeing.

In order to help virtual workers feel part of the community, involved and not isolated, and able to build trust with each other what can organizations do? In another article Sense of Virtual Community-Maintaining the Experience of Belonging the authors describe some research they did on a well-accepted framework of sense of community. This framework, developed by, McMillan and Chavis, has four conditions for building types of communities in which friendships are more likely to flourish:

• Feelings of membership: feelings of belonging to, and identifying with, the community.
• Feelings of influence: feelings of having influence on, and being influenced by, the community.
• Integration and fulfillment of needs: feelings of being supported by others in the community while also supporting them.
• Shared emotional connection: feelings of relationships, shared history, and a "spirit" of community

The authors were researching whether the four conditions are required for people to feel a sense of community in a virtual experience and their conclusions are more or less, yes. In saying this they make the important observation that:

Virtual communities, like all communities, require ongoing community maintenance activities …. Community-like processes and the sense of virtual community outcome cannot be guaranteed. They require people to enact them and to continue enacting them over time. .. companies must give special consideration to the types of virtual settlements and virtual communities they want to create. Members will enact these processes only if they perceive a benefit. Companies must rethink the type of virtual groupings they hope to create, focusing on the underlying needs and values of the consumer.

As organizations like the one I am working in urge and encourage workers to become more 'virtual' it requires that line managers, and organization design and development practitioners take an active part in facilitating the development of virtual communities that build trust, enduring friendship, and connection. How else are people going to be able to check the box that they have a best friend at work? It's important for their own health and the organization's health that they can do this.

I'd love to hear any tips you can share on how to build on-line communities that promote trust and quality friendships among participants.

This past week I've been racing to learn new things: Salesforce's Chatter, Chaos theory, Google docs, sharing Dropbox folders, my new Livescribe pen, our move from Sametime to Webex, and how to follow the author guidelines including the Harvard referencing system for my new book.

So is this an unusual number of new things to learn in a week or a normal number for most people? I'm wondering if I've particularly noticed because so many of them are new technologies to me. Salesforce's Chatter is apparently just like Facebook, in fact one of our beta test group (we're trying it out before the rest of the organization gets it) asked if it was on a Facebook platform. It isn't but for those people who use Facebook it will be easy to make sense of Chatter. I'm not a friend of Facebook for various reasons – I'm hoping that Siva Vaidhyanathan author of a book I'm currently reading The Googlization of Everything and why we should worry will tackle Facebook as his next book. He's a professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia so it's a deep and thoughtful approach to a phenomenon that isn't quite what it might seem.

We are testing it to see if Salesforce is a good platform for performance feedback – but find out that it's not really. More interesting is the fact that around 20 people signed up to use it in order to find this out but only 3 or 4 actually did. And this was an enthusiastic – at least on the phone call – group. So how could we encourage people who were less enthusiastic to use it? As I was thinking this over, one of my favorite principles leapt into mind 'never work uphill'. That's taken from a great document by the way: "Rules of Thumb for Change Agents" by Herbert A Shepard. He originally published it in 1975 in Organization Development Practitioner by the Organization Development Network. Hardly a day goes by without one of the rules of thumb coming to my mind.

Chaos theory I'm learning from Steven Strogatz a Cornell Professor. It's on DVD in 24 x 30 minute lectures which I'm watching not quite one a day as planned but have got to lecture 13, 3 of which I took last week. They're tremendously informative and his delivery style is terrific. Why chaos theory? Because people want organizations to be stable and predictable and they're not, but there are intriguing links that Strogatz goes into that could illuminate non-predictability to people.

Google docs is very limited except in its ability to share with others. Gone is the track changes feature that showed who thought what as we changed docs. Also gone are most of the graphics or images in a PowerPoint slide, plus any semblance of organization of the docs. I get a link saying someone has shared something with me – it's not possible to write a message into the sharing bit (or is it) so often I don't quite know why I have got this gift. If I do know and it happens to be the most recent doc it is easy to find but then it gets lost way down in a list and I don't remember exactly what it was called so have to go back and find the email that had the link so I can open it from there, etc. etc. It's tremendously time consuming and frustrating. Sharing Dropbox folders on the other hand is quick and easy and you know what it's for. It's simply for sharing docs.

My LiveScribe pen I think will be useful as I start writing the new book. I unpackaged it on Monday and got it set up. Someone read an article about it in The Atlantic and thought I would be interested. I finally got round to investigating and then buying one. I was spurred on by Troy, the shop assistant, in my local Staples (office suppliers) who was wildly enthusiastic – he'd seen it operated at an exhibition and was longing to get one. Although Staples didn't stock them in store, only on-line he did a great sales job. (Except I got mine on Amazon).

Sametime to Webex isn't such a big deal except the Webex link isn't compatible with Google Chrome and has to be cut and pasted from the email into the browser instead of just clicked on, but oh well. I keep reminding myself that even last year we didn't have this capacity to hold real time virtual presentation with people from across the country/world. The technology is truly amazing albeit irritating at times. (Talking of irritation, I won't speak on the topic gmail at this point).

Other learning events this past week: learning to work with my new boss, learning a couple of new yoga poses, learning how to lock my bike when I've left the lock at home, learning how to program myself to look up things like library opening hours so I don't arrive ten minutes after it's shut. Learning that leaving my living room window open while I'm out and a huge rainstorm happens results in a flood in my condo. Learning where to buy an Islamic swimsuit for my daughter who is in Sudan.

What did you learn last week?

Beyond any move logistics – which are critically important to get right – other conscious choices and decisions need to be made in preparing people for an office move. Typically before a move, in many real estate moves or office space redesigns we ask people to complete a survey on work style (are they deskbound, etc.). Then we gather 'requirements' on what they'll need in the new space. However, there is a tension here. People will base requirements on what they know, or what they are assuming or have heard from others about the new space. What we get from 'requirements' gathering is, for the most part, uninformed by actual experience of working in new space styles and new work ways. People have little ability to make informed choices and decisions on what they don't know or haven't experienced. Addressing that knowledge gap is essential in order to get informed requirements that help us meet any business goals related to real estate and/or carbon footprint reductions combined with business process streamlining and delivering the business strategy.

Although the 'requirements' tell us something e.g. "I need a lot of flat workspace because I have large drawings to lay out", often over-looked are the personal preferences that should be factored into the space design ("and I like standing up half the day while I'm looking at drawings and sitting down some of the time."). Having personal preferences met plays a big part in keeping people motivated. Clearly this should not be done on an individual by individual basis but by ensuring that space and furniture is flexible and adaptable in order to enable, as far as possible, personal preferences to be met.

Many of these preferences are context specific – people cannot express them until they are actually in the space and see how it is working. But in the project I am working on we are learning a lot about how preferences start to come in to play once people have moved to the new space and some of these we will be able to accommodate and act on in designing future space and making furniture purchase decision that arrive at a solution that meets both individual preferences and work styles.

In asking people what they would change now they are in the new building they say things that can be relatively easily grouped:

Workspace comments come thick and fast focusing on temperature, light, noise, storage, personalization of space, and furniture combinations. Typically people say things like:

Temperature: We need ways of tailoring individual preferences around light, heat, and noise. We should be able to adjust our local environment using smarter systems to control them.

Light: I have a preference around having natural light and having a shade system that automatically adjusted window blinds for heat and light gains would make a lot of sense. We could make gains in lighting efficiency by teaching people more about the individual contributions they could make to save on lighting.

Noise: These open environments are very noisy. There's a lot of interruption if you are sitting in a desk near a walkway because people just stop to talk. Then there are people on their cell phones when they walk by. I'm having to learn how to tune out people and develop strategies for indicating that I don't want to be interrupted. (Listening to music on headphones helps with this).

Storage: Storage issues could be resolved by perhaps bigger lockers and a good method of coat storage. And if we've got visitors they need somewhere where they can put their stuff for the day. Keys make life difficult – people walk off with them. Combination locks work better.

Personalization of space: I miss having my "personal" items in the space – photos of my children, a lucky stone someone gave me. They help me feel grounded in the day. I'm having to learn new ways of getting that personal kind of stress buster. We need to develop a sense of place. Plants and pictures would make a big difference. Something that builds that community feeling.

Furniture combinations: I love the furniture. The variety allows for alternative ways of working. With this variety of choice comes comfort in being able to choose over a traditional workstation but that is available if needed. Having adaptable furniture is very good. I like the way everything is on castors so we can move it all around easily.

The technology and equipment people receive to help them be efficient and productive in the new space is another aspect to consider in preparing for the move. Heavy laptops, slow internet connections, unstable wifi, lack of systems compatibility, too many passwords, lack of financial support for mobile working and insufficient knowledge of what tools and help are available are often cited as anxieties in this phase of preparation for the move. Types of comments on this include:

People were very anxious when we were told we'd be hoteling. We thought we'd have to be staring at our small laptop screens all day. We didn't know we'd get monitors for each workspace and be provided with headsets to cut down on noise. We knew we'd be telecommuting more but we didn't really get enough education about the new technology and tools available that would make this easier for us.

The ways people interact with each other in the new space (real or virtual) is a further aspect to debate in the preparing for the move. Many people suggested (after their move) that there should be organization wide set of basic protocols, or at least a building wide set, for working in the new types of open/collaborative space, which should be communicated to new joiners and any visitors to the space. Others are very keen to build their new communities through social events, communication forums, and a variety of other methods of engagement, participation, and fun.

We needed policies and protocols in place for the whole building prior to the move. We must have the same protocols apply to any new individuals that come into space after the initial move. Right now, new people don't know what to expect and they haven't received any information on protocols. People are just working to their preferences and not to any group norms.

We've got a great opportunity to start community building and collaborating across the two departments now that we're housed in the same space. We need a whole battery of formal and informal methods of developing camaraderie and the sense that this is a good place to work.

Summarizing in planning for office moves the physical space and furniture requirements should, of course, be gathered but bear in mind these are based on knowns and not unknowns or possibilities. In any event requirements gathering should be balanced by preference options, and making space and furniture decisions that optimize the possibility that individual preferences can be met is in the best interests of everyone. Your views?

Howard Schultz joined Starbucks in 1982 as director of retail operations and marketing. He became CEO in 1987 and took the company from 17 stores then to 2,498 in 2000 when he handed the CEO role to Orin Smith and became chairman and chief global strategist. Smith retired in 2005 and Jim Donald became CEO. Two years later, during the depths of the recession Starbucks nearly drowned in its caramel macchiato. After decades of breakneck expansion under Mr. Schultz, tight-fisted consumers abandoned it. The company's sales and share price sank so low that insiders worried Starbucks might become a takeover target. So in 2008, by which point there were 15,001 stores worldwide, Schultz returned to the CEO role with what he called a "transformational agenda" that included wooing back customers, remodeling some stores and closing 900 others (predominantly in the United States), streamlining the supply chain and changing the executive team.

In his several decades of leading Starbucks, he provides a good example of a leader who has demonstrated both healthy and unhealthy leadership attributes.

Healthy leadership
Taking Starbucks through the "transformational agenda" had the effect, according to one commentator of leaving "Mr. Schultz a changed man. Starbucks, these people say, is no longer 'The Howard Schultz Show'. The adjective that many use to characterise his new self is 'humble' – a word that few would have applied to him before." And Schultz says of himself that "he can no longer run Starbucks through the Cult of Howard … he readily acknowledges that he badly misread the economy and underestimated the extent to which his customers would pull back during the recession".

During this traumatic period in Starbucks's history Schultz learned to listen to his executives and take their advice. In December 2008 during an executive rehearsal for a meeting with Wall Street analysts Schultz kept interrupting. "Vivek Varma, who had recently joined Starbucks as head of public affairs, told him that he should leave. No-one could remember anyone talking like that to Mr. Schultz. But he left."

A different example of the adoption of healthier leadership habits concerns the rollout out of Starbucks instant coffee Via in January 2009. Market research was showing that sceptical customers needed a lesson about instant coffee. Some executives worried that a big rollout might flop. Ms. Gass and a few others told Mr Schultz that Starbucks should delay Via and introduce it in two cities before going national. "That was hard for him," Ms. Gass says. But rather than overrule his executives, as he might have in the past, Mr. Schultz agreed. It turned out to be the right decision. After testing Via in Seattle and Chicago, Starbucks rewrote the plan for a nationwide introduction. In Schultz's words: "leadership is the courage it takes to talk about things that in the past, perhaps we wouldn't have, because I'm not right all the time."

One aspect of Schultz's leadership that has remained constant during his tenure at is being fanatical about Starbucks. He remains obsessive about the details. One customer tells the story of how he emailed Schultz to say that coffee lids in a particular outlet leaked coffee onto his shirt. Schultz's almost instant reply was that he was "On it." And his employees have respect and trust him on that score.

Unhealthy leadership
In the years 1987 to 2000 when Schultz was growing Starbucks from a small US West Coast chain to a global multi-billion dollar business (described, by Rupert Everett, a British actor, using an ill-health analogy as "a cancer") he had an in-company reputation for being an iconoclast, measuring success on his own terms.

He had many hates – research and development among them: A former executive recalls what happened to anyone with the temerity to suggest doing more research. "Everybody would cringe and say: 'You're new, aren't you?' Howard would say: 'We're not P&G.' " He's on record as saying "I despise research. I think it's a crutch." Advertising was another thing he was not interested in and he did not care much for cost control either.

Starbucks immense success hid some of the symptoms of ill-health that Schultz should have been paying attention to. With hindsight he remarked: "We got swept up …We stopped asking: How can we do better? We had a sense of entitlement."

Indicators and actions
It is dangerous to generalise from the specific, but the stories of Schultz's leadership that have been related in books and on film reveal some common indicators of healthy and unhealthy leadership.

Positive indicators
• a strong desire to learn, grow, and change
• the ability to take in and learn from the information (direct and tacit) coming from people about an organisation's leadership and then taking action to get it right
• being willing to take the hard hits and difficult conversations and see them as valuable learning
• listening
• promoting and actively 'walk the talk' on a strong set of humanistic values

Negative indicators
• Leading through command, control, and coercion.
• Being volatile, unreliable or untrustworthy
• Having scant ability to gain the trust and confidence of others
• Passing the buck, scapegoating, or blaming others rather than taking responsibility
• Encouraging "yes men", and not encouraging people to challenge the process.

Actions for healthy leadership
• Regular, even continuous reflection of performance and adherence to a principle that practice leads to improvement, though in leadership never perfection
• Even senior managers can benefit from the help of mentors and coaches (and peers or direct reports who are around the leader a lot) who will tell them what they have done well, what they haven't and how they could do better.
• Learning from other leaders through the stories about them, observing their performance and behaviour, and assessing what they do well and badly. But remembering that everyone must develop a leadership style that suits their personality.
• Becoming a perpetual "student" of leadership. There is never an "arrival point".
• Even top managers can benefit from training and development programmes.

What's your view on unhealthy leadership? How would you describe healthy leadership?

If you are interested in the topic of organization culture change join the discussion at the Organization Design Forum's Virtual Learning Series webinar I am facilitating on October 4 from 11am – 12:30 pm Eastern Time. The session is designed to be collaborative, seeking participant input and observations to build the story of culture and design. Get more details by clicking here.

The session discusses the notion that when competitive and other contextual forces require a change in business strategy, business leaders usually turn to organization design for changes in structure and work process. As the power of organizational culture in strategy achievement has become clearer, many business leaders are making "culture change" a priority of organization design, often because they see the organizational culture as limiting what they want to achieve.

In my most recent book Corporate Culture: Getting It Right, I discuss and explore issues surrounding cultural change in organizations. I am of the view that an organization both is and has a culture – two different perspectives highlighted by Lou Gerstner, from 1993 – 2002 Chairman and CEO of IBM :

"Until I came to IBM, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several important elements in any organization's makeup and success – along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the like. I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game; it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value."

This quote puts Gerstner straight into the theoretical camp of academic researchers who take a "cognitive or symbolic perspective on the study of organizations". That means they leave "behind the view that a culture is something an organization has, in favor of the view that a culture is something an organization is" and they experience organizations as "networks of subjective meanings or shared frames of reference that organization members share to varying degrees and which, to an external observer, appear to function in a rule-like or grammar-like manner". (Smircich, L. 1983. Concepts of Culture and Organizational Analysis. Administrative Science Quarterly, 28)

The main alternative theoretical camp views culture not as what an organisation "is" but something it "has". This seems to be what Gerstner felt before joining IBM (see the quote above). People with this veiw see culture as a variable that can be identified and relatively easily changed in the same way that a strategy or a marketing approach can be changed.

I take the view that if you want to change organization culture you have to recognize both the 'is' and 'has' factors and remember that

• Organization culture is not an 'entity' or a 'thing', independent from the business strategy, that can be manipulated by pulling 'levers'
• An organisation's culture, like a society's culture, changes continuously regardless of any formal or informal efforts to change it.

With this in mind, I argue that six conditions need to be present in order to change a culture.

1. Having clear and well-articulated reasons for changing the culture that are inextricably linked to the business strategy
2. Being able to act on clear and well-articulated principles for delivering the business strategy which are supported by values that are shared, and acted on by those working for the organisation – albeit in different ways in its different parts.
3. Demonstrating the capability to align such matters as language, policies, practices, processes and the physical environment with the principles for delivering the business strategy.
4. Showing overt leadership commitment through deeds as well as words to the desired/required 'way we do things here'.
5. Recognizing what degree of change is possible given the constraints of history, legacy, the business model, resources and so on.
6. Accepting that planned culture change takes years rather than months, and that culture is in any case changing all the time irrespective of any plans to change it.

Even having these six conditions in place is not a guarantee of cultural change success. There are all manner of traps and unintended consequences of missing cultural nuances as you try to redesign the organization to support the desired cultural change. Using a variety of tested tools and techniques for staying alert to these or dealing with them if and when they arise helps mitigate the risks. Learn more by attending the seminar.

Here's a quote from an email I received this week:

"We are about to undergo a space renovation to provide a more collaborative work environment and allow us to start hoteling*. We recently announced this initiative at a staff meeting and there was a lot of apprehension from the employees regarding the change. Do you know of a good change management training course that is offered? I think it would be beneficial to everyone to ease their concerns and show them than change can be a good thing."

In the email quoted you have a classic situation. Leaders believe that to develop the organization they need to provide a more collaborative work environment and start hoteling. That is the strategy piece that aims to develop the organization. The change management piece is helping workers adapt to the change in circumstances and context that this development strategy brings about.

So, organization development is not the same as managing change. To make it simple OD is strategy and the change management is operations. But with this in mind it is obvious that in order for organizations to develop/improve then aspects of their operation the process, people, space, technology, have to change. Thus organizational development and change management are intertwined.

But let's take a more detailed look at the email because it is the type of enquiry that I am getting several times a week right now. However, before that, I'll tell you three things I've learned in this sort of situation.

1. You can't help people manage their way into a new way or place of doing their work just by a training course. Helping people adapt is a multi-stream approach which should recognize individual preferences as well as collective benefit.

2. What's seen by management or the business strategists as organization development – that is improving aspects of the business operation like profitability or productivity or usefulness, may not be seen as 'improvement' by front line workers.

3. Announcing things at a staff meeting with little or no prior involvement, engagement, testing the water, or other means of 'no surprises' to employees is almost always going to result in people feeling they are losing something rather than gaining something which is not going to lead to embracing the change.

So how could you either rescue the situation or stop it from happening in the first place in both instances getting the desired result – that employees will at best welcome the new development strategy and change to make it successful, and at least not overtly or covertly sabotage it?

Let's begin with rescuing the situation: is there a way of overcoming people's apprehension and helping them feel energized by the changes proposed? Well yes. Here's what one leader said about a similar situation:

"I realized I'd made a mistake in just announcing something. Essentially, I'd imagined that in making people aware of what we were trying to do then they would do it. (The left hand side of the graphic below: awareness and action). I'd forgotten that the leadership team had been working on the development project for a good while and were familiar with what the strategy was and what we wanted to achieve. During this period they'd gradually recognized the changes that would be required and were ready to make them, they'd already moved through the four stages that makes change successful: awareness, understanding, engagement, action).

I decided to do four things to help engage the employees:

a) Set up what I called a 'Show and Say' period of 2 weeks. We planned out a whole series of events, activities, webinars, and forums which were targeted at raising awareness – basically making the business case about what we were trying to do and why we were trying to do it. During this period we invited comment, responses, and questions from employees about the organization development strategy. These were all debated in on-line forums, at management meetings, and in my blog to staff.

b) Help employees really feel what it would be like working in a hoteling environment. We set up one of the office floors as hotel space and invited work-groups to come and try it out for a day. We more or less insisted that everyone experimented with this or at least talked to someone who had. We got a lot of good feedback with this and realized that we needed to do things like provide useful tip sheets, where to go for help, and 'how to' information, like "How to change the height of your desk" etc. When I think about it, it's the sort of information you find in a standard hotel room – that explains how to order room service, amenities in the neighborhood, and so on.

c) Highlight the gains they would get from this – which were linked to the business processes, and technology we were introducing at the same time to support the hoteling principles. We wanted to make sure that people, process, space, and technology were all aligned in service of the organization development strategy. We made this a two way process – it wasn't just management saying "Look what you gain from this", it was employees putting forward points on what they felt the gains would, and could, be. I was surprised and pleased to find that employees put forward some gains that we hadn't thought of like they would be learning to use some new technologies that would be useful in streamlining their work – putting all documents on-line was one of these.

d) Recognize and reward people who volunteered to start hoteling. We had to be careful with this one so we had a phased process. Each week for eight weeks we told a story both of an individual employee's experience of hoteling and a group's. They weren't all glowing praise either, we learned to improve the process substantially in that time period."

This leader realizing that if he forced the hoteling issue he could end up with a demotivated workforce and drops in productivity. So he decided to take a step back and invest the time in doing things differently. It paid off for him, and it would pay off in most OD/change situations.

You'll find that any organizational development strategy must be partnered with a change management approach that will gain employees support. But that too is not enough. This piece has focused mainly on the communication and message based approaches of change management. Hand in hand with this goes:

• Using the forces of social influence to generate enthusiasm for the change. This is described at a popular level in Malcolm Gladwell's book 'The Tipping Point',

• Ensuring that the business processes, technology, and office space are also changed/aligned appropriately.

• Being willing to change course as you see resistances or people experimenting in ways that others could benefit from.

To summarize – any organization development strategy requires change management. The change management work is not just about the people but also about the business processes, the space, and the technologies. The aim of all people related change management is to gain high awareness of the business goal and high support for it.