Rationale And Issues That Occurs When Managers Read A Popular Book By A Management Guru

Foreword by Spenser Johnson: One the surface, the story of this book appears to be a fable that is relatively easy to grasp, but it does subtly impart an invaluable lesson on change. The book covers John Kotter’s Eight Steps to bring about successful organizational change and can be equally useful for a high-school student as it is for a CEO of a multi-national organization.

Step 2 is forming a powerful guiding coalition. Leadership will have to be on board and on the same page in regards to the change. Kotter and Cohen reveal the core problems people face when leading change. Their main findings are that the central issue concerns not structure or systems but behavior and how to alter it (Farris, 2008). The success of the changes will depend on the ability of the managers to show their commitment to change and motivate the employees to do the same. Without any process to track the implementation, the change can also fail.

Managing Change: The Art of Balancing“ by Jeanie Daniel Duck [1] came out in the Harvard Business Review in November 1993. It is an influential article, one that has been cited 437 times until date. Duck draws upon her years of experience as a Vice President in the Chicago Office of the Boston Consulting Group and of running her own consulting firm that focused on the emotional and behavioral impact of change on corporate performance. She can be safely called both, a management consultant as well as an organization development consultant. Presented below is a summary and key points of the article supplemented by examples, views and facts gleaned from other sources as well.

The chapter focuses on putting it all together: integrating everything learned about organizations and leadership into more comprehensive and powerful understanding and action. The reframing process illustrated in the chapter can be applied to almost any case or experience: students’ personal cases, published cases, films or fiction, or class experiences (role plays, experiential activities, team experiences, the course). Instructors can, for example, have students study a challenging case (multiple suggestions are offered elsewhere in this instructor’s guide) and then, either individually or in teams, reframe to develop both diagnoses and solutions. Individuals or groups will differ in what they see and what

Today’s companies are challenged by frequent changes in market demands and consumers’ desires for new products and services. Companies which fail to adapt to these changing conditions often find themselves struggling to survive. This is the situation for the Texas Plant, as described in the case study by Pryor, Humphreys, and Taneja (2011). The Vice President, Human Resources Director, and Organizational Development Manager find themselves not only facing the struggles of transforming the Texas Plant, but also the difficulties of working together to achieve it. The following paper describes these difficulties and examines how the actions of the leaders impacted the change process. Recommendations to assist the plant’s leadership in moving forward will be offered.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to use the course concepts to expand upon the topic of leadership styles. I will define leadership and management; explain how the two play a role during organizational change management and how this information can be used by practicing managers. Lewin’s change model combined with Kotter’s eight step change model will be used to present an understanding of and emphasize the importance of leadership through the stages of change.

In general, we are familiar with the quote managers do things right while leaders do the right things. In essence, the analytical versus the holistic approach of leadership addresses these two separate and distinct functions within an organization. For instance, a manager focuses on the daily operations of an organization with an emphasis on team delivery, budgeting, and supervising the employees. Contrarily, leaders within an organization focus their time on improvements and innovation. In particular, leaders can perform this function since they are not culpable for routine tasks and mired in the minutia. As a result, there is a misnomer that managers are leaders and leaders remain managers, but they are not exclusive. Therefore, being a manager and a leader requires different abilities and dispositions.

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.

Implementing Organizational Change: Theory into Practice, Third Edition, by Bert Spector. Published by Prentice Hall. Copyright © 2013 by Pearson Education Inc.

One strength good leaders bring is to switch their leadership styles depending on the situation (Darling & Heller, 2012). This is like situational leadership and it is important in organizational change as well. Situational Leadership is a model designed by Dr. Paul Hershey in the 1960s which focuses on how managers can develop competencies to diagnose, adapt, communicate, and advance the situation they are in (The Center for Leadership Studies, n.d.). Hershey stresses the importance of relationship of the approach of the leader and the readiness of the followers for a specific task (The Center for Leadership Studies, n.d.). This is the same as a change manager. Although dominant forces are often the initial go-to for change managers, good change managers must assess the situation and apply the needed ideal change manager to the situation. Because of this, regardless of the dominant change manager, it behooves an effective organizational leader to understand the different images of change and how they can influence a change’s successful

Richard Dana Associates (RDA) was brought in by the owners of a family-owned business with complex relationship issues at a time preceding an anticipated leadership transition. Following individual and group coaching sessions, RDA was able to help the leadership separate personal issues, and codify practices through formal policies to allow the leadership group to focus on business issues without personal complications. At the end of RDA's engagement, the client was well-positioned to begin developing a transition plan.

In this individual assignment, reading material including the different ways companies innovate, re-energize a mature organization, and change corporate culture provide the basis for analyzing British Airways’ (BA) transformation and the difficulties encountered in making an organizational change. Identification of critical factors leading to British Airways successful transformation as well as steps, sequence, and risks taken to transform the organization and personal assessment is provided for this case study.

As organizations change, leadership must find ways to adapt and adjust to those changes. Many times it’s the inability of being open-minded to new ideas, beliefs, thoughts and cultures that prevent individuals from moving forward. Saner (2004) states, “Increased globalization and integration of information technology have brought about a fundamental rethinking of how to conduct business and how to lead a complex organization for continuous improvement and reinventing of the organization” (p.654). In any organization, change brings resistance, but with positive managerial and leadership skills, accepting the challenges that come with diversity such as ambiguity, complexity, resistance and confusion, will give managers the foresight to effectively and efficiently implement processes that will benefit the organization as a whole.

Organization development grew out of the human relations traditions of the 1940s and 1950s, and it has had enormous influence on management practices and thinking about how organizational effectiveness can be achieved. Critical manpower and resource shortages faced by all organizations, public and private, during World War II and in the immediate post-war years stimulated a search by social scientist and managers, separately and in cooperation with one another, for effective means to maximize the utilization of existing individual and organizational resources. (Ritcher, I 2007). Organization Development was by tradition about planned change efforts, instituted to enhance organization effectiveness within the context of the traditional, hierarchical, management-as-experts, top-down era. The legacy of leaders and organizations developed in this context remain. Organizational Development is about how organizations and people function and how to get them to function better. Organization transformation signals the need to transform mindsets, engage people and make the deep shift to the ongoing mutual learning environment needed for the long-lasting change characteristic of our world today.