Resources

Tom Devane helps clients achieve rapid, dramatic, and sustainable improvements resulting from increased employee engagement and contemporary leadership practices. Prior to joining Energage as VP of Consulting Tom founded and operated his own consulting company for 25 years. Before that he held leadership positions in Big Six Consulting and at an alternative energy firm that was purchased by ConocoPhillips. His evolution from a technical practitioner to global thought leader and practitioner in culture shaping has been a gradual process that has enabled him to combine “hard” and “soft” aspects of performance as he helped numerous organizations in their transformation efforts. For example, in Microsoft’s early exponential growth years he worked with four divisions of Microsoft Corporation on strategy development and deployment, culture shaping, and process improvement. He also had the extraordinary privilege of being selected by the government of South Africa to assist in the dismantling of apartheid. In his latest large-scale transformation, Tom helped the biopharmaceuticals division of a global pharma company reshape their culture from a research and development mindset to a commercial operations mindset as they successfully transformed from an organization that had zero revenues to one with over $1 billion annual sales within 18 months. Beyond those experiences, Tom has worked in a variety of industries including healthcare, life sciences, financial services, and high-tech manufacturing. Tom is the co-author and co-editor of The Change Handbook (Berrett-Koehler, 1999, 2007) and is the author of Integrating Lean Six Sigma and High-Performance Organizations (Wiley & Sons, 2003). Tom has spoken for the American Management Association, LINKAGE, and The Organization Development Network.

There’s no doubt it’s easier to make improvements to employee engagement when the CEO stands behind it from the get-go. While this is an ideal situation, it’s not reality for many HR professionals. The good news is that there are high-leverage actions you can take to get the engagement ball rolling at your organization — and we’ll show you how to get started.

You’ve heard it before. Engaged employees are good for your organization’s bottom line. They’re also motivated, productive, and more likely to stay put. But with employee engagement seemingly stalled around 30%, it’s no surprise leaders identify it as one of their top challenges.

10 High-Leverage Principles for Sustainable Organizational Change With today’s scarcity of time, leverage is the name of the game. That is, yielding a substantial benefit from a moderate amount of effort. In my organizational change journey across a wide variety of industries, communities spanning five continents, and three decades of experience, I’ve come to know […]

The Sustainability of Results: Part III I had hoped I could boil down all the best global practices for organizational change sustainability into eight (or so) pithy points that would fit on a small laminated card. But after extensive research, input from the 95 contributing authors, and personal experiences, it’s just not possible. So here […]

Six Factors that Work Against Sustainable Solutions In a perfect world, organizations would address sustainability problems before they occur—and design conditions for sustainability from the beginning of an improvement effort. But as a senior vice president once said to me: Tom, I live in the real world where those preventive conditions just aren’t always possible. […]