“ABSOLUTE POWER may corrupt, but shared leadership creates infinite value.”

This was what keynote speaker Christopher Worley, Ph.D shared with the participants of the 5th Asian Organization Development Summit.

Asian Organization Development Network (AODN) Co-chair Michelle Tapia said that through the summit, they wanted to help facilitate organizational change while simultaneously guaranteeing care for people and the earth.

Ateneo Center for Organization Research and Development (CORD) Executive Director Regina Hechanova-Alampay said, “The Asian OD Summit aims to bring together practitioners and [people from the academe] in Asia who practice and build knowledge in organization development.”

Over 300 delegates from countries like Thailand, the United States, South Africa, Myanmar, Malaysia and Taiwan attended the summit. Majority of the participants were from the Philippines.

Hosted by the Ateneo CORD and held from October 27 to 29, this year’s event was themed “Transforming Asian Organizations towards Global Competitiveness and Sustainability.”

Future of Asia

In his presentation, Dato’ Dr. Michael Yeoh of the Asian Strategy and Leadership Institute said that the rise of Asia is certain and unstoppable.

He added, however, that Asia needs to put a premium on human capital development in order to see more growth in the future.

Yeoh said that key drivers of change in Asia include globalization, regionalization, liberalization and digitalization.

Globalization is about the fluidity of capital and investments from one country to another while regionalization is the continual strengthening of ties between member-countries of a particular region. An example of this is Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Liberalization meanwhile talks about bilateral or multilateral free trade agreements between or among countries, and digitalization has information technology as its vantage point.

Bilateral free trade involves economic trade between two countries, while multilateral free trade involves three or more countries who wish to engage in a trade with each other.

Yeoh also proposed that the continuing changes in Asia’s growth must be tended by strategic and effective leadership. He added that business strategies must be reassessed, organizations made more flexible, and social media utilized in communication strategies.

Drawing the line

During the forum, a number of participants, many of whom are organization development (OD) practitioners, raised the issue that OD is subsumed in human resources (HR).

Hechanova-Alampay said, “HR tends to focus on recruitment, selection, performance management, compensation and benefits and employee relations.”

On the other hand, she said that “OD tends to focus on the diagnosis and interventions of groups and the organization as a whole to enhance both employee well-being and organization effectiveness.”

Affinity for sustainability

According to Hechanova-Alampay, the purpose of OD is to make the actions of a group of people mroe effective.

She said that OD ensures that an organization’s systems and structures are aligned with its directions. The OD also ensures that the changes that are implemented are managed well.

Meanwhile, Worley said that in order to create a sustainable management organization, one must first create values that are geared toward the future and ensure that the identity of the organization is sustainable.

Worley also suggested that in the organization of work, information should be transparent and that an environment conducive to work is kept.

He also commented on how the organization’s manager should treat of talent. In one of his slides in his presentation, he wrote that “good processes help talented people get more done” and that “bad processes try to prevent recoverable mistakes.”

Worley also said that leadership should never fall into the hands of only one person but should be spread out.