LO Colleagues -
Jacqueline Coppola proposes: (LO19601, replying to LO19596)
>Employees are no longer considered "workers" or "hands". We now refer to
>them as "partners" or "associates". This terminology is intended to bring
>knowledge workers into the organization as intrinsic members....-snip--
Consider also using the term "members," as in "members of the company."
The ownership analog is to the members of performing arts groups, and each
person's essential contribution to the performance that draws an audience.
If the performance is of high quality and pleasing to the ticket-buyers
(i.e. the customers) the word will get out and more customers will come.
Members also improve their knowledge, skills, and competencies in course
of performing -- thereby increasing their value, to themselves and to the
company.
Jane Galloway Seiling's book, "The memberbership organization: Achieving
top performance through the new workplace community," (Davies-Black, 1997
- the SHRM "Book of the Year" for 1998) has more to say about this.
PRM Insttitute is working to test the hypothesis that there are other
useful strategies for turning companies into a workplace communities.
They include:
1) Balanced scorecard
2) Compression planning (storyboard-based brainstorming and selection of
ideas, using pre-planned headings for categories, subjects, and topics).
3) Ideas program ("Every idea is an incitement" - as written on the seal of
the new Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University. "To get
good ideas get many ideas.")
4) Learning / development plans ("Learning is each person's responsibility
and opportunity; helping each person learn is the responsibility of every
other member of the company.")
5) Process improvement ("Every process can be improved. The people doing
the work, company members, know how!")
6) Open book management
7) Servant leadship (Robert Greenleaf's creation, closely linked to Peter
Block's "stewardship" and "accountability").
8) Visual workplace
9) Workout (a program started at G.E. by CEO Jack Welch).
PRM Institute is preparing a "best practices" project that will examine
these resources (are there others that we should add?), and seek to
integrate them so a company could use two or more in combination when that
fitted their vision, mission, goals, culture, and climate.
We invite comment and expressions of interest in participation.
Dick Webster
Richard S. Webster, Ph.D. - President
Personal Resources Management Institute
709 Wesley Court - Worthington OH 43085-3558
e-mail <webster.1@osu.edu>, fax 614-433-71-88, tel 614-433-7144
PRMI is a 501(c)3 non-profit research, development, and consulting company
founded in 1978. The Institute's R&D projects relate primarily to the
paradigm shift from "training, instruction, and teaching" to "learning"--a
key for creating outstanding organizations with improved leadership,
ideas, processes, quality, members' and teams' performance, productivity,
and bottom-line results.
***
"Things are getting better and better and worse and worse faster and
faster" says Tom Atlee. Challenges: (1) Finding the "betters" and building
on them, in time. (2) Learning -- each person's responsibility and
opportunity.
--"Richard S. Webster" <webster.1@osu.edu>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>