Lloyd C. Williams - Böcker

This book explains in theoretical and practical terms the creation of effective change within organizations. The book states that dysfunction is a current fact of life, creating chronic problems for people and organizational systems. The author describes the basis for dysfunction and develops an effective belief system that can guide personal and organizational functioning. Specifically, the author defines the parameters of creating effective balance and, through three primary cases (city government, utility corporations and gay/lesbian organizations), shows how dysfunction can guide personal and organizational action.The author displays an abiding belief that change should occur only when people and systems begin to experience dysfunction. He describes a process for change and effectively walks the manager, professional, consultant, student, or faculty person through creating balance, change, and congruence for the long term.

Not only in corporations but also within governments and not-for-profit institutions, organizational violence is on the rise. Drawing on his extensive experience as a consultant and human resource executive, Dr. Williams looks at the nature of violence; identifies its tenets, vessels, structures, and processes; and then offers ways to create what he calls an aura of calm, a state within organizations that is essential to ending violence. The book concludes with a detailed questionnaire, which the author has devised and tested and which manakement will find valuable in its effort to assess the extent of violence within their own organizations and then end it.

With compliance now its main goal, human resource management has become a hodgepodge of unconnected functions and tasks. Williams argues persuasively that lost in the day-to-day effort is another, equally important goal: employee and organizational development. One result is that human resource management has lost credibility as a profession and in its own way, much like many of the organizations it serves, has become dysfuntional. To correct this imbalance—compliance over development—and in fact to salvage the HR profession itself Williams challenges HR people to abandon their search for power and money in organizational life, and instead to redirect their efforts to helping, truly helping, employees realize their potential in organizational settings. With surveys, checklists, advice, and revealing anecdotes drawn from his own extensive academic and consulting experiences, Williams provides a provocative, controversial analysis of the new crisis in human resource management, and a workable set of strategies to help HR professionals emerge from it.Williams begins by calling the human resource function a bogged-down process. He identifies the problems this causes, and articulates a need for a new set of synergistic processes that will pull HR people out of the past and into the future he envisions for them. In Part II he digs into specific strategies to accomplish the HR makeover. He identifies a new role for HR, traces a process of change, and illustrates the effects of technological advances on the entire HR restrategizing effort. Part III tells HR professionals how to do it. In what he calls a series of workshop chapters, Williams helps HR people reassess their position in their own organizations, determine whether they are on the wrong paths and if so how to get off them, and then provides ways to reinstate the development function to its rightful place as equal in importance to compliance.

Dr. Williams contends that over the last 20 years a change has occurred in organizations that has created a syndrome of dysfunctions that are neither good for businesses nor for the people who work in them. Williams sees businesses as living entities, and argues that how they act and react will have an impact on their employees, and often a devastating impact. In much the same way as businesses make decisions, people make choices, and seldom are these decisions and choices congruent. Unless disparate self-interests and goals can be reconciled—unless a partnership can be restored between people and their organizations—not only will employees be damaged, but the success of their organization, upon which they depend for their livelihoods, will be jeopardized. How this dangerous situation came about, what it means, and how it can be remedied is the subjet of Dr. Williams' book. Research-based and always in touch with the realities of commerce, Dr. Williams will make business people aware that organizations and their people must become reunited, and then show them how it can be done.Dr. Williams makes clear he is not simply speculating or theorizing. His goal is to make management aware of the dysfunctions that are damaging their organizations, and how these are reflected in the behaviors of their employees. When he calls for a focus on humanity, spirit, and context, Dr. Williams is actually offering a workable, real-world strategy to breathe new life into organizations of all kinds—a strategy he calls The Trinity Process. Its purpose: to help management restore the essential partnership between organizational entities and the people who make them succeed or fail. In Part One he shows what it means to be part of any organization and, with anecdotes and cases from his own research, helps readers grasp the dynamics of their own organizations. In Part Two he proposes new or reframed paradigms that provide an underpinning for the reestablishment of equality between organizations and their employees. Then, in Part Three he presents The Trinity Process itself. The result is a remarkably lucid, readable, engrossing exploration of organizational life today, important reading for decision makers in all types of organizations, public as well as private, and for academics concerned with how organizations behave.