Competencies for Organization Development (OD) Practitioners

Competencies to Learn in OD

There are a wide range of knowledge, skills and abilities that one might consider when learning about OD. The following links are to guidelines and suggestions from a variety of OD experts.

What is Organization Development?
Knowledge and Skills Necessary for Competence in OD.

Learn Business Skills, Too

Efforts at organizational change can fail, not only because of people's beliefs and feelings and perceptions (which are the focus of many OD training programs today), but also because of business goals and structures and operations. In this case, it might even be damaging to focus only on OD models that get peoples' buy-in to the change, help people overcome resistance to the change, etc.

Therefore, it would be wise for the OD practitioners to get at least some basic understanding of certain business topics. If your OD school and training does not include some basic skills in business, then see

Free, Micro-eMBA
Free, Nonprofit-eMBA

For the Category of Organizational Change and Development:

Recommended Books

Managing Organizational Change

Growing Your Organization

Managing Organizational Change

Field Guide to Consulting and Organizational Development: by Carter McNamara, published by Authenticity Consulting, LLC. Provides complete, step-by-step guidelines to identify complex issues in for-profit or government organizations and successfully resolve each of them. This book is also helpful to organizations that are doing fine now, but want to evolve to the next level of performance. This is one of the truly comprehensive, yet practical, books about this complex subject! Includes online forms that can be downloaded. Many materials in this Library's topic about guiding change are adapted from this comprehensive book.

Field Guide to Consulting and Organizational Development With Nonprofits: by Carter McNamara, published by Authenticity Consulting, LLC. Provides complete, step-by-step guidelines to identify complex issues in nonprofit organizations and successfully resolve each of them. This book is also helpful to organizations that are doing fine now, but want to evolve to the next level of performance. This is one of the truly comprehensive, yet practical, books about this complex subject! Includes online forms that can be downloaded. Many materials in this Library's topic about guiding change are adapted from this comprehensive book.

The following books are recommended because of their highly practical nature and often because they include a wide range of information about this Library topic. To get more information about each book, just hover your cursor over the image of the book. A "bubble" of information will be displayed. You can click on the title of the book in that bubble to get more information, too.