Al Watts started his professional career at Land O’Lakes Inc., where he had the opportunity to significantly expand its college recruitment efforts, develop its affirmative action program, and initiate its employee assistance program. He gravitated to training and organization development, and after beginning his graduate work in organization development started the training and development functions for both Rosemount Engineering and a manufacturing software startup. Early in Al’s career he served as president of the Southern Minnesota chapter of the American Society for Training and Development (now the Twin Cities chapter of the Association for Talent Development) and charter president of Minnesota’s HR Planning Society (now the Human Resources Executive Forum).
Mid-career Al was most engaged by aligning human resources efforts with organizational strategy, which became the focus of the consulting firm that he founded in 1983, PRISM Inc. Over the course of 15 years Al added two business partners and five employees; together they helped large, small, public, private, government, and non-profit organizations manage change, develop their leaders and teams, and improve their quality and processes. After leading PRISM for 15 years, Al felt a call to strike out in new directions, wanting to integrate more values-based principles with traditional consulting and to better align personal and work realms. His efforts evolved into re-branding his work around leadership and organizational integrity, whole-systems approaches to improving organizational effectiveness, worker engagement, and ethical cultures. Mr. Watts published a book in 2011 that summarizes his approach and provides guidelines for developing “triple-E” leaders and organizational cultures, “Navigating Integrity: Transforming Business as Usual Into Business at its Best.” His consulting and speaking engagements continue to be based on the book’s principles and inTEgro’s Leadership and Organizational Integrity Model. Newsletters and resources for putting the principles into practice can be found at www.integro-inc.com.
Al started his graduate work in organization development at Bowling Green State University over 30 years ago, but until 2014 had not completed it. In recognition of his work over that period BGSU allowed him to return and complete his Master’s in Organization Development in 2014. A primary motivation for completing his master’s degree was to teach at the college level and play a role shaping tomorrow’s leaders. He is happy that has led to serving as faculty for Saint Mary’s Organizational Leadership master’s program, as well as community faculty teaching strategic management and organizational behavior for Metropolitan State University in the Twin Cities.