🌿🧭🌳 OD12: Resources for the Crisis, Stabilization and Recovery stages ∙ Question for Reflection
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Foreword
Organizations around us are in different stages of dealing with the recent major unplanned changes: crisis, stabilization or recovery.
For this week, we’ve selected one resource for each of these stages and a question that invites you to reflect about collaboration in the current context of your organization.
Stay safe and keep your spirits up,
Raluca & Bülent
For the crisis stage
We found a comprehensive Business Continuity toolkit from the OnStrategy team, that includes:
Workshop tools - for leading your team through the continuity planning process, including workshop slides, Continuity Plan Canvas with triggers and actions to protect your business and crowdsourced continuity strategies
Planning tools - including a Cash Runway excel template and a Continuity Plan powerpoint template
Action tools - including an Action Plan excel template and an OKR Cycle planning guide
We’ve included below a snapshot from the Continuity Plan template.
For the stabilization stage
When going through the stabilization stage, realignment in the organization is extremely important, both with the adjusted direction of the company and also between people in the organization. Shared understanding of the current context and of the approach towards the recovery stage is usually an effect of successful realignment.
One tool that we’ve started using in our interventions for client organizations in the stabilization stage and beyond is created by the Mirror Mirror team.
What’s most relevant is the set of insights it brings to a management team about their team effectiveness around four areas:
Psychological safety
Confidence in the team’s capabilities
Interdependence
Team cohesion
Here are some snapshots from their explanatory materials that particularly resonated with us:
Main source of misalignment
Behavioral and cognitive alignments as enablers for engagement and effectiveness
For the recovery stage
This stage is about starting to perform in the new setup.
If you’re leading an organization or strategic initiatives, there’s a key skill that enables performance for this specific recovery stage: leading virtual teams.
We’ve created an advanced Virtual Collaboration Program for management teams that want to become better at achieving their purpose in the new remote setup.
We do this by upgrading collaboration and accelerating management team performance through multiple interactive remote sessions. If you are part of a management team and this resonates with your current context, let's talk.
A resource that covers the basics of leading virtual teams in a concise & practical way is part of the HBR 20-Minute Manager Series. We’re recommending the following chapters:
Get to Work - especially the “Define common expectations”, “Align priorities” and the “Build rapport and trust” sections
Communicate Effectively - especially the “Pick the right channel” and the “Avoid communication fatigue” sections
Cope with Common Problems - especially the “Maintain accountability from afar” and the “Manage conflict on a virtual team” sections
Snapshot from the “Pick the right channel” section in the Communicate Effectively chapter:
Question for Reflection
The OrgDev newsletter is curated by Raluca and Bülent Duagi, the team behind Sense & Change. We work as Organizational Development Advisors, offering elegant guidance for implementing strategic initiatives in client organizations.
If you think these ideas and tools are useful, you can support the newsletter by sharing it with your friends and colleagues.
You can also view all the previous editions of the newsletter here.