Presented by:

1. Presented by: Jennifer TuckerConsulting DirectorOKA (Otto Kroeger Associates)Phone: 703-591-6284E-Mail: jtucker@typetalk.com Understanding and Diagnosing Teams and Organizations

2. Webcast Objectives By the end of this webcast you will be able to: • Use OKA’s Wrapped Cable Model to better understand the teams and organizations you work with. • Ask the right questions to effectively and efficiently explore each element of the model. • Identify possible intervention strategies based on your findings.

3. General Consulting Model Entry Assessment Design Action Evaluation Overview: Position for, win, and initiate the project. Possible Activities: • Scoping Meeting • Project Proposal • Contract Award • Kick-off Meeting Possible Deliverables: • White Paper • Proposal • Kickoff Briefing • Project Plan Overview: Gather and analyze data to identify key needs, develop theories about causes, and formulate recommendations. Possible Activities: • Review materials • Interviews • Focus Groups • Surveys • Outside research Possible Deliverables: • Assessment Report • Gap Analysis • Recommendations Report Overview: Translate recommendations into an action plan and design. Possible Activities: • Develop alternative approaches and vet with client • Create draft designs and materials (e.g., curriculum development) Possible Deliverables: • Development/Action Plan • Implementation Plan • Design Summaries Overview: Take action, by implementing recommendations and designs. Possible Activities: • Strategic planning • Team/Leader Workshops • Skills Training • Coaching Possible Deliverables: • Workshop agendas and materials • Instrument/tool feedback reports • Status Reports Overview: Evaluate effectiveness of actions, determine next steps, and/or close project. Possible Activities: • Re-administer surveys • Conduct follow-up interviews • Project debriefing session Possible Deliverables: • Summary Briefing • Project Summary Report • Recommendations paper scoping activities for next phase

4. Thinking About Questions • One general way to think about questions is through the SPIN model, which stands for: • Situation – What are the facts of the situation at hand? • Problem – What are the difficulties, or dissatisfactions being experienced? • Implication/Impact – What are the consequences or implications of the problem? • Need (explicit/implicit) /Payoff – What is the value or usefulness of a solution? - Neil Rackman (1996) The SPIN Selling Fieldbook, McGraw Hill

5. The Wrapped Cable Model™ • Comprehensive and scaleable tool for interpreting the challenges facing organizations, projects, and teams. • Structured and systematic way to think about teams and organizations. • Illustrates integration and differentiation of organization or team elements. • Allows for assessment of whole systems,projects, teams and/or isolated issues. • Seven core elements are contained within a defining shell. • Shell represents culture – which both emerges from and acts upon other elements.

6. Cable Model Elements • Mission: Unifying statement defining the organization’s work and driving purpose. • Leadership: Responsible for bringing the mission to fruition, setting tone and direction. • Structure: How formal power is distributed and labor is divided. • Processes: How work is organized to accomplish the mission. • People: How relationships are managed, and how people are addressed. • Money: The financial factors and constraints impacting the system. • Environment: Needs, expectations, and constraints set by external environment. • Culture: Commonly held rules, expectations and consequences that identify who we are.

7. Mission • Strategically placed in center of model to reflect mission’s centrality to every organization and program. • Unifying statement that defines and focuses the group’s work and driving purpose. • Too often, the mission is not adequately articulated, or is not related to the goals toward which people are actually working.

8. Questions Related to Mission • What is the mission of this unit, team, or program? Who told you that? • How does the work you do right now support the mission? • How are incentives aligned with the mission? • How does your mission differ and/or is the same as other parts of the organization? • What does success look like? How do you know you are successful? • What goals or milestones measure performance against the mission?

9. Leadership • Defined as the intentional use of power with individuals or groups toward some desired end. • Anyone who exercises his or her power to effect change is a leader. • Ultimately responsible for bringing the mission to fruition. • Critical to organizational and team effectiveness.

10. Questions Related to Leadership • To whom do you look for leadership? • Who has the power to get things done? • How long do leaders stay here? What happens when they leave, or join? • What do you look for in a leader in this organization? What are the most important qualities for a leader here? • If you were called in for a surprise meeting with the boss, what would your first reaction be? • How do people become leaders here? How are they selected? • How diverse are the leaders in this organization? Does that diversity reflect the organization overall? • Do leaders “walk the talk” when it comes to leadership philosophy and policies?

11. Structure • Illustrates how formal power is distributed, and labor divided. • Closely linked with leadership - examining structure reveals alignment or gaps between authority, responsibility, and accountability. • Power networks are not always reflected in the published structure – impacting both cohesiveness and effectiveness.

12. Questions Related to Structure • Where is your organization chart? How does it relate to the real connections between people? • What other parts of the organization do you depend on? What are the formal communication paths between you and them? What are the actual paths, if different? • How often does you organization or group reorganize? What was the last reorganization, and why was it done? What worked? What didn’t? • Who do you have on the speed dial of your phone? Why?

13. Process • How work, people and communication are managed and acted on to accomplish mission. • Includes the rules and standard operating procedures in place – and whether they are used and effective. • Includes degree of standardization and consistency, and the communication tools used to transfer information.

14. Questions Related to Process • How does what you do contribute to the operations of the organization? • What happens to your work once you are done with it? • What processes and procedures help you do your job? Are they working? • What performance measures are used to assess progress or success? • How do new or changed decisions, initiatives, or processes get communicated? How do you learn about what’s really going on? • What could make you more efficient?

15. People • Includes stakeholder management, interpersonal relationships and human resources. • Considers how people are selected, developed and leveraged for organizational effectiveness. • Includes group’s reward system, which depends on people feeling both accountable and empowered to act, to decide, to suggest.

16. Questions Related to People • When do you encounter conflict? How is it handled when you do? • What kinds of risks are you allowed to take in your work? • How is success rewarded? What happens when something goes wrong? • How is morale? If asked six months ago, would the answer be different? • Who is your key customer? Who is the true beneficiary? • How are customer relationships created, maintained and ended?

17. Money • Represents the financial picture, which both facilitates and constrains mission accomplishment. • Can be a source of stress and conflict, as financial needs often demand attention before other issues. • Money issues can signal deeper concerns related to mission clarity, strategic planning, operational and investment decisions, and internal and external communications.

18. Questions Related to Money • How are incentives aligned with the organizations or project’s mission? • How are investment decisions made? By whom? How are they evaluated for return on investment or more intangible benefits (e.g., good will)? • How is the organization financially structured (public/private; government/commercial; long/short term debt, profit, cash flow, revenue)? • Is the organization dealing with growth or survival? What is the impact of this? • How long does it take to get a product or service to market, and how is this funded?

19. Environment • Collective set of needs, expectations, and constraints determined by external factors. • Includes larger social context, organizational setting, regulatory environment, political scrutiny, supply chain dynamics, competition, market variability, and technological change.

20. Questions Related to Environment • What external factors are most important to your success? • Who are your leading competitors? What do they do better and worse than you? • How do you learn about what your competitors, suppliers, or partners are doing? What are their greatest concerns, and how might that impact you? • How do economic downturns impact your success? How do you plan for this? • What is the greatest external threat facing your group? • What is the greatest external opportunity that you could take advantage of? • Are people who work together collocated? How close are you to your customers?

21. Culture • Emerges from all the other Cable Model elements. • Results in a set of commonly held rules, values, expectations and consequences shaping and reflecting the spirit and nature of the system. • Culture is both the sum of the elements that comprise it, and a dynamic all its own—a synergy greater than the sum of its parts.

22. Questions Related to Culture • What metaphor, image, or picture would you use to describe your team, program, or organization? • What stories do people tell to new employees? To each other? • What kind of rituals or celebrations do you have here? • If I walked down a hallway, how often would I hear people laughing? Would there be people in the halls? What would people be generally doing? • If you were King or Queen for the day, what one thing would you change around here?

23. Other General Questions… • Tell me a little about your group and what’s going on. What led to this need? Why now? • What is your role with respect to this particular group? • Who are your customers? What are they saying? What would they say? • What are the implications of __ on your customers or your services? • How are you handling ___? • What problems or downsides are you seeing because of that? • What other benefits could that achieve for you? • What factors play into that? What impact does that have? • What leads you to conclusion? What is telling you that? • What else is going on in the organization that might be impacting you? • Do others on the team want this? What are their expectations? • What’s the sense of urgency among others in attacking this problem? • Who needs to approve whatever we move ahead with? What are their goals/interests? • Over or during what timeframe are you hoping to complete this effort? • What are your goals for this effort? What does success look like? • Imagine a point after our work together is complete – what has it achieved that would tell you the investment was a positive one?

24. Addressing Needs • Change Management • Risk Communication • Sales and marketing strategy • Employee on-boarding • Recruitment/retention strategy • Mentoring • Conflict management/resolution • Customer service surveys • Training • Negotiations/mediation • Strategic Planning • Leadership Coaching • Teambuilding • Skills Training • Workforce/Succession Planning • Communication Management • Process Reengineering • Organization/Culture Surveys • Group Facilitation • Meeting Management • Competitive Analysis

25. Case Studies • While interpersonally connected to each other, a quality assurance team didn’t agree on who its primary customers were. This ambiguity was reflected in its structure, which lacked a liaison to bring external information back to the group. In addition, processes existed for internal work flow, but not for communicating that work externally. Leaders were primarily internally focused, and the group also displayed an insular culture, isolating the group from the rest of the organization. • A software help desk was surprised by an increased call volume from unhappy customers after a recent upgrade. Help desk personnel were not adequately trained to address the complaints, and there were few communication channels for getting concerns back to the developers. This was reflected in a “guru on the hill,” mentality, where technical personnel positioned themselves as the “experts with the answers,” rather than service providers to their customers. • The leadership team of an engineering division was uniformly focused on the mission of delivering a product by a fixed date, to meet the needs of its customers and its revenue goals. In doing this, however, the quality process was shortchanged to meet the schedule, leading to suspected defects. The quality team was not organizationally independent from the product leaders, which meant that people concerned about the defects did not feel safe communicating them to their managers.

26. Questions/Comments • Case Studies? • Questions? • Comments?

27. About OKA Founded in 1977, OKA is a training and consulting small business specializing in leadership and team development. Expert in a variety of psychological instruments and group processes, OKA offers high-impact leadership and team development programs and a variety of instrument qualification workshops. We are changing the way the world lives and works - one person at a time. www.typetalk.com (703) 591-6284