Value of Organisation Development from the CEO’s Perspective

Organisation Development (OD) has had a bad wrap, often accused of being a ‘fluffy’ discipline with some practitioners demonstrating an unhealthy bias towards a people agenda disconnected from business goals.

However given the scale and complexity of the challenges facing today’s organisations, the contribution that organisation development can make to the success of organisations is vital. There is a need to design and develop organisations that are more adaptable, innovative, collaborative, inspiring and ultimately accountable. As such the natural place for the leadership of system-wide organisational change is the CEO.

CEOs need high quality Organisation Development support to help them lead essential business transformation. 
Key points in this article include:

• The four most significant changes to the CEO role in the last five years.
• The Leadership challenges that must be addressed are not new. We have been wrestling with them for a while. Today’s ‘stretch’ comes from the amplification of these existing challenges.
• The one factor that differentiates the most successful CEOs.
• Organisations that strike a balance between shorter term performance goals and longer term organisational resilience perform two and three times as well as those which only focus on health or performance respectively.
• Creating and leading organisations that are adaptable, innovative, collaborative, inspiring and accountable used to be the concern of the few. It is now the concern of the many.