Suchergebnisse

Since the inception of the federal‐sector labor‐management program in 1963 with the issuance of Executive Order 10988, the program has experienced sixteen years of trending toward collaboration and thirty‐five years of adversarial labor‐management relations. Adversarial labor‐management relationships are antithetical to collaborative labor‐management relationships. Notwithstanding the fact that collaborative labor‐management relations can satisfy the interests of managers and employees through their unions to create better delivery of public service, the confluence of presidential, managerial, and union leader support is hard to create and maintain.

The brutal fact pointed out by Michael Beer and Nitin Nohria in their May 2000 Harvard Business Review article is that about 70% of all change initiatives fail. The failure of leaders to challenge themselves to change, and then model the behavior they seek in others, may be a large contributor to these failures. There are many models for conducting organizational change, and they all seem to focus on the process steps that the organization must take to initiate and implement a change effort. For change to work, a leader must be able to articulate what changes are necessary in his own behavior. Then, the leader must personally -- and authentically -- state why it is difficult to change while modelling the desired changed behavior. Consequently, the author came to understand that it is not the led that must change first, it is the leader. Otherwise, organizations will continue achieving a 70% failure rate. Adapted from the source document.

Over the past decade, labor-management relations have taken a sharp turn toward confrontation in several states and localities. Political ideologues have attempted to roll back collective bargaining rights in several states and cut back on public employee wages and benefits to balance budgets thrown into deficit. This has led to heated debates in such states as Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana. In the midst of this swirling controversy, which has been part of a wider effort to dismantle the existing order of labor-management relations in America that has prevailed for decades, the public and policymakers have lost sight of the potential and real benefits of labor-management collaboration as a strategic device to improve delivery of goods and services in both the private and public sectors. Several lessons learned from the Clinton partnership program included how to make collaboration work effectively on a sustainable basis. Adapted from the source document.