Lesson 7 Blog Reflection

One fairly recent organizational change I experienced with my company occurred a few years ago when we launched a new, refreshed branding campaign.  This was something that seemed to be driven primarily by our Marketing Team, and I was working in our Training and Development group at the time.  I recall that our department head was extremely frustrated with the communication process that was put together to launch this new campaign to all associates.  His frustration trickled throughout our team, and I myself subscribed to that as well.  My frustration was  based on the lack of involvement that our team, and HR as a whole had in the early planning stages of this change effort.  We were brought in more as an after-thought.  Because of this, there wasn’t enough thought put into how this change would impact associates, and therefore how it should best be communicated.  After the news of the branding initiative was released throughout the company, I recall that many department heads were confused about the intent of the change- specifically, what did this mean for them and their associates?  Of course, these questions and concerns came directly to our HR Team.  Unfortunately, because we weren’t involved in some of the early discussions where the strategy was laid out, we weren’t in the best place to respond to these concerns.  Inevitably, we continued to feed these concerns to the main project team, and they were forced to re-group and identify a game plan to respond.  This time, members of our HR Team, including my boss- who was the leader of our Training and Development group- was involved in these conversations.  Much of the “clean – up” effort fell on the shoulders of HR, and that left our team, including me, with feelings of bitterness.  All-in-all, it wasn’t a good feeling.  And as I learn more about OD&C, it’s clear that this was an initiative that could have benefited from an OD consultant.