Spray and pray communication strategy

lectures

This week we'll discuss some techniques used by high-performance organizations. Employees in high-performance organizations use combinations of process interventions and OD interventions. Process interventions focus on understanding processes and how people relate to one another. OD interventions involve using specific interventions to solve problems. Both process and OD interventions are required to implement successful change management initiatives.

What are Process Interventions?

In an organization people communicate with one another either as a part of formal groups or through informal interactions. Often the dynamics of these interactions can create problems or prevent the group from resolving differences.

Process interventions are designed to understand various processes involved in formal group and informal interactions. When you are involved in process interventions your role shifts to that of a coach. For example, a coach works with a football team to help identify and assign various roles to players such as who should be the quarterback or wide receiver. While doing so the coach focuses on the abilities and skills of players in the team. The coach diligently observes players during the game.

To improve performance the coach works in tandem with players to build an effective team. The key responsibility of the coach is to enable players to make crucial decisions while on the field.

In an organization supervisors may observe the strengths and weaknesses of various team members. Supervisors also observe how team members relate to each other. Based on these observations the supervisors assign appropriate tasks to team members. The supervisors also help team members relate better to each other and contribute to improving team performance.

Process Interventions (2 of 2)

Process Intervention Techniques

Process interventions involve several steps—the primary and the most crucial is observing and listening. A process intervention technique that can be often used by you is to participate in team meetings with the purpose of obtaining process data.

You can track the following activities:

Who initiates discussions?

Who does the most listening?

Does anybody interrupt the conversation? If yes, who?

Who holds the leadership in the team? Is it the team leader or another person informally regarded as the leader by the group?

Who makes decisions? How are they made?

How do various individuals behave?

Who talks to whom?

You can gather such data by observing several group interactions and conversing with other employees. This data provides you an excellent insight into how the group interacts. You and the team members can analyze if current processes enable the team to be productive. The team can work towards the following ways to improve productivity:

How can quiet listeners contribute their ideas?

How can some employees stop dominating the conversation?

How can decision-making be more participatory?

While handling process interventions the idea is not to solve identified problems. Instead the entire focus is on improving processes.

Need for Process Interventions

Why should you be concerned with interpersonal processes? The reason is that ignoring processes can often result in the failure of change initiatives. If the team leader is dominating and overbearing it may result in quashing ideas contributed by team members. Talkative team members often ignore suggestions made by quieter peers. Decision-making that is not participatory may result in resistance from employees.

Process interventions are very important, but they cannot be isolated from OD interventions to solve organizational problems. A successful employee is one who simultaneously examines and conducts these interventions.