A Lecture Note : Leading Change From The Middle

Some many organizational change efforts fail to reach their intention, but the high-ranking sponsors often blame the disappointment on the employees and manager struggle to change at times. They really don’t know how difficult it is to lead and implement change effectively (Robbins, 2011). A good change does require good people skills. Employees resist change because employees can be very unsure about the loss of status or job security within the organization. This would mean the employees and there manager as well as their peers will resist technological changes. The employees will also endure fear of failure that could cause employees to doubt their ability to do the job/ or their duty. Those type of change employees are resisting because the employees are too worried about learning the new requirements. Peer pressure can be endured as well for employees when the employees start to resist change to protect their co-worker, and so will the manager to protect their work group. The human resources roles are planning and implementation, planning would be evaluation of

Organizational change is a necessary outcome when considering various scenarios contributing to the resulting vision. Perplexing as it may seem, change initiatives don’t always result in positive outcomes. In fact, many never succeed. As a change agent, one should always have formulated a vision of what change will “look” like for the organization. One would be hard pressed to paint a landscape without having a vision of what the landscape should resemble. Yet, resistance to change usually becomes a significant factor contributing to an initiative’s failure. It is likely an

“If we understand change better, we will be able to influence (but not control) it for the better” (Fullan, 2014). When change in a culture is in effect, the organizational culture tends to be unsettled. This may seem like an inopportune time for our staff to be unsettled, but this is the best opportunity to identify and create breakthroughs (Fullan, 2014). When analyzing the structure for a change initiative, strategic planning must first take place. What problems are foreseen or obvious? Are there

Organizations must respond to their internal and external environment. Therefore, organizational success heavily relies on leaderships ability to manage change. Unfortunately, many leaders struggle to effectively lead change initiatives. In fact, Ashkenas (2013, para. 1) reported 60 – 70% of organizational change initiatives fail to meet their objectives.

Middle management are store managers and assistant managers. The managers at the middle level are responsible for implementing top manager’s strategy. The middle managers usually supervise the first-line managers. At Wal-Mart middle managers are responsible for customer service, supervising employees, applying company regulations, and taking care of several administrative tasks. (Kumar) Assistant managers are leaders who should characterize their company and themselves well by acting as a role model to the people below them. Walmart has several department managers. There are managers over the food department, electronics,

Middle managers focus their goals on a shorter time frame, usually ranging from one month to one year. They develop plans to achieve business objectives in a process called tactical planning. They need more detailed information than top managers do, but somewhat less information than team leaders and supervisors.

To have an effective change team, champions and helpers from every step of the organization need to be chosen. Per example, by completely ignoring the 240 IT personnel (even when IT was an essential part of the project, if not the most essential), the change team was missing important members and that made it lack credibility. The employees and trust officers were not convinced from the beginning about why the change was needed, therefore they didn’t believe in it and they didn’t even put in the effort. They also should have done a better selection of the program, focusing more in the company’s needs then in the competitor’s status.

Excellent question, I would assume that I have seen the three types several times. However, I will to be concise I will comment on the third problem, since by far it is the most vital and acute issue. As the old say “always blame the boss “or “fix the head, everything else will fix itself”. As I explained in prior posts, in the change process we have the change sponsor or the top layer management such as CEO or COO, VP. When it comes to effective and successful implementation of any change, it is all about the change sponsor behavior and actions. One of the main roles of the change sponsor is to select the change agent, to lead the change or be the change “agent.” In the sense, that talented people must be put in charge of implementing it and

The author will employ a combination of two change theories. Kurt Lewis’ Unfreeze-Change-refreeze theory and John Kotter’s 8 Steps of leading change. A summary of the steps is attached below (Taner, R. 2015).

Book review by Pat Naughtin Harvard-Professor John P. Kotter has been observing the process of change for 30 years. He believes that there are critical differences between change efforts that have been successful, and change efforts that have failed. What interests him is why some people are able to get their organizations to change dramatically — while most do not. John P. Kotter writes: Over the past decade, I have watched more than a hundred companies try to remake themselves into significantly better competitors. They have included large organizations (Ford) and small ones (Landmark Communications), companies based in United States (General Motors) and elsewhere (British Airways), corporations that

Week 3, the lecture on Managing Change describes organizational changes that occur when a company makes a shift from its current state to some preferred future state. Managing organizational change is the process of planning and implementing change in organizations in such a way as to decrease employee resistance and cost to the organization while concurrently expanding the effectiveness of the change effort. Today's business environment requires companies to undergo changes almost constantly if they are to remain competitive. Students of organizational change identify areas of change in order to analyze them. A manager trying to implement a change, no matter how small, should expect to encounter some resistance from within the organization.

Introducing organisational change is often hard, the main reasons for that can be variation in perceptions of the employees, fear of disruption or failure and underlining the right approach to apply change. Then even if the change in a specific organisation is projected successfully there is still lot to be done to manage it in an appropriate way (Oakland, 2007).

In order to examine this issue further, this research will look at a number of different sources. Contemporary managerial sources are explored in order to understand how other voices in the field are describing similar methods for change. First, popular structures for change management are examined, especially within their correlation to Palmer & Dunford (2009). This is followed with an extensive

In a recent study of major change, it was found that employees are highly critical of even well thought-out attempts to communicate change and multiple communication channels are preferred when communicating a change vision, plan and process (Elving, 2005;

NASA had a firm hierarchy and this brought about a lot of resistance to change from people. NASA could have gotten more of the people involved in the changes. I find that by getting people involved and having some key people or champions to support the change, there is less resistance. People want to feel involved and a part of decisions, especially if it impacts them directly. When it comes to successful change management, get people involved earlier, which will contribute to greater buy in and acceptance. Keep in mind that this should not be the sole solution for employee resistance; successful change management is about understanding the true nature of the resistance.