Our practice areas / Organisational Development
Developing organisations
As business psychologists and change specialists our purpose is to help leaders plan and implement development initiatives that maximise efficiency and effectiveness while minimising the negative impact on organisation members.
The Organisational Development practice at Milward & Partners harnesses and integrates the skills and experience offered through our other practice areas – Survey and Assessment, Executive Coaching and Educational Services to provide an holistic approach to organisational development for public and private sector organisations.
Our approach
Developing an organisation is all about changing the organisation; changing it from its present state to some future desired state. However, getting an organisation to change is no easy task.
The building blocks of organisations are individual men and women. Therefore in order to help an organisation to change it is necessary to help people to change. However, people are often reluctant to change because they like things the way they are or they feel the pain involved in moving to a better or different state outweighs the advantages of their present state.
Telling people that they should do things different usually results in more resistance and damage to morale. This is why the change or development process is a real challenge for leaders.
Resolving ambivalence
At Milward & Partners we adopt a scientific approach to organisational change. We recognise that people and the organisations that employ them are usually ambivalent about change; they see no real benefit one way or the other. Our task is to help resolve that ambivalence; to make people want to change because of the benefits that change brings.
Our approach is to take individuals, groups, teams and entire organisations through a structured process of discovery through which everyone comes to understand the benefits of change, buys into the process and then helps to bring it about.
Our experience
Since our formation in 1992 we have gained many years experience of organisational development in both public and private sectors.
We started out in Eastern and Central Europe in the early 1990’s helping newly privatised organisations to adapt to the new free market conditions. Since then we have built up a wealth of experience in handling large scale cultural change, cultural integration following mergers or acquisitions and planning and implementing organisational restructure.
Our work is international and we frequently manage projects in Europe, the United States of America and the Middle East.
Through our sister company MilwardDoran we specialise in helping small entrepreneurial organisations to grow and flourish.