Are You a Dog or a Cat Person?

Some people are very much one or the other. I have never seen the need to chose a side, I have a dog, and I have had cats, I like them both and can see what people like and dislike in both.

I have recently been lucky enough to develop and deliver some Organisational Development Workshops for a client, and it has caused me to internally debate what OD is. I was challenged about how purist the world of OD should be about its craft and I have recently seen a few things on LinkedIn about setting up an OD profession and a professional body similar to CIPD. And lots of discussion occurred about whether HR teams could or should do OD, or whether this should be specialist service.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, the more psychologically based human behaviour side of OD, can require very different skills, to that of a transactional HR professional. On the other hand, HR professionals often display the skills that were once the preserve of OD on a daily basis, they just don’t label it as that.

I think there is more and more of a cross-over, and I think there should be. If your bag is purely transactional HR and you love payroll, or the intricacies of employment law, or recruitment timelines, then maybe you will never want to develop and deliver a whole organisational transformation, working on relationships and developing senior team dynamics. I think that the glue that binds the two parts of each professional together are HR Business Partners.

As an HR Director, I have introduced HRBPs to several organisations and while it is true they still have to do some of the transactional delivery to earn their “license to trade” with customers, if given the right support, development and vision they can be a great interface between pure HR and pure OD. They can understand the issues and contract locally with line managers and either develop and deliver, or commission colleagues back at HQ, giving a great background set of data to work with.

So, after talking it through with myself whilst writing this, I have come down on the side of it is both/and. HR and OD are great bedfellows and while there are differences at the fringes, and some of us will want to always stay at the fringes, we have more in common and should be working together to get the best out of our people for the good of our organisations – a great definition of OD, and a great definition of HR. And I still like cats and dogs!