How to Improve Yourself as an Organizational Development Professional

Laura Geary, VP of Organizational Development Manager at Tompkins Financial

The impact of change on any organization occurs through the lens of its most valuable asset—its people. 

Take people out of the equation, and change is irrelevant. How people interact with, interpret, and respond to change is where it can become an organization's powerful ally or devastating foe.

Change Management is part of the discipline of Organizational Development. The magic everyone pursues is how to change your powerful ally. I recently worked as part of a team leveraging change management as the key ingredient to a massive conversion that affected all business units in our company. I want to share my experience and some key pieces I leveraged as an Organizational Development professional.

1. Meet people where they are at.  

You may be familiar with the Change Curve Model developed by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. The premise is that we all go through various emotions as we encounter change. Those emotions are paired with behaviors. Suppose an organization struggles with change, and most of the team is frustrated. In that case, those behaviors look very different from most team members in experimentation. 

Many fail because of the desire to push or pull team members through the curve model. “If I can just convince Joe this is the right thing…” or “If I threaten a reprimand…” are methods WE use to push or pull OTHERS. 

The shift is to meet people where they are and understand why they are there. In our conversion, the team worked hard to check in regularly with team members through open sessions, one-on-one conversations, and established communication tools. Our goal is to seek out people we haven’t heard from. The more we understood why people felt a certain way, the better we could provide them with the information they needed to move forward in the curve model.

"The more we understood why people felt a certain way, the better we could provide them with the information they needed to move forward in the curve model."

2. Find a process and stick to it. 

There are many change management processes to choose from. The good ones have similar strategies. One of the fundamental pieces of a process that worked in our conversion was celebrating small wins. We established routine communication timing around wins occurring at different points. Organizations that take the approach of “no news is good news” are missing the boat completely. People want to hear how things are going. In the best of times, they hear the good news that helps them move through the change curve model. Sometimes, the news may not be about small wins, but it does allow an organization to be transparent and give people time to consider the information without the urgency of changing right behind it.  

3. Tie the change to your future. 

You have heard the adage “change for change’s sake.” People mustn’t feel that is the case in your organization. The change was tied to our strategic plan with a long-term vision of scalability for this conversion. Leaders throughout the company were educated on the strategic plan long before the change was announced. Our senior leadership ensured the message was that our conversion was tied directly to our strategic vision of how the company would grow.  

As an organizational development professional, consider what role you could play in helping your company purposely manage change. Just as any major project needs a project manager, any major change needs a change manager.