Upcoming Events

Prior to adopting Lean principles and practices, the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) lacked robust systems for building effective processes, identifying waste, and documenting best practices.  Along with low employee engagement scores and vestiges  of top-down decision-making from previous leadership administrations, AHIMA needed improvement.

AHIMA adapted major Lean principles and  began seeing immediate results in the delivery of greater stakeholder value. Next AHIMA tackled its organizational culture using Lean principles addressing the “employee lifecycle process” from hire to departure.  This included building the necessary support mechanisms resulting in over two dozen follow-up projects.

Learn from AHIMA Sr. Director of Executive Operations, Mollie Pillman, and AHIMA Director of Profession Governance, Sheryl Reyes, about how implementing Lean practices and principles enabled this non-profit to get on the road to becoming an employer of choice.

How’s business? Join us as we experience a large-group intervention that will answer that question for those who participate. ODN/C members often discuss marketing informally ,offline, or  during the networking time at our program meetings  but rarely, if ever, as a formal part of the program. At this meeting we will!

Whether we like it or not, we all have some relationship to and responsibility for marketing our profession and our professional services as internal or external practitioners. Some of us are even better at selling than delivering; others aim for a stable market of one whom we never need to actively persuade; most of us fall somewhere in between.

Together we compete, collaborate, and cooperate; we seek referrals and referral sources; we sub-contract and outsource, all the time wondering if we are missing some crucial “something” that others possess.Sometimes we may worry that a few may be giving our beloved profession a bad name and hurting the rest of us.

This is a unique opportunity to observe and participate as our system and community reveals itself to itself as we collaborate to make the market “pie” bigger, along with our influence.

Work …changes. But sometimes the process goes more smoothly than others. Good work redesign does not happen by accident. There are best practices and established methods that help ensure success. Learn the fundamentals that underlie successful redesign efforts with Maggie Shreve, ODN/C President and experienced work redesigner.

What’s cookin’? What skills do you hunger for?  Building on June’s marketing OD meeting and July’s fundamentals meeting and expanding on last year’s popular Assessment Buffet, let’s pool our resources for the sake of our practice and profession for the betterment of ourselves, our clients, and the world! Check out the sources below to whet your appetite. THIS PROGRAM IS $10 FOR ANYONE & EVERYONE! And that includes wine!

http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/course/6/6.055/readings/ericsson-charness-am-psychologist.pdf

http://www.mockingbirdeducation.net/uploads/5/4/0/7/5407628/ericsson_1993.pdf

http://www.odnetwork.org/?page=ODCompetencies&hhSearchTerms=competencies

Emotional intelligence remains a hot topic for organizational leaders and those who advise them. Modeling, and, more importantly, experiencing and developing it for ourselves is a core competency for OD consultants. EI is not an abstraction, but a lived experience that grounds us and ensures we are a renewable resource for those we coach and consult to. Let’s not be the shoemaker’s children …come and walk the talk!

Robert Gramillano has earned a Doctorate in Organizational Leadership from Argosy University (also known as The Illinois School of Professional Psychology) and is an MBA graduate from DePaul University. He is a Certified, Licensed NLP (Neuro-Linguistic-Programming) Master Practitioner, a Certified Empowerment Coach, a Certified Emotional Intelligence Coach of iPEC (Institute for Professional Exellence in Coaching), and recently obtained a second certification in Emotional Intelligence from the Jim Liautaud Graduate School of Business at the University of Illinois Chicago. Always learning and growing, Robert is currently studying for a Certificate in “Leadership in Sustainability Management” at the Graham School of The University of Chicago. He is a Life, Career and Executive Coach with a personal coaching practice at http://www.chicago-coach.com/,  teaches and coaches in the fields of Leadership, Organizational, Career and Business Development from the perspective of Personal Mastery and Emotional Intelligence.

We won–again! Y/our ODN/C has been recognized as best Regional Network. In an effort to be gracious and humble as well as proud, we want to remind ourselves that ODN/C only works and will only ever work as well as you/us, because you/we are it! There’s no “staff” and leadership is a porous and flexible enterprise here by design. So let’s explore what that means and how we can always be the best us we can be–for our practice and and our profession, our clients and our colleagues.

Half off whatever you normally pay…and there will be cake!

You heard us: $5 student members

$7.50 student non-members

$10 members

$12.50 Alliance members

$15 non-members/non-students

The words “team-building” may, (or may not) make us say bah-hum-bug, but the importance of social systems to effective workplaces will never go away. We asked for and got a menu of new activities to try that have worked for you recently as participant or facilitator, cutting edge team techniques, oldies but goodies, and stuff of special interest to jaded practitioners, aging hippies, newbies, continuous learners (or all of the above)!

Join Julie Benesh, Laura Braeunig, MaCarolyn Brown, Maurie Coleman, John Cooper, Steve Garrett, Kortney Peagram, and James Sibley, doing peer-coaching, getting acquainted, retention-building “stay” interviews, problem-solving, communications skills, team leader diagnosis and more.

This holiday- appropriate theme has something for everyone: you can be a resource, be a participant, or hang back and watch.

This program will use an in-the-moment experience involving role plays and team work, bringing out our global, cross-cultural competencies.  We will conclude with a conversation about how to leverage these competencies in our work.

Polarity Thinking and the PACT™

Does your organization experience problems that just won’t go away?

Should we pay attention to our mission—or to our profits?  Should we focus on long term strategy—or short term results?   Should we honor tradition—or embrace innovation?  So many organizations see these questions as problems to solve.  So they make choices, they vacillate back and forth; they waste resources and exhaust their people.

Polarity Thinking tells us that values come in pairs and are usually not problems to solve but polarities to manage.  As breathing in leads to breathing out and back again, these poles define a natural energy flow that, when managed well, creates the future the organization wants; and, when managed poorly, creates the future the organization fears the most.

Discovered by Barry Johnson, Polarity Thinking addresses the “wicked problems” that won’t go away.  It can be applied as a graphic tool on a napkin, a strategic planning methodology, an approach to real time change, and a brand new quantitative survey tool called the PACT™ (Polarity Approach for Continuity and Change) for real-time insights into engagement, alignment, and more.

You will have the chance to physically explore the quadrants of a Polarity Map, hear stories about applications, discover and discuss polarities that are relevant to your own work, and experience the PACT™.  By the end of the evening, you’ll see pairs and polarities you never noticed before and think twice before saying “either-or.”

Neesa Sweet is the former Director of Learning and Development for the Sun-Times and has consulted for dozens of companies and not-for-profits in OD, coaching, communications and change.  She is a certified PACT Consultant, a certified Neuroleadership Coach and the principal consultant at her company, the Braided River Group.