About Stephen Treacy and this blog

To my clients, colleagues, students and friends:

My teaching and consulting career spans more than twenty five years. In that time I have served hundreds of clients and taught more than six hundred graduate students in the Management and Organization Behavior Graduate Program at Benedictine University.

Many times recently I feel a great desire to creatively share information experiences and techniques I use in my every day work. I want to  help my clients, students, colleagues and friends know the profession of organization development better, and to have NEW solutions to situations they are attempting to manage. So this is what this blog will show:

• Some of the interesting activities of my scheduled client visits, my own development activities, and learnings.
• Theory bases or practical interventions I use or develop..
• Occasional insights from my personal life – races, aviation stuff etc.

My vision is that will be resources for all of us. I want and welcome your feedback and comments. They will help me greatly.

Best regards,

Steve

New ideas for leadership meetings

A simple way to identify what is important for your meeting and be a basis for meeting design. I hope you find this helpful. Click on the document below.

Leadership team meeting planner

4 counter-intuitive leadership principles gain power by empowering others Leadershipfreak Dan Rockwell

Skillful leaders are rare because the principles of leadership are frequently counter-intuitive.

4 counter-intuitive leadership principles:

1.Talk to them about them.
2.Gain power by empowering.
3.Join their team before they join your team.
4.Talk less, listen more, and others will listen to you.

A letter to a client about team development.

 Here are exerpts from a letter I wrote today to a client regarding team development. After I wrote it I thought this is worth keeping and sharing. So here we go….

Thoughts keep coming to my mind about recommendations for team development activities. So let me share a few.

First recommendation: determine the purpose and process – why are we doing this, why are we doing it now and what’s the best process to use.

1. Option one- An exercise just to have the team know a little bit more about each other. This works for either a team that is established, functioning well, roles are clear and their work processes are well defined. This is where something like the MBTI or LIFO works well.
2. Option two – a development process that includes some kind of simple team self diagnosis either in the meeting itself or beforehand. If it is beforehand the diagnosis can be either a simple team functioning questionnaire such as I sent you earlier or interviews conducted by the facilitator. In either case the results are shared with the leader beforehand and with the team in the meeting. In this case the MBTI or LIFO are used as a part of the workshop but are not the primary focus. Often this kind of intervention leads to further discussions in the team about team functioning. Examples include communication or meeting process, new or better definition of role responsibilities etc.
3. Option three – a hybrid of the two which can take many forms.
4. Option four – similar to option one – a training intervention where some expert in some methodology (e.g. communication skills, meeting design etc) delivers that skill only.

Second recommendation: involve the leader in determining of purpose, choosing the facilitator, the methodology and designing the workshop. Too often team development doesn’t  go as well as it could because the leader hasn’t had inputs to these decisions. Sometimes the choices, made by the HR director or someone else on the team, are the right choices but not owned by the leader. The process needs to be seen as owned and directed by him even though much of the setup can be done by you and the facilitator.  Regarding choosing the facilitator, there are two criteria – competence and chemistry. You can search and find many facilitators that are competent but you and he need to evaluate the chemistry decision. The only way I know to do that is to have you, the facilitator and leader meet.

A new way to look at facilitation

This is a way I look at choices f or facilitating groups. It is based on assessing the outcome I want from the facilitation effort then picking the right option. Options for facilitation of a group

PPT presentation from “Tools for Leadership Development” presentation

 View document: iasbo joint conference presentation 09 for distribution PDF