My reflection blog this week is to reflect on the two opposing ideas by brown that determines that Organizational Development (OD) is viewed by some as a rapidly changing field keeping up with the times and by some as a fad that will become irrelevant. Since I have only take one of the course, MSLD 631 Leading high performance teams, I will reflect on my personal experiences and learning from this course.

My experiences with OD

Organization development in my current workplace seems to be always changing based on the structure or alignment of our company objectives and needs.  Just a decade ago our team structure was designed in functional teams, where each team would have their own cost and schedule integrator, with specialized engineering team members who were all managed by a single manager, to a specific program director.  This design, from my experience, allowed individuals to focus specific skills to a specific program, which allowed myself to become an expert in the field I was working within.  However, each employee did belong to a program core functional manager that oversaw your journey as an employee. For example, this core functional manager would oversee all skillsets that belonged to the entire company. The advantage of this function is if there was a shortfall of experience or talent on another program, the core functional manager could recommend or suggest pulling a person from another program that may be over strengthen with staff. 

The other advantage that I was able to personally experience is when

Applied for a position that was two levels higher than my current one.  The Human Resources (HR) department stated that employees cannot jump levels of promotions, and I did not meet the criteria for the position. My core functional manager went to bat for me with the HR group. The situation was I hired in as an administrative assistant due to only having 40 hours of college credit and seven years of military experience, which was crazy as the company cuts enlisted military experience in half, so I felt like I was cheated of my experience from the beginning.  So I did my time and within two years had three college degrees, and according to the corporate matrix I was actually eligible for a manager job, just based on experience and education.  My core manager took this information to battle with the HR team, and I was given the interview and later the position. The value of this story is we have a leadership that their sole role was to take care of the development of their employees. A decade ago, I felt that the company design had elements in place to help employees.

Keeping up with Joneses

 Keeping up with the Joneses is considered an idiom referring to being alike our neighbor for usually some type of material good, however it is unique saying for companies striving to be competitive and keeping that competitive advantage with their competition.  Our company is no different than any other large aerospace company trying to compete with reducing overall costs, building in first time quality, and delivering products when they said they were going to deliver them. 

The company organization development design has changed over the last decade for the sole purpose of reducing overall costs.  Most core functional management has be dissolved and made to go back into working organizations.  Key skills sets such as mine, scheduling, have been removed from the functional team managers and put with a program management manager. The advantage of this redesign is I can be pulled to help any program that needs scheduling assistance. The disadvantage is I am no longer focused on single product, and being pulled multiple directions takes away from the customer service that we provide in our roles.  The experience of this design is that is does provide an umbrella of processes that are centralized for all programs. The one company site we often refer to as the mother ship, or central management is a major disadvantage when issues arise. We are not the biggest platform for aeronautics and our team is often left with the idea that we are not as important as the fighter programs.

            When it comes to keeping up with the jones our company does a pretty great job and leading the market in aeronautics, however our programs suffer do to the redesign of leadership, and unfortunately our little mobility aircraft cannot keep up with the fighter programs within the company, or it appears that way.

Fad or Routine

            In working with the company for twelve years, I have seen organization development changes happen about every two years.  There has been redesign of program leadership, merging of programs, and shift in dynamic protocol of how we do things. If you talk to someone who has been with the company more than 20 years, they will grumble with comments about how they have done this before and it never works and we go right back to where we started. I have also experienced things of where we mess up a design or process that cause major delays and costs, we realign management. I always think this is odd is when we mess up, we realign leadership and then we explain to our customer that we have rectified the problem and a new leader will get this fixed.  The company also likes to bring in external experience to help with fixing the company culture. An example is when we hire ex military officers, whom some we have worked with as a customer, to help realign our programs. This is a fad and a routine, and often it takes this leader about a good year to understand the company culture and really they do not fix things quickly.  I often think the strategy is if we hired the customer that was unhappy about our service and product, maybe they have that skill to lead the workplace more effectively. My experience is after they have worked with the company dynamics of processes, people, and cultured environment, they tend to have a completely different view on the company.

            I think my company is very routine, however they have definitely honed in on fad marketing for leading such as the NextGen is now the preface for all training, presentations and focus for company initiatives. I would agree that NextGen is the focus for all technology, leadership, training, culture and focus for improvement, as we should always be looking forward in what we do.

Conclusion

            When reviewing my company, I would say that we are very routine and fad centric with the idea of keeping up with the times, or joneses. We strive to be the leader in the aerospace market. We are not just an aeronautics manufacturing company as we are diving into areas of cyber security, information technology, and reaching out to touch other military markets such as building the next Humvee. Recently the company is sought out to tap into the civilian market, which is new and will be a challenge to manage since it will be different than the standard military products that we are used to building.