Dear OLers,
One week ago, I had a learning experience with respect to the
essentialities. For the professional OD-trainers among you, it may be your
daily bread, but for me, it was a new experience.
In a Japanese-German Joint Venture with a production facility in Germany
and Japanese majority (turnover about 100 Mio DM p.a.) an 11 days training
for all 25 managers (7 of them Japanese) was given to overcome existing
conflicts and to align for a common future. The managers were divided in 3
groups, only the final 2 days were held with the whole group.
I was asked to participate as a co-trainer in a workshop with the japanese
managers and during the final 2 days.
The training was very successful with respect to connect the german and
japanese managers: First, cultural differences could be seen as a sign of
diversity to learn from and not as causes for opposed parties any more.
Second, a breakthrough arrived, when it became obvious, that the purpose
and goal of the company is shared by all managers up to 90% of all single
items that have been collected in the process before. Thus the process of
creating measures to head for the future was very intense and successful.
Then we came to the final feedback. The participants expressed their
enthusiasm with the results, yet they were unsure about the further
process. They anticipated, that daily work could make the training
forgotten in a few weeks.
Listening to the feedback, I briefly reviewed the seven essentialities in
my mind and it became obvious to me where we were in the process of
helping an emergence to birth: Connection has taken place thus the chance
for fruitful cooperation is given. Also diversity has been accepted, so
quality-variety has a chance as well.
But two other essentialities are still weak and require special care:
Wholeness requires to strengthen the value chain, i.e. to leave habit of
functional thinking and to view internal supplier-customer relationships,
thus to associate the company into one whole. The other essentiality is
sureness: Although the group worked on a common vision and mission for a
few hours, this is nothing but a start in creating a corporate identity in
the sense of alignment of competence and vision.
There is something new emerging in this company, but it requires care for
the further development. I was only a guest in this case, but I had the
chance to express what I have written here to the coach and the CEOs. To
the managers, I requested to take the generated enthusiam and contact as a
reference level that must not erode. If they feel the danger of erosion,
then they must take this as a sign to sit together again and to work on
the problems behind.
Liebe Gruesse,
Winfried Dressler
--"Winfried Dressler" <winfried.dressler@voith.de>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>