Since 2009 I have worked in defense acquisition — budget and cost analysis on major programs, first in Washington, DC, and from Utah since then, supporting program offices in Utah, Massachusetts and Colorado. It is the kind of institution where change is genuinely difficult, where the structure is older than anyone in it, and where the consequences of getting a decision wrong are not a slide in a quarterly review.
That is an unusual vantage point, and worth being precise about what it is. I was not running these organizations. I was the person costing the decisions — which means I watched, in numbers, what happened after each one.
That vantage point raised a question I could not answer from inside it: why do some leaders move an organization that is designed not to move, and others, apparently just as capable, do not?
So I went and studied it. My doctorate at George Washington University is in Executive Leadership and Human and Organizational Learning, and my dissertation examined the relationship between servant leadership and psychological capital from the follower's perspective — which is to say, it looked at what makes people follow, measured from the side of the people doing the following rather than the side of the person being described as a leader.
Organization Science Management is the practice that came out of both halves. It combines executive coaching with organizational diagnostics drawn from peer-reviewed research rather than invented models, and it is deliberately not a franchise model with a proprietary four-quadrant grid.
A presentation to the OtterBox leadership team, on site, in June 2017 — on servant leadership and psychological capital, the two constructs the doctoral research went on to measure against each other. Named with permission.
Measure first. If a claim about your organization cannot be checked, I would rather not make it. Every engagement starts with a baseline and ends with the same instruments run again.
Say the unwelcome thing early. If the assessment says the structural conditions are wrong and coaching will not fix them, you will hear that in week one, in writing, rather than at the end of a six-month engagement.
Give the method away. The three diagnostics are published in enough detail that an internal team can run them without me. The organizations that do so and get an uncomfortable answer tend to be the ones worth working with.
Small practice, deliberately. You work with me, not with an associate who was assigned to the account.
The fastest way to find out whether this is useful to you is a conversation about what you are actually trying to change.