Sarah Herberg on the Power of Organizational Development with Brand and Comms

Mixing Board Studio Session

Sarah Herberg spent over 15 years in advertising, brand-building and innovation consulting at top agencies, including Martin Williams, Olson, and Zeus Jones. Now she is the owner of Loom, a organizational development firm that helps companies from Fortune 10s to emerging startups define their desired futures and build the people systems required to bring that future to life. 

In this Studio Session, Sarah and Mixing Board Founder, Sean Garrett, talk about the definition of organizational development; what’s misunderstood about the process and how closely it interconnects with the success of brand strategy and communications efforts.  

SG: Tell me about Loom and how you found yourself doing this work.

SH: Most simply, my work lives as the intersection of brand strategy and organizational development. I've been independent for three years now, and over the arc of that consulting journey. When I first started out, I was often coming in the front door as a brand strategist or a strategic consultant, who was using organizational development methods in that process. Today, I do more and more work where I'm coming in as an organizational development consultant.

I work with some orgs on mission, vision, values type work – which bigger picture –  is when an org has that wake-up call that they need to either be a lot more clear on who they are and where they're going, or they need to make a pivot on what their business is. I also do a lot of that at a team level – how do we align a team around their purpose within an org. That tends to fall out of larger transformation work, where there's been a broader shift in strategic direction that trickles down to, say, “What's the purpose of marketing within this business, as we've shifted our direction as a business and brand”

I left a job at a really wonderful organization in January 2021 to do this work. I didn't have the language for it, to be honest. I knew that I could be doing change work that involved teams in being part of the change – both the shaping of a strategic direction, and the implementation of it. A lot of traditional consulting is expert consulting, where the consultant studies the organization or situation, and then comes back with recommendations. And then good luck implementing that! I knew I wanted to work in a way where I was guiding and supporting teams through that process, where they were involved in the meaning making and decision-making, and they had the support system to implement it.

At the time, I didn't know what that was called. I just knew I wanted to work in that way. 

SG: Now do you feel like you have the language? 

SH: It honestly depends on where I'm showing up. My network is a lot of agency and marketing leaders. When I’m working with those teams, a lot of times I say that I’m a facilitator and a guide through a strategic change. Those teams are looking at said change as brand transformation or repositioning. Maybe they've gotten clear that they need a new purpose as their marketing function, but they aren't talking about organizational development. They don't really care about that language, it doesn't really mean anything to them.

The most simple definition of organizational development is that as you're helping a group of people navigate a change, you're equipping those people to have the capacity to navigate change independently in the future. It's a “teach a man to fish way” of approaching change management. If change management is, “We're going to get you through this change but we're going to really focus on systems and structures,” people are a casualty, or certainly an afterthought, in that change, then organizational development (OD) is about making sure that those people have the skills and capacity to sustain change again and again.

This is so critical for leaders in brand and marketing functions. This industry is dead upon arrival if we are not constantly changing. A lot of people in brand, marketing and comms naturally have the capacity of OD within them, but it hasn't always been valued. Or they don't have a really rigorous structure and methodology to make sure it's present on every project.

SG: Sorry to digress into my own experience, but I co-started this firm called Pramana Collective after I was at Twitter. The idea was, we're going to help do deep strategy and positioning work that the internal team would otherwise never find the time to do. 

Companies would call us up and say, "We're having this problem with our positioning. We need a reset. We need to uplevel our game here. Our PR firm sucks. Our website sucks. The way we recruit sucks. No one understands what we do."

They would think that fixing one of these problems was the objective, but through our discovery process and with the lens of people who have worked inside complex organizations, nine times out of ten, the true objective was about correcting human misalignment in the organization.

SH: You were doing OD.

SG: Exactly. It became clear to us pretty quickly that that actually was the job. To find those pockets of misalignment within the organization, because every company right now is in change. Everyone is going through inflection points. What company right now is static? We would find this over and over again. So we had to ask ourselves, what do we call it? Is this management consulting? It’s not comms, per se, it’s not brand strategy. We were doing OD for sure, but OD is not specifically designed to create a marketing, brand, or comms outcome. 

The interesting moment that we're in, is the intersection between those two things – it's that external outcome with that internal alignment. That is certainly what you do, and what more of us can do. 

SH: Your experience is so similar to my own, the recognition that the methodology is organizational development. Once I had the language and the “purist” OD methodology, and I was able to transpose that on top of my strategy methodology, it helped me see when it would be beneficial to a client system for me to show up as a an “expert” strategic consultant, and when they really needed a supportive guide through an inflection point. Both have their benefits, but to be conscious of how you are showing up as a consultant is so critical to your client’s success, I believe.

I spent a lot of time in agencies, and a general practice that is taught to agency strategists is that you almost have to make the insight so enticing and intriguing that I think you risk losing the clarity of truth. In organizational development, it’s really about showing truth. We’re not going to skip over and give you a bunch of hypothesized solutions. We’re not going to masquerade it. 

SG: The process should be a mirror. This is what you look like, actually. Not this dressed up version. 

SH: In agencies in particular, there's so much fear about speaking truth to clients. And that is so harmful. Instead, OD is about creating a space where you speak honestly about the reality of the situation. There’s a lot of thoughtfulness put into creating a space where a team can have those conversations in an honest but productive manner, and make meaning of it together. Again, while the traditional consulting approach does not invite the client into that conversation. But again, if it’s a mirror, your client has the right to know the truth. And they deserve the space to work through what do to because of that truth. 

SG: It's also why they would trust you in the process moving forward. Because you showed them the truth. If you show them this false veneer, then they may think, "Oh, that's great," and then it falls apart. Or they present all this work, they spend all this money on it, and all the employees are looking around going, "That's not us." It’s dead on arrival. 

SH: When you're in the organization, you sometimes can't feel the truth happening around you. You can be so used to it that you don't know that it is unusual – it's like water. And then of course there are power dynamics: An employee may be having an experience, they might recognize that experience is not aligned with the ambition of leadership, but they don't have a safe space to share that. Those are also the small but really powerful things that get a little lost when a company becomes too focused on understanding external dynamics like the category or customer needs (which are important, certainly). But what are the strengths and weak spots within the organization? How do we address those? 

SG: Who should own this work internally? Or who does normally? One of the biggest issues with this area is that it's a jump ball, in terms of who owns this. It varies greatly depending on the size or maturity of the organization. But even within Fortune 100 companies, it may be completely different. What's your take on that?

SH: For the work I do, the truth is, it has to be a critical leader driving this. Any large-scale change is not owned by HR. The clients I work with, it’s either someone that's C-suite or executive leadership that has a vision and they're like, "How do we start to move towards that vision?" Or someone at that level who recognizes "things are so broken and we've tried so many other ways that haven't worked that we're ready. We've exhausted our other options." Over the last three years I’ve learned, if it's not one of those, there probably isn't a change project where they're going to bring in an outside consultant. 

There's definitely talent development work that's adjacent, and of course a lot of organizations will bring in coaches for individuals. But when it comes to change work at the org level, you need to have executive leadership who is ready to go on this journey. It requires a lot of vulnerability and time from leaders. If they're not game and ready to commit themselves and ask the same of their leadership team, it's not going to be a very enjoyable process for me. I've definitely learned that the hard way.

SG: What are the signs? If you're working at a company and you're like, "Do we need OD or not? Should we be talking to Sarah? Should we be talking to someone who could help us?" What are the things that might be occurring at an organization where you're like, "It feels like we might actually need to do this work?"

SH: I went through a period where I was actually codifying a lot of this into work sessions, because the patterns are so common. One of them is a group that is stuck in swirl, meaning they are trying a lot of things, there's a lot of energy being exhausted, but they aren't headed in a clear direction together. That is the most common one. It’s also very common that you end up with an executive who is coming to a realization that they have a vision or ambition for the future of the business, but they cannot seem to get that vision across to their leadership or employees, or align the organization to it. I will say, I think visionary executives often recognize that they need this support from the get-go. 

The other thing that happens is that I am often brought in with teams that have some dysfunction. There's a lack of trust. Or people don't know how to navigate conflict together. Once you dig into why that is happening, it’s happening because there's no alignment on purpose or goals. There's a framework that I just love for this work – the TLDR on is that 96% of conflict in a team occurs because they don't have a clear purpose or clear roles.

We tend to misattribute that conflict to interpersonal issues or ways of working. But if we're actually clear on where we're all headed and what our roles are on that ship, it diminishes a ton of conflict. At a surface level, the presenting problem for a team will be we don't trust one another or we don't know how to navigate conflict. When we dig into why, it is happening because the team actually doesn't have a clear purpose. Or the organization isn't giving them clear guidance.

SG: That gets into the mission, vision, values work. People might say, "Hey, it’s great to do it, can't hurt." And when you do it and people are like, "Wait, this is just a bunch of statements. How does this actually connect with what I do every day?" At the end of the day, people are just looking for meaning in their work. And that meaning comes from knowing that when you go to work every day, that the company has this bigger purpose. And what you do adds up and supports that in this way, and that adds up to what your team does, and your team's role is this and that. It's about connecting the dots all the way down the line. How can organizations do that better?

SH: Organizational development has a huge emphasis on how we teach people new capacities and skills. In some ways it's training, but it’s really about giving people the support to head in a new direction, to work together in new ways, whatever that their organization might require to move closer to its vision or ambition. If you start to apply that to mission/vision/values type work, it tells us that we can't just get leaders to a new strategic direction and say, “Good luck!” The job isn't done until you've actually started to build the capacity within the organization to live that new direction.

A lot of times that is about aligning someone's individual role to the purpose of the larger group. The way I work with organizations is, very functionally, I have three different scopes. I scope discovery and feedback, which is where we have those honest conversations about what's really going on here. Then we do a scope that's actually aligning on strategic direction. Whether that's mission, vision, values, or brand positioning, whatever that is, let's co-create a strategy together. The third scope is running change cycles. That's where I'm actually working with the team to think about, "Okay, we decided on this direction. What do you actually need to implement in your team to start to live this?" That could be anything from guiding a team on how to create an internal comms plan, how to do a large-scale rollout, identifying skills within the team that need to be built up, how are you going to go build up those skills, are there roles that are missing, etcetera. 

At a high level, you can't get people through the strategy and then be like, "All right, the job's done." If you walk away too soon, it’s just words on paper that at best can give some clarity on direction, but at worst can actually do more harm than good. It can be harmful to employees to say, "We're going to shift the business over here, and we're not going to support you at all in determining how you can contribute to that vision."

SG: What is your philosophy on mission, vision, values, north star – all the different words. Is it required for every organization? Or is it just different for every organization? What are the non-negotiables?

SH: It needs to be custom to every situation. I am biased. I’ve worked at some agencies where there was a selling of “secret sauce” that was just packaging those up in different ways. When you strip them down to their core, they're quite similar. Sometimes we’re creating complexity that doesn't actually benefit our clients.

I try to understand the situation and talk in really clear terms before we introduce any strategic frameworks. The framework is just there to help make meaning. If we're adding them on in a way that's actually hiding the clarity, then we're not doing anyone any favors. Particularly in orgs where most people in the organization don't know the difference between a mission and a vision – and it's not really their job to. When we create these complex frameworks and then expect to educate everyone in the organization what they are, we’re not setting anyone up for success.

SG: And then people say, “Nike does this.” Well great, it's wonderful that Nike does that, but we’re not Nike. 

Sarah: When you have authenticity and a visionary leader, there's something to attaching those frameworks to what makes sense, coming from the leaders that you're often equipping to tell these stories. But let's understand the current situation first, frameworks second. 

I’m working with the executive leadership of a large organization, and we're having conversations where they are saying “we need a new north star”. As I dig in and ask what they mean by “north star,” they all have a different definition. Some think this means that doing a new mission and vision is on the table. Others are saying, nope, the mission and vision is good. We actually want a 10-year strategy. It's revealing the lack of alignment on what they're even asking for. And if we just rested on the framework, this conversation could be missed. I’ve had to figure out, what are you really asking for when you say that you want a new north star?

Whether we call it a vision or a north star, that act of a team envisioning the world that they seek to create, that can be really powerful. Especially for organizations that have such a strong strategic planning muscle, they know how to think in one-year, three-year or five-year horizons. But they really haven't been given the space, as a leadership team, to think about what that endgame would look like. What is the impact we seek to have on the world or community that we serve? Let's envision that and bring that to life. It’s more about the practice of having that conversation than what we call it.

SG: It’s about the alignment, not the actual output. Do you have any favorite discovery questions that expose truth?

SH: This isn't a question, but a practice. In my career, I was taught to do stakeholder interviews–lots of them. A pivot I’ve made is having folks do a reflective survey or pre-work ahead of the interview. I read those first and then we talk. It gets people thinking before arriving to that conversation. They prepare a bit more, and often are more vulnerable. 

One survey question I’ll ask people is what their relationship with change is. Are they coming in resisting a change that's maybe going to happen or has happened in the organization? Or are they one of the people that's driving it forward? That can really let me know what to dig in during our conversation.

SG: For startups that are moving from 12 people to 200 in two years, how should they be thinking about organizational development to set the right foundation?

SH: With startups and emerging companies, some of it does start with talent development. Having that clarity of purpose and giving people clear on roles (rather than assuming that things are interpersonal issues). Helping people have a clear view of the teams they're on and then their roles within is just a fundamental yet huge step. Especially in those environments where that isn't the norm. And that's part of the beauty and fun of being in a fast-growing startup environment. But if you can give people just a little bit of that clarity, the runway they get with that is just so immense and powerful. Just because it's not the norm in the culture of a startup, it doesn't take very much.

One piece of the experience of being at a startup that's very akin to organizational development is the practice of running experiments. Let’s say that a team is not very good at running a good meeting, we've identified this is a problem. The team is going to run an experiment where they structure meetings in a different way, we're going to have a conversation on what we learned, and we're going to figure out what doesn’t work and what we might scale.

That's a really natural way of working for a lot of folks in a startup environment, it's usually how they’re already building. Turning that same practice inward on ourselves has a lot of power. This ability is inherently built into a lot of people that really thrive in a small, fast-growing company. Just don't forget to do it for yourself. 

SG: And you can actually connect organizational development to an output, to an actual execution. It's nice to be able to do organizational development, change management, and get everyone aligned, but to what end? If you can connect the dots from alignment to, "Actually, now we can do this amazing campaign," it starts to connect the dots between our employees, our customers, potential employees, investors. It becomes very easy to see and understand the point of this work. It's not just feeling good and hugging each other. It's actually what you do to get on the same page.

How would you recommend someone get into the work that you do? How do they figure out their way into this? What experience do they need?

SH: There are so many ways. The thing I haven't done, but I've always been curious about, is folks who take an OD lens and go into an in-house leadership role. There's something to understanding change with that human-centered lens, which is essentially what OD is. I’d love to see someone leading a function with that experience.

It’s a relatively small world, but there are also some wonderful, well-known firms that do that intersection of strategy and organizational development, like SY Partners, Nobl or The Ready. There are so, so many lesser known firms doing this work as well. 

A lot of us who grew up in brand marketing tend to have the track of, "I'm going to go work at Nike." But there's a lot to learn from small consultancies who lead with organizational development. I'm obviously biased, but there's a ton of superpower if you can combine strategy and OD.

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