“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.” ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
Contents
Welcome
Ways to use your Report
2. Organization Development
OD Refresh
OD Fundamentals
OD Career Landscape
3. Meaningful Work
The Thing about Meaningful Work
Sources & Outcomes
A M.O.S.T. Meaningful Assessment
4. Your OD Career Calling
Your Preferences
Market Demand
Do you have a Twin Calling?
5. Oh, the Difference you'll Make!
The Unique Impact of your Calling
Inspiring Examples
6. Careers you'll Love
OD Careers for you
Real Examples
7. How to Equip Yourself
Fill your Toolbelt
Stretch Yourself
8. How to Develop your Calling
Global Career Development
Personal Career Development
9. Thank you!
Getting Started
Welcome!
Get ready to answer your career calling, ignite your passion, boost your career capabilities, and Master Organizational & Societal Transformation (M.O.S.T.)! Work your way through each section in your report to learn about transformative careers you'll love. Then, plug directly into resources that energize and propel your career calling, including carefully curated books, articles, podcasts, and a community of positive change agents just like you!
Before you get started, share your results online! You'll trigger social media algorithms that attract connections with like-minded leaders, employers, and communities who wish to influence positive, healthy, and sustainable change. Attracting the right people to your network will supercharge your career trajectory.
Graduate students watch this first
Ways to use your Report
You're about to learn a lot about your unique fit as an aspiring practitioner in the field of Organization Development (OD). And the good news is that you're not starting from scratch! If you're reading this report that means you already have some or many of the key strengths and interests associated with a meaningful OD career. And whether you are a graduate student or are simply investigating a career transition, each section in this report is designed to bring you a very deep level of OD career clarity.
There are thousands of resources orbiting the field of OD, but we're gong to help you cut through the clutter and get right to the knowledge and resources that will feel personally tailored to your tastes. We'll hook into your interests in ways that inform, inspire, and equip you for a personally meaningful OD career journey! You'll also have an opportunity to fill your very own professional bookshelf, podcast playlist, and toolbelt! Here are just a few ways you can utilize your report...
Aspiring Practitioners, explore M.O.S.T. Meaningful Career coaching with Dr. Brendel, who can help you gain even deeper critical insights around the relationship between this report and your career narrative and portfolio. Contact Dr. Brendel for a 15m discussion about coaching and learn how he can help you develop a career vision and mission, practical strategy, and objectives for career development.
OD Departments and Firms, consider utilizing this assessment with your team. Contact Dr. Brendel for more on how this can be used to develop an OD Department design that not only caters to your organization's strategy but also orchestrates your OD team in ways that provide mentoring relationships based on individual strengths, interests, and career aspirations.
Professors & Instructors in a OD or Change Leadership degree or certificate program, consider having Dr. Brendel come to class and guide a discussion around ways this report can give your students tailored direction regarding paper topics, practicum opportunities, course electives, stretch assignments, and research areas.
Organization Development
What is Organization Development?
OD is known for its breathtaking diversification of professional titles, competency combinations, change impact areas, and approaches. But how do you know an OD career when you see it?
If you are looking for a career capable of transforming organizations and society, look no further than Organization Development (OD)! A quick Google search for "Organization Development Jobs" yields an impressive number of results, but not all of these job descriptions are created equally or meet the definition of a real OD career. So how can you tell whether a career shares the core qualities, aims, essence, and impact of real OD practice?
We've got you covered! Let's begin with a universal definition of Organization Development that can be applied to your job search, as well as efforts to launch your own consulting business. Analysis originally published in the OD Review, which now includes 98 scholarly definitions of OD, 11 competency models, and 750 jobs leads us the following definition:
People & Culture Consultant
Business Transformation Specialist
Manager of Culture Change & Teaming
Organizational Strategy & Culture Consultant
Director of DE&I and Organizational Development
People & Organizational Performance Manager
Global Organizational Culture Business Partner
Organizational & Leadership Development Mgr.
Learning & Organizational Development
Global Talent & Organization Development Mgr.
VP of DE&I and Organizational Effectiveness
Organizational & People Development Specialist
Director of Culture & Organizational Effectiveness
Organizational Design & Transformation Manager
Organizational Transformation Manager
Organizational Design & Effectiveness Manager
Future of Work Strategy Consultant
Excellence, Strategy, & Innovation Consultant
Search Results
About 1,090,000,000 results
Organization Development is a dynamic field of practice that uses caring and collaborative change frameworks and interventions to generate sustainable and flexible improvements to well-being, performance, and prosperity in human systems.
...a dynamic field of practice
OD is known for its breathtaking diversification of professional titles, competency combinations, change impact areas, and approaches. But how do you know an OD career when you see it? And for that matter, how did OD become so dynamic in the first place? OD is informed by numerous theories including Western humanism and postmodern philosophy, as well as an array of social sciences — most notably, the applied behavioral sciences. More recently, OD has become informed by Eastern philosophies and traditions including the expansion of consciousness through mindfulness and contemplative practices. The M.O.S.T. assessment demonstrates that there are 16 predominant types of OD positions, and most professionals gravitate toward one of these types or preferences. Just like wildflowers, there is always room for variation that branches from these 16 types, however, understanding your dominant type provides a clear frame of reference for developing your unique career development strategy!
...caring and collaborative
An OD practitioner’s first obligation includes care and consideration for the well-being of individuals, teams, organizations, surrounding ecosystems, and themselves. OD practitioners always strive to include diverse perspectives through a wide variety of collaborative models, participatory discovery approaches, consensus-driven decision-making processes, and collective action frameworks. In other words, change is not directed or carried out by the practitioner, but instead, the practitioner utilizes change frameworks and interventions that help organizations spark their own common sources of motivation, collective understanding and consensus, common language, and customized strategies. Each practitioner cares and collaborates through a unique core value, which you will identify in your first coaching assignment!
...change frameworks and interventions
There are numerous OD frameworks, interventions, and practices. They may include team-based interventions that entail active experimentation with new ways of operating together on an everyday basis. They may also include dialogic methodologies that seek to transform mindsets across large organizations. Additionally, they may seek to improve a system's ability to be agile not only through adaptive design and structure but also by reducing attachment to the status quo through mindfulness- based interventions. Due to the diversity of OD, new change frameworks and interventions seem to emerge on a regular basis. Nonetheless, OD practitioners tend to lean toward approaches that differ, and your M.O.S.T. Career Calling Assessment tells you what your Preferred Approach is! We will cover this in your first coaching session!
...generating sustainable and flexible improvements
OD provides organizations, communities, and social impact initiatives with a pathway to establish new ways of operating, relating with others, and making sense of systems. However, given that change is a constant feature of organizational life, the changes that do take place must always leave room for additional change. This is done by developing structural and cultural mechanisms that allow for continuous improvement, such as effective feedback systems and psychological safety, which encourage individuals to continue to experiment and learn from mistakes. In addition to flexibility, OD also helps individuals establish a new relationship with change itself! In this way, as OD practitioners help organizations change and build some level of internal capability for continuously adapting in healthy ways long after the OD engagement has taken place.
...to the well-being, performance, and prosperity
The impact of an OD career becomes observable to the degree that people, systems, structures, strategies, leadership, teams, and culture align to produce a wide array of improvements including more humane, adaptive, and effective forms of awareness, learning, and relating. Though well-being, performance, and prosperity are subjective enough to allow for customization, they also make sense on a universal level. Well-being includes physical, psychological, and spiritual safety, ease, and fulfillment. Performance is a wide-ranging term that includes a human system's ability to achieve its stated goals, operate effectively, and adapt to internal and external change in ways that do not produce unintended negative outcomes. Prosperity is also an intentionally broad term as it refers the overall strategic, ethical, and spiritual success of these human systems.
...of human systems.
Whether an OD practitioner works with, in, or between organizations and/or communities, their work focuses on the intersection of humans and systems (a.k.a. sociotechnical systems). This implies a wide variety of contexts for OD work, including individual organizations, loosely coupled systems, trans-organizational systems, communities, nations, and trans-national organizations. Depending on a practitioner's professional strengths and interests, as well as the size and requirements of the human system, the desired approach to influencing these systems can range in complexity.
OD Fundamentals
Every Great Journey Begins with a First Step! The first step for anyone interested in transforming organizations or society in a humane and effective fashion is learning about the field of Organization Development (OD). OD is a diversified field of practice that utilizes a wide range of caring and collaborative change frameworks and interventions that are designed to produce sustainable and flexible improvements to well-being, performance, and prosperity in human systems. OD is certainly not lacking in certificates, graduate programs, books, resources, and learning opportunities!
As a Creative Amplifier, you are most likely not interested in attaining the entire range of OD readings. However, it's still a very good idea to establish a baseline understanding of OD. Here are some of our "Must Reads" for those who strive to become full fledged OD practitioners. Each of them provide a helpful view of basic OD frameworks, interventions, and dialogue techniques. We suggest you select one or two as a baseline for your work. Click on a book to learn more!
The OD Career Landscape
The demand for OD careers seems greater than ever before, and we have created this report to help you find your place! The illustrations below demonstrate the latest analysis of where OD jobs exist. This includes geographic location in the U.S., physical working arrangements (Hybrid, Remote, In-Person), the proportion of jobs across different industries, and finally the proportion of jobs across different levels of seniority. Our data demonstrate that the OD career landscape is strong and widespread!
Locations
Seniority Levels
OD careers span numerous levels of seniority within internal OD position, and therefore, many viable career paths exist between these positions. It is worthnoting that career advancement opportunities increase when individuals move to Sr. Consultant (20%), Manager (32%) and Director positions (26.9%), and then decrease as one moves into a Vice President (5.3%), or Chief___ Officer (2.2%) postion. However, it stands to reason that some professionals transition out of internal consulting positions and begin their own external consulting businesses. If you decide to receive coaching, you will chart that path and utilize additional data about the top skills required to ascend as an internal practitioner.
Industry Representation
OD careers have spread across 18 industries! The majority of job descriptions we've analyzed demonstrate that while industry knowledge is helpful, it is not required as a job requirement. In general, aspiring practitioners have ample opportunity to shift the industry they are a part of. It is worth mentioning that the biggest OD-hiring industries now include Healthcare (17%), Retail & Consumer Products (9.8%), and Higher Education (9.2%).
Meaningful Work
The Thing about Meaningful Work
It's undeniable. Despite the challenges they face, many change agents absolutely love their jobs. We call this a "Career Calling" and it's a kind of joy that blurs the lines between work and life (in a good way!). To assess what makes a career a calling, our assessment has its roots in four questions that are key to identifying meaningful work, according to an ancient Japanese wisdom tradition called Ikigai, which translates as: reason for being.
When combined, your answers to these four questions can reveal a career path that is most meaningful, rewarding, and impactful (compared with other OD careers). Much has been written about this wisdom tradition, and its many natural connection with recent articles and views about meaningful work. These basic questions include:
- What type of change outcomes do you wish to influence?
- What type of professional identity do associate with?
-
What unique talents have you mastered?
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Which approach to change brings you the most joy?
Many characteristics of this model make it particularly appealing for the context of OD careers. In addition to containing questions that focus on change (a primary outcome in OD) and meaning-making (a primary process in OD) , Ikigai is often used in coaching sessions to assist with career exploration. Each of these questions have two primary preferences. This results in 16 different combinations (OD Career Callings). Our analysis demonstrates that while some callings are more common than others, all callings are represented in education and career opportunities.
Sources & Outcomes
Personal
Sources that evoke an individual’s perception of meaningful work vary widely, and are based on “… experiences, present life situations, and aspiration, and integrates various emotions evoked by the sources, such as self-realization, motivations, life satisfaction, vitality, a sense of existence, and a sense of agency” (source).
Engagement
This approach includes inquiry that focuses on the relationship between one’s work and positive and ethical change outcomes. It also emphasizes agency in shaping one’s life purpose in ways that pre-date the work of Frankl’s (1984) logotherapy and Maslow’s (1968) concept of self-actualization by over 750 years. Similarly, it focuses on meaningful work, which has become an attractive employee value proposition.
Well-being
Finally, securing a livelihood based on the Ikigai framework is demonstrated to have benefits to psychological well-being, including “feelings of accomplishment and fulfillment” (source). In this way this framework may also be integrated with meaningful job-crafting.
A M.O.S.T. Meaningful Assessment
OD is considered by many to be a deep personal calling that fuels continuous learning, creativity, and positive client outcomes. Helping individuals measure and develop the competencies they need is just the beginning of a relevant career assessment. A more authentic approach to career development for OD might also include the aim of helping professionals through a process of deep personal discovery, aligning what is most personally meaningful to them with different variations of OD work, and potentially transforming their careers into callings.
With the above opportunities in mind, what if there were an assessment that balanced what experts suggest should be characteristic of an OD position with evidence of what is actually represented by job market data and consultant feedback? Also, rather than asking OD career-seekers to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to developing OD consulting competencies, what if this assessment utilized an algorithm that equally valued an individual’s existing talents, sources of inspiration, the types of change they wish to influence in the world, and the unique career identity they are most interested in cultivating? These questions led to the development of the M.O.S.T. Meaningful Careers Assessment, which aims to help practitioners develop their OD careers in a highly meaningful, efficient, and practical fashion.
While this report provides robust information around your career calling, the next important step includes dialogue with others about what this means for you given your unique career narrative, strengths, and interests. This can be accomplished by talking with a M.O.S.T. Meaningful Career Coach, which we introduce at the end of this report.
Your OD Career Calling
Creative Amplifier
Your Preferences
Organizational vs. Societal
Those who prefer Organizational Outcomes experience a greater fulfillment by working on projects related with organizational change, which includes the development of a competitive strategy, employee engagement, business performance, agility, design, ethics, employee wellness, and process efficiency. On the other hand, those who prefer Societal Outcomes experience greater fulfillment by improving organizations that work on societal issues. Satisfaction is derived from working directly on societal change efforts such as community development, social justice, environmental sustainability, income equality, establishing healthy food sources, and addressing unethical governments.
Hybrid vs. Pure
Those who gravitate toward a Hybrid OD Identity tend to feel more at home in career roles that are adjacent or partially overlap the OD profession, marked by a preference for some but not all OD job characteristics. According to our research, OD is now diffused or merged into professions that include Talent Development, Human Resources, Human Resource Development, Management Consulting, DE&I, and Executive Coaching. Still, those with a Hybrid preference can still appreciate and adopt additional characteristics of Pure OD practitioners, who identify only as OD professionals (i.e. "OD Proper"), and hold titles that are strictly named OD and attend only to matters of OD as defined mainly by university educators.
Classic vs. Innovative
Those who prefer a Classic Approach are more likely to enjoy a step-by-step, scientific, and objective approach to change that engages in diagnosis, problem solving, and changing behaviors. This is also known as the "Diagnostic" approach to OD, and it still has a very large following. On the other hand, those who prefer a more Innovative Approach are more likely to enjoy a "Dialogic", subjective, and emergent approach to change that facilitates sense-making and the transformation of mindsets. The Innovative Approach includes both "Dialogic" OD and relatively newer "Conscious OD" paradigms.
Specialized vs. Broad
Those who prefer a Specialized mastery of OD tend to gravitate to just one or two specific approaches (e.g. Appreciative Inquiry), and many with great success! However, they do not prefer to possess the remarkably extensive, Broad mastery of knowledge, skills, and abilities that represent all three core competency domains discussed above (Social, Technical, and Influence). Those who prefer a Broad Mastery may serve a wide range of organizational roles as they have an ample number of OD frameworks, tools, and approaches. Broad Mastery also requires a deep knowledge of the theoretical and psychological underpinnings of OD work.
Market Demand
The illustration below demonstrates the types of preferences employers are looking for, when it comes to internal OD positions. While there is healthy representation of each preference in the job market, you'll notice that some preferences are in greater demand than others. This is a snapshot of the current market, and this illustration will be updated periodically.
