Monthly Archives: November 2017

What challenges have you experienced developing the feedback report in three different forms?  What skills do you need to further develop to expedite the process?  Share lessons learned from the activity (250–400 words).

One of the biggest challenges that I experienced developing the feedback report is identifying which format to use for the different groups.  I am most familiar with using power point for leadership presentations, but I felt that the information that would be presented in a feedback report could be more formal if it was in a word doc.  Another challenge was in determining what information I could include in a blog post.  I have somewhat limited experience using blog posts (other than the regular assignments through PSU), so I needed to get some ideas from the web and from my peers.

I think that providing feedback in an appealing format is something that could really “make or break” a feedback session.  Because of this, I think that increasing communication and technology skills would be a big value-add.  I also think that its important to acknowledge and understand that everyone has different styles and preferences for receiving information.  So, there would be a risk in presenting too much detail to a key stakeholder who is only interested in minimal, more high-level, information.  Conversely, it would be a miss if you provided general, high-level feedback to someone who is interested in the details behind the work.  For this reason, I think it would be good for the OD Consultant to be aware of the different preferences and prepare the feedback in a way that is easily customizable to the audience members.  This could include leaving out the details in the presentation, but having the details as separate documents in the event that they are requested.

Describe challenges you encountered while collecting and analyzing interview data and share lessons learned from the activity.

I really enjoyed this assignment.  First, I really enjoy conducting interviews, and I was able to solicit some great information from the associates that I got a chance to interview from the organization.  The assignment called for the facilitation of 5 mini interviews.  Identifying the subjects for these interviews was fairly easy because I knew what types of perspectives I wanted to gain in order to dive deeper into the area of improvement that I had uncovered in previous stages of the OD process.

One challenge that I experienced related to the fact that one of the five interviews was cancelled in the last minute.  I had emailed all of the subjects earlier in the week and asked for their participation and when an appropriate time would be to conduct the interview.  One of the participants said that Friday afternoon was a good time, and so I scheduled an appointment with her.  Prior to the interview, she called me to tell me that she would not be able to meet with me.  Because it was late in the day on Friday, we were not able to reschedule to another time that I could interview her before the assignment deadline of Sunday evening.

I do feel that I was able to solicit a sufficient amount of feedback that led me to identify some needs with the 4 associates that I was able to interview.  However, the learning that I have with this is that, as an OD consultant, I think it is always a good idea to prepare MORE than expected in order to gain sufficient feedback.  Had I scheduled interviews with several more, there wouldn’t have been any negative consequences as a result.