ORID 1 Learning Organizations

My name is Diane Fornieri, I serve as Chief of Staff, Board Secretary and Chief Communications Officer at a college on Long Island.  I have worked here for 21 years and have enjoyed every learning moment.  Since I have a very demanding job and am currently pursuing my master's degree in Organizational Leadership, I purposely carve out as much time as possible to spend with my family, including my grandson.  I enjoy reading, learning, decorating, the beach, walking, biking, and spending as much time outdoors as possible.  I also enjoy people; I find them fascinating.

I have learned many things since beginning this program in organizational leadership.  The reason I applied to this program was not only to enhance my leadership skills but also to take what I have learned throughout my professional career and apply real-world experiences to my coursework.  To date I am very satisfied with the ability to apply both sides of my learning experiences toward my degree.

Since I work in an academic institution, I feel I have an advantage since we typically operate in a learning environment.  However, this does not mean that we do everything right.  We have much to learn and much to implement. As a result of a college-wide listening tour in 2014, I am currently undergoing a change in how we communicate at the college.  This is good news but I am consistently running into various setbacks.  We have to retrain everyone with the onus that everyone is on board to a new and improved form of communicating.  Since not everyone needed to implement this new way of communicating does not directly report to me, I am challenged with figuring out how to manage this.  I have met with dozens of people on campus - all of whom can be considered stakeholders and whom I would call "champions," we need to begin meeting to put the plan(s) in place that I am still drafting.  I need them to help me build upon the goals and objectives with strategies to make things happen.  I have a limited staff to help me do this and am I need of a senior director to execute the plan(s).  All in good time, some would say, but the time lost by researching and interviewing people, is not totally lost as transfer of information is taking place but is also making the implementation lag a bit.  We need this process to be reliable and I constantly find myself learning new and more things that can build upon what we have already started. At some point, however, I need to get these plans and strategies approved so we can begin our work.

Organizational effectiveness is at the core of this communication initiative and we must be "adaptive, problem-solving, organic structures (Garvin 2000)" in order to be flexible enough to move through the ever changing internal and external forces that come at us every day.  Our president is a master at being flexible.  I have seen him move from Plan A to Plan Z within a matter of weeks on some very key strategic initiatives for the college and his ability to change with the tide is one of the best learning opportunities I have been exposed to while working with him all of these years.  It has led to the financial health and the sense of pride in our community that has come to be known as the culture of the college.

Questions we asked ourselves when we considered innovation and change as evidenced by the previously mentioned college-wide listening tour are outlined, below.  This list includes objectives, reflections, interpretations, and decisions that took place during and after the process:

O R I D

Objective questions:

What do we want to accomplish in making the college the best it can be?  We gathered all of its employees to ask this question in addition to the reflective questions, below.  Through this listening tour process, we were able to define what we want to accomplish and outlined these objectives in our 2020 strategic plan.

Reflective questions:

What is it that works currently?
Again, through the listening tour process, we discovered many systems and processes that work and some that do not.  Examples of this include our transparency of thoughts and ideas and our learning culture.

What would you keep?  We will keep those things that work, i.e., our mission outlines clearly who we are as an institution.

What is it we need to change?  One thing we discovered through this process was our lack of consistent communication.  A communications plan was developed as a result of this.

Interpretive questions:

What did we learn from the listening tour process?  We learned many things from this process, including how important it is to be heard.  Many individuals to this day thank us for allowing them to be a part of the process of improving our wonderful college.

What do we want to consider implementing?  Throughout this process, many suggestions were made on processes that needed to be developed to ensure the smooth operations of our institution.  Since that time, many processes have been put in place, including the formation of a process improvement culture and department that researches and manages process improvements.

Decision questions:

How could we implement proposed changes?  This is the tricky part.  Implementation of these changes has been spotty and stretched out over time due to competing priorities and other factors.

When do we implement various phases of implementation plans created?  Timelines continue to be drawn with resources attached to them.  This is still a work in progress.  A strategic plan, I have learned is a living document that continues to evolve.  It is not a one and done type of document.  This is why, I believe, it is so hard to implement the objectives outlined in the plan.

Who implements the plans?  The people who implement the plans are the various stakeholder(s) who own the plans.  This may be a group at times.

This process has been an eye-opener to everyone at the college but consumed a great amount of time and manpower to manage.  However, it was money well spent.  Everyone on campus felt listened to and empowered to contribute their opinions on what they think we should change.  In addition, some employees are being invited to join in on the planning and implementation phases of this project, which is also a wonderful learning experience for me as a leader and everyone else involved.  Here is where we transfer knowledge to each other and work together as members of a very large college-wide team; not just experts within our own departments.

References
https://hbr.org/1993/07/building-a-learning-organization