Who needs organizational diagnostics

Organizational Learning & Development is all about continuous improvement of people and processes. It’s a vital organizational function, cutting across all that constitutes performance and identity of an organization. Internal leaders are key to setting up successful L&D practices that really create value to the organization and its stakeholders.

But how do we set up successful L&D practices in organizations?

1. Buying what’s offered

One of the established ways of decision making in organizational L&D is buying what’s offered. In some sense, it sounds meaningful: you cannot buy (at least easily) what’s not offered.

Buying what’s offered means that buying decisions are frequently made under the influence of sellers and selling. We hear there’s a brand new training on some nice topic - let’s buy it, our employees may like it and our employer branding may benefit too. That’s a common decision making pattern and that’s fine.

2. Shifting organizational decision making process in L&D

Organizational diagnostics is a key term to actually shift the decision making processes in organizational L&D. It is a very simple thing: understand what is going on inside an organization or its part by means of data collection.

This simple thing that is called organizational diagnostics fundamentally changes decision making in organizational L&D.

It’s core implication is that we start collecting data first, and buy trainings, coaching or other L&D programs later. Organizational diagnostics is all about data driven L&D decision making. It also means that buying decisions are less under the influence of selling and more internally focused and shaped.

3. Organizational diagnostics is data driven L&D

Organizational diagnostics is basically applied organizational research. Data may be quantitative or qualitative, coming from across the organizations, or within teams, or even collected at individual level. Data collection procedures may include questionnaires, focus groups, interviews, documentation analysis or else. The key principle is: find out what’s going on first, make a buying decisions later. If you need to buy at all.

4. How does organizational diagnostics work in practice

As organizational leaders we often have intuitions or opinions about what are priorities when it comes to L&D decisions. It may be that some teams are underperforming, or that a new coming group of team leads needs to catch up to the company standards, or that certain divisions are not cooperating successfully. And our intuitions are very frequently quite ok. Serving as quick proxies or mental shortcuts for conclusions drive our subsequent actions. But we can also “muscle up” our intuitions with organizational diagnostics.

Step 1. Determine a developmental opportunity starting from an intuition, complaint, enthusiasm or any other organizational sign indicating a development opportunity.

Step 2. Prioritize development opportunities in terms of their impact across the system. Follow through and evaluate the prioritize different development opportunities. This usually means setting a goal to explore of organizational diagnostics.

Step 3. Collect and analyze data around development priorities. This is what constitutes organizational diagnostics in its core.

Step 4. Ground decision making in data. Once you have an indepth understanding of a certain development area, start thinking about how to close the gap between the current way and future way of operating.

Step 5. Evaluate. Check how your solution made things better.

5. What are the topics we cover with organizational diagnostics

Our expertise in academic organizational psychology enables us to set up almost any kind of research design that helps your organization understand better what’s going on and act on it based on data.

We can catalogize the topics we generally cover according to different organizational levels.

INDIVIDUAL LEVEL DIAGNOSTICS	TEAM LEVEL DIAGNOSTICS	ORGANIZATIONAL LEVEL DIAGNOSTICS
Individual 360 feedback Personality assessments Burnout pulse assessments Leadership development needs assessment	Team 360 feedback High performing teams questionnaire Stakeholder interviews about team functioning Team health assessment Team reflexivity scale Hybrid team work assessment	Employee engagement Organizational values research Cross-team collaboration Organizational culture assessment Coaching culture assessment Psychological safety in organizations Organizational stress assessment Evaluation of performance

6. What are your next steps if you want to know more about organizational diagnostics

We collaborate with organizational leaders to set up a finely tuned diagnostics process. Just reach to us via office@koucingcentar.com and let’s chat about how your organization can benefit from organizational diagnostics.