Saint Joseph's College of Maine invited Carr's President, Jared D. Lock, Ph.D.  to present a 3 hour symposium at this year's summer session titled, "Successfully Managing Major Change in Health Care: 2010 Symposium for Health Administration Professionals."  Approximately 50 seasoned healthcare executives from across the country came to listen to Dr. Jared Lock present on Leadership Excellence in the Healthcare Industry.  The purpose of the talk was to:  

•    Define the Business and Financial Impact of poor leadership during times of change and upheaval
•    Review the research and define the most important leadership competencies needed in healthcare organizations
•    Help participants understand and recognize in their own organizations the common pitfalls that negatively impact the performance of over 50% of all healthcare leaders
•    Help the participants understand that the best way to manage change is to have a solid core value system.

The Saint Joseph's symposium is well known across the country and brings together experts from all aspects of health care.  The symposium gives participants access to many health care experts from a variety of backgrounds and engages the participants in a search for viable solutions to some of the problems plaguing their current health care systems.  The annual symposium was developed as an accent to the Master of Health Administration degree program offered at Saint Joseph’s College (http://online.sjcme.edu/master-health-administration.php).  The students in the MHA program are individuals with experience working in health care systems that desire to lead and shape of the future in America’s health care systems.

Dr. Lock's presentation was very well received garnering an average overall presentation rating of 4.8 on a 5.0 scale - one of the best ratings ever.  Twila Weiszbrod, Director of Saint Joseph’s Health Administration Program noted “Dr. Lock’s presentation was a highlight of the symposium and we’re hoping he will return to present at future symposia at the college!”

The following comments were collected from participants after the presentation.  

"Dr. Lock's presentation had great points and gave a great framework to the leadership field.  He is a masterful communicator with a great sense of humor!  I really enjoyed how he related every one of his slides (power point) to real life scenarios.  He brings his topic to life by providing relevant examples that we can relate to.  It was one of the best speakers/topics yet ... I actually wish this could have been an all day presentation".  

"With so much conflicting literature available about leadership it's hard to know what is really important.  Dr. Jared Lock provided us with an excellent review of what the research really shows and how we can take that information and use it to make a positive difference in our organizations.  The thing I will remember most about his presentation is that good leaders always go back to the values of the organization. If we focus our actions and attention on the root values of the organization, we are much more likely to make good decisions".

Find out more about Saint Joseph’s MHA program at http://online.sjcme.edu/master-health-administration.php.

Carr’s Director of Assessment, Kent Noel, Ph.D., was recently elected President of the Missouri Chapter of the American Counseling Association (ACAM) with his term beginning July 2011.  He has previously served as Second and First Vice-President for ACAM the past two years respectively.   He also is actively involved in the Kansas City Chapter and currently holds the position of Administration Trustee.  He began his eleventh year with Carr in January of this year.    

The American Counseling Association is the world’s largest organization of professional counselors with a membership of over 50,000.  It is a self-described “big tent” organization whose members work in various specialties across a wide variety of settings including business and industry, private practices, hospitals, governmental agencies, schools, colleges, and universities.

Jared Lock, Ph.D., President of Carr & Associates, presented at the local monthly chapter meeting of the Chief Operating Officers Forum on a topic titled “Leading to Succeed in the 21st Century – Defining and Developing Your Critical Success Competencies”.  The invitation came from Dan Carter, Kansas City Chapter Director of the COO Forum who identified the topic and content as “timely and well organized”.  Despite the poor weather and proximity to the holidays, the meeting was well attended and there was lively discussion.  The main presentation goals included defining the most important leadership competencies needed in the 21st Century, helping the participants learn how to build a leadership model in their own organization, and identifying best practices concerning measurement and development of these competencies in their organizations.  

The main take-away points were:  
•    Carr has developed a descriptive list of the key leadership competencies needed in the 21st Century marketplace.  
•    Many of these competencies have been identified in the past, but more pronounced emphasis has been placed on ingenuity, leveraging technology, and having irreproachable integrity.  
•    By using a simple yet effective classification system, any executive can personally identify those characteristics that are needed to succeed in their organization.  
•    Success still comes down to consistency – having a consistent value system, setting consistent performance expectations, and consistently managing performance.  

The COO Forum is chartered to bring together the world-wide community of Chief Operating Officers who strive for superior leadership.  The COO Forum’s mission is professional development through peer-to-peer collaboration and they expect members to learn, grow, and become more effective as a result of their peers.

On Thursday, September 2nd, Carr & Associates hosted the monthly Kansas City Applied Psychologist Society’s (http://kcaps.50webs.org/index.html) monthly meeting at Yia Yia’s restaurant in Overland Park, KS.  Dr. Joe Rei, partner at MORF Consulting (http://morfconsulting.com) guest speaker presented his thoughts on network analysis -- a new way to look at team-based work and organizational communications.  

According to Dr. Rei, network analysis can help organizations harness the power of their teams, which results in leveraging this preexisting, but often invisible, asset – i.e., teamwork.  As organizations urgently search for ways to get greater results, many have turned to collaborating teams to achieve strategic objectives.  Network analysis provides a way to analyze team communication patterns and trust levels and can help organizations predict likely future performance and develop teams to produce more profit, innovation, and employee engagement.  

During the presentation, Dr. Rei, MORF Consulting Partner, showed how network analysis helps leaders assess manage, and maneuver networks for strategic purposes -- to fill the missing void.  He showed how network analysis helps managers drive collaboration which delivers the greatest performance impact for the team and company. He also introduced MORF’s STAR™ (Strategic Team Assessment and Research) model of team effectiveness (http://morfconsulting.com/star.html).  
 
The concept of network analysis was particularly salient to Jared Lock, President of Carr & Associates.  “As I/O Psychologists, we typically look at individual data and/or databases full of individual data to make inferences about team-level performance.  Network analysis provides a way to quantify team performance and communication patterns.  Joe’s research is at the crux of the social media and individual performance research and he gave us a glimpse into this new frontier”.

Carr & Associates had a vested interest in this presentation as well.  While network analysis provides direct performance information concerning how well a team is performing or “what they are doing”, it does not provide individuals feedback concerning how they can independently improve their team-based performance.  Carr & Associates has developed an Assessment Neutral-Content Custom reporting process that presents feedback to individual team members using the STAR model language and works in tandem with MORF’s network analysis research (http://morfconsulting.com/articles/star/STAR_Sample_Individual_Report.pdf).  The individual reports help team members understand how they impact team dynamics and how the individual can improve personal performance in this arena.  

Carr & Associates was represented for the third consecutive year at the Society of Industrial/Organizational Psychologists annual conference held in Atlanta, Georgia.  This is no small feat as over 1,300 papers, posters, and presentations were submitted to the 25th annual conference and fewer than 400 were accepted.  

Jared Lock, Ph.D. and Carr’s President chaired and participated as a panelist in the Panel Discussion titled “Building Successful OD Programs. Lessons Not Learned in School”.  Other panelists included Amy Grubb from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Liana Knudsen of Dell Computers.  They presented to a packed house of more than 150 audience members in what was seen by many to be a very engaging topic.  In fact, as indicated by Larry Nader, IT Manager of SIOP, “Your SIOP presentation: Building Successful OD Programs. Lessons Not Learned in School (138), has been selected as one of the sessions to be recorded at the SIOP conference. Unlike previous years where all sessions were recorded, this year we will only record 20 sessions”.  

The panel discussed best practices associated with building and maintaining OD programs in organizations.  Little theory was discussed as this was a hands-on p resentation of what works, what does not work, and what to watch out for in the real world.  The premise of the discussion was that Organizational Development programs are differentially designed depending upon culture, environment, and need.  The panel used the first part of the session to describe best practices associated with building and maintaining OD programs at different life cycle stages (Greenfield, project-based, and established) and then finished the interaction by answering a series of questions.  

The panel was assembled because they brought three very different perspectives to the discussion based on their employment in three different organizational settings (consulting, government, and business).  The panel covered key questions associated with building successful OD functions, evolving them, and transferring capability throughout the organization.  The end result was an audience that was well informed and had a clear understanding of best practices concerning managing and maintaining organizational development initiatives in their organization.  

This was the 15th year in a row that Dr. Lock has given at least one presentation to this conference.