ODS-OL ASSESSMENT TOOL

PERFECTING
CORPORATE GOVERNANCE

Corporate governance now has new accountability standards. ODS-OL (Organizational Diagnostic Survey OnLine) is the perfect tool for Directors and executives who need to meet the new standards.

"ODS-OL is not just a governance tool for public corporations, it can be an important strategy for family business succession management," according to top family business expert Don Schwerzler. "It is very important for family businesses, especially those that are transitioning from one generation to the next, to make sure the organization stays properly aligned as the new generation of leadership takes the helm."

Schwerzler has been studying and advising family businesses for more than 40 years and he is the founder of the Family Business Institute.

"Generally, when boards have not functioned well, openness has not existed. One of the signs of a poorly functioning board is a lack of openness between the company management and the board. If you look at companies that have stumbled and the boards that have struggled in dealing with their companies’ poor performance, you can see that in virtually all cases openness did not exist. For one reason or another the board was kept in the dark about the real issues in the company.”


Lewis Platt, former Chairman, CEO and President of H-P


ODS-OL is an on-line assessment tool that helps to streamline board member communication while improving interaction between directors and management executives.

Spurred on by the failure of companies like Enron, WorldCom and Arthur Andersen, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley act to underscore a new beginning for defining the work of a corporate board of directors. Boards of directors are no longer going to be a group of friends or "good ole boys and gals” giving lip service to the performance of the company. The term Board of Directors is no longer another way of saying "rubber stamp".

In successful business organizations, leadership and corporate governance can be defined in various ways:

  • A committed, driven workforce
  • Superior productivity
  • Long lasting competitive advantage
  • Quick response to new opportunities and threats
  • Quick response to new opportunities and threats
  • Minimal wasted effort
  • Maximum adaptability
  • Personal commitment to organizational success
  • A passion for improving the organization

Leadership And Corporate Governance

Great leaders set employees up for success. Great leaders align employee self interest with organizational achievement. Great leaders create win-win-win employment: employees enjoy their jobs, perform up to their potential, and believe they share equitably in the organization’s success.

Poor leaders don't know what is really going on in their company… how it really runs. The employees who perform the work know, but few leaders can read the minds of their employees.

Successful leaders listen to their employees, but employees are rarely capable of verbalizing what’s wrong with their jobs.

ODS-OL is the perfect tool for family business owners, boards of directors, advisory boards and C-level executives interested in knowing how best to organize their organization.

What Is ODS-OL?

Professor Ken Mackenzie is one of the world's leading experts on leadership and organizational theory. He developed the Holonomic Theory of Leadership. The Organizational Diagnostic Survey-OnLine is based on The holonomic assessment of the leadership of an organization. This organizational diagnostic tool assesses an organization's leadership performance system and identifies the leadership practices that offer the greatest potential for improving productivity, adaptability, and motivation.

ODS-OL is a proprietary, web-based assessment tool that translates employee feedback to identify the company's greatest opportunities for improvement. It combines employee responses to standard employee satisfaction questions and employee responses to the organization's performance on 53 specific managerial processes.

ODS-OL Background

This techically advanced on-line assessment tool translates Professor Ken Mackenzie's Holonomic Theory of Leadership into a tool that uses employee feedback to measure leadership's performance along the Holonomic Processes (HPs) and Desired Organizational Characteristics (DOCs), and more importantly, identify which leadership processes (LPs) offer the greatest leverage for performance improvement.

ODS-OL evaluates thousands of possible relationships between the managerial processes until it identifies those that closely correlate to the employees' feedback. Typically, the final correlation values exceed 80%. That correlation performance is unheard of in the industry where 10% correlation is considered to be outstanding. ODS-OL's methodology has advanced far beyond any other leadership or organizational assessment tool in the market.

Why Survey Employees?

  • To learn what is really going on in your company
  • To identify management's opportunities for improvement
  • To discover what messages are getting lost down the line
  • To evaluate effectiveness of management initiatives
  • To provide "voice" opportunities for your employees
  • To augment the limitations of your financial reporting systems

Where else can you get reliable feedback about your organization? You and your employees make up this organization! Only you and they really know how it operates, what drives it, and what its real potential is.

Ask your employees, "What advice can you give me to improve this company?" and you will receive every idea in the book including the all time favorites: better teamwork, better communication, better tools, and better pay. Does being told you should improve everything give you any valuable guidance? Of course not.

Employees can sense what is right and wrong with your company. The reality is that most employees are incapable of expressing their intuition clearly and concisely. And each employee has a limited view of the organization and must interpret what he or she sees exclusively by his or her personal experience. You need the observations of all employees to have any reasonable hope of identifying the consensus themes that permeate your organization. Together, your employees know more about your company, its strengths, weaknesses, and improvement opportunities than does any single manager or executive. It makes sense to find out what they are thinking. It is best to do this with a systematic and comprehensive opinion gathering process that ensures the confidentiality of their opinions.

The main reason for conducting a survey of the opinions of the employees is that its good business. After all, when you think about it, your organization's success is driven by the talents, commitment, and creativity of its employees. It just makes good sense! Today's limited resources require informed choices.

Client Testimonials

"Rarely have the acquisition of new information and new ideas been so happily mixed with congenial personal relationship. ... I do understand and am awed by the intricate and interdependent inquiries, results, analyses, and recommendations that comprise the entire process... and I believe that the process reaches the 'right' conclusions and recommendations, the intuitive and contextually and temporally based evaluations I have made align nicely with the ODS process."

CEO, Research Institute


"I can wholeheartedly recommend ODS-OL to any organization in need of perceptive analysis and guidance.

To this point we have experienced no backlash whatsoever from anyone who feels threatened, disappointed, or that we wasted our money. No one was fired and we even have some valuable new team members. While change is an integral part of any healthy organization, I am confident ODS-OL has helped us establish a solid foundation for change for years to come."

Senior Pastor, Large Church Organization


"Our overall results were phenomenal... Employee satisfaction improved based on several different surveys. One of our normally uncommitted Employees said that he thought the concepts introduced by ODS-OL were just another "change of the day", but now he is convinced, and committed to the direction we're taking the organization."

Quality Assurance Director, International Communication Company


"The ODS-OL Organizational Diagnostic Survey is a scorecard for Balanced scorecards."

Vice President HR, Internationally Known Testing Organization


"Our employees credit ODS-OL with eliminating the communication problem we had around here."

Director, R&D Subsidiary, Major Drug Manufacturer


"In our organization, research and survey design are a significant part of our business, and it was important for me to work with superior tools that had a sound analytic, conceptual, and research basis. ODS-OL was appropriate for our demanding environment."

Vice President HR, Internationally Known Testing Organization


"ODS-OL helped us find the organizational problems that were holding us back. The problems we thought were 'real' were not the problems we needed to work on."

Corporate Board Member


"We needed to make some decisions about outscoring services and we wanted an impartial third-party to help us. We wanted someone who was not solution-driven, but who could collect, analyze, and interpret the work processes performed. ODS-OL provided us with valuable benchmark data.

Director Employee Benefits, Nonprofit Education Research & Measurement Company


"The end result of the ODS-OL process was an entirely new management structure, a new set of corporate objectives and strategies, and clear, concise evaluations and career path planning. Our employees are more excited about our business than ever before. And down the line, where our stockholders look, we complete the biggest profit year in our history."

Vice President, Major Supermarket Chain


"I believe that in addition to an improved bottom line, the other key benefits of the ODS-OL process to my company were:
Both Managers and employees understood, as a result of the ODS-OL process, why, if we were to succeed, as we all wanted it to, our company's organizational structure had to change. Employees have ownership in the new structure because they were an integral part of the company's redesign. Managers have a much better understanding of their objectives and confidence in achieving them."

President & CEO, Telecommunications Firm


Click here to contact Don Schwerzler
About Your On-Line Organizational Assessment





Your Business Will Succeed...

If...

You have The Roadmap for Success

That's What

The Practitioner's Guide for Organizing an Organization
Is All About

  • PGOO shows how to identify the most pressing problems to solve
  • PGOO introduces the ODS-OL (Organizational Diagnostic Survey –Online) - an electronic assessment tool that is highly effective, easy to use, systematic and data-based
  • PGOO explains how to produce a better-organized organization
https://www.family-business-experts.com/PGOO.html




Family Business Experts Understands
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