Change Management Experts - Essay Example

CHANGE MANAGEMENT Change Analysis Paper ‘Images’ …………………….. ………………………… …………… Introduction ‘Change’ is perhaps one of the extremely important strategic initiatives that a manager is responsible to take in volatile environments as a reaction to external threats or as proactive attempt to seize opportunities and manage the environments (Thompson, 1993, p. 697). The way managers take strategic initiatives to implement changes and their ‘change management’ efforts can be perceived through either the image of ‘management as control’ or the image of ‘management as shaping’. The change management is not an entirely different management system, but rather, it necessarily encompasses a number of managerial functions like direction, planning, organizing, coordinating and controlling. Similarly, managing change is about ‘shaping an organization’ as it involves people to be participated in the change process, with sufficient knowledge and thus it resembles to shaping the behavior of the people involved. Change management, as viewed through these two images, results six images namely director, navigator, caretaker, coach, interpreter, and nurturer (Palmer, Dunford and Akin, 2009, p. 24). Application Analysis Change management experts deal with controlling the organization or shaping it, and their functions are may be intended, or partially intended or unintended. Guiding or directing the people in an organization towards a strategic change is thus part of managerial function, called control. Management is often termed as control and control is management (Swayne, Duncan and Ginter, 2006, p. 26), because, at the heart of managing is controlling the behavior or outcome of the processes, programs or plans. From the Semco case study detailed in the text book ((Palmer, Dunford and Akin, 2009, p. 34), few things need to be highlighted. 1) emphasizing staff empowerment to engage in decisions, 2) its successful way to digital without a strategy, 3) employees, with interests and initiatives shaped a different organizational culture and 4) ability to change with just an announcement of top-down direction. The Semco case shows that its change management process, from being a manufacturing company to a ‘digital’ business, was largely influenced by some of the change images like direction, coach, navigator etc. The change management team in Semco has been successful to direct the origination in to specific cultural background, to navigate managerial functions by putting cross functional teams in place, to coach the entire organization to inculcate a culture that employees are free to engage in decisions and to interpret by helping the employees to be sensible of its transformation from manufacturing to a ‘digital company. A manager is place of implementing change may have to play different vital roles at different stages of the change process. The change manage is thus often a director who directs the entire organization and its people towards making them highly involved I achieving the goals. Similarly, he may be care-taker when his managerial activities are occurred unintentionally. In cases of partially intended activities, the change manager may take form of a navigator as well. The change manager is one who shapes the organization or structures it, and he becomes a Coach if he shapes the organization through intentional managerial functions. He may take form of an interpreter with partially intended activities or nurturer with unintended activities. Lessons Learned The change management process is basically an approach to take strategic managerial initiatives. Managing change happens in two different domains, management as control function and management as shaping the organization. When it is viewed through ‘control’ aspect, the change manager may be a 1) Director, who is able to direct his organization to achieving a specific goal of implementing a change or transforming the organization to a newer shape, or 2- Navigator, who will achieve some intended change outcomes, or 3- Care-taker, who brings strategic planning, rules, regulations and form centralized practices. When it is viewed through ‘Management as shaping, the change manager may be a - 1- Coach, who is intentionally able to shape the capabilities of the organization to a specific way, 2- Interpreter, who creates sense of various organizational events and activities among the people, 3- Nurturer, who is able to facilitate organizational qualities to enable positive self-organizing and characterized by close relation that future outcomes are nurtured (Palmer, Dunford and Akin, 2009, p. 24- 38). References Palmer, Dunford and Akin, 2009, Managing Organizational Change: A Multiple Perspectives Approach, Second Edition, McGraw Hill Companies Swayne, L.E, Duncan, W. J and Ginter, P. M, 2006, Strategic management of health care organizations, Fifth illustrated edition, Wiley-Blackwell Thompson, J.L, 1993, Strategic management: awareness and change, Illustrated second edition, Taylor & Francis CHANGE MANAGEMENT Change Analysis Paper ‘Vision’ Your name …………………….. Course ………………………… Date of submission …………… Vision, mission and strategy A clear vision and mission statement, as critical elements to the organizational success, can enable an organization to analyze the organizational performance. The change process and strategic management practices to implement changes necessarily involve designing and developing a vision and communicating it to the people so that change managers can make people believe that they can get over all the fences (Ventris, 2004, p. 73). Vision, mission and strategy thus play significant roles in aligning strategy and change management process. As Kotter emphasized, an effective vision must be able to guide decision making process (Palmer, Dunford and Akin, 2009, p. 253). An effective mission statement can always help achieve organizational goals and strategies because a mission statement is more purposive and instrumental to realizing what particular things to be carried out. The strategy is an organizational approach to implementing the vision and communicating mission statement more effectively. Application Analysis Organizations that lack sound ‘vision’ is very vulnerable to failure (Palmer, Dunford and Akin, 2009, p. 250), because, communicating vision is critical to take strategic moves, create a positive environment that people are involved in the proposed change process. The vision, strategic managerial activities and new behaviors need to be communicated in a variety of ways like role modeling, formal communication, promotion decision etc (Cameron and Green, 2004, p. 217). Vision has been highly critical factor to the success of change and development at Mentor Graphics, as detailed in the text (Palmer, Dunford and Akin, 2009, p. 280). The company designed its unique vision as ‘Build something that people will buy’ and it accordingly developed its business ways in competing with others and thus to create a sustainable competitive advantage. Palmer, Dunford and Akin (2009) described how vision and organizational change links each other. They found three basic arguments regarding it. Whether vision drives change or emerge in during a change, whether it helps or hinders the change and whether it is attributed to heroic leaders or to organization (p. 269). When change management is viewed through the image of director, vision can be viewed as most critical to producing successful change within the organization and this shows how both vision and change links each other. Vision, as detailed above, drives changes because; a change proposal must be communicated to the people (Palmer, Dunford and Akin, 2009, p. 250). When it comes to the case of Mentor Graphics, Vision has played pivotal role in ensuring critical growth and also in building market leadership with its ‘six boxes’ vision. At Mentor Graphics, the director image of the change can be applied because vision has been driving changes and vision was something highly important to produce successful change outcomes in the organization. As far as Navigator image of the change is concerned, vision is some thing important and not necessarily to be able to be achieved (Palmer, Dunford and Akin, 2009, p. 250). As Parlmer (2005) stressed, vision can hinder companies when those companies are developed based on sense-making processes that are linked to current or future practices of same feature (p. 248). When change is viewed through the image of Caretaking, Vision is often immaterial to the way that change is processed and change may not always be the outcome of visionary actions. Vision is a force-field that generates energy to put vision in to action (Crosby and Bryson, 2005, p. 57), enable strategic changes (Cameron and Green, 2004, p. 217) and facilitates organizational change (Holland, p. 223), and therefore vision always helps changes. Based on various literatures, Palmer, Dunford and Akin (2009) found that vision is more attributable to the heroic leaders as well as to organizations. Vision links with the Coach image of change as vision is more likely to be emerged through the facilitation skills of the change, with the image of interpreter as vision is the ability to articulate the organizational voices and with the image of Nurturer as vision is emerging from some unpredictable change forces (Palmer, Dunford and Akin, 2009, 252). Lessons Learned Vision is critical to organizational success. Many organizations have failed in managing changes and implementing strategies because it lacked a sound and clear vision. Vision is directly and closely linked to change management because, vision drives changes and helps changes (Crosby and Bryson, 2005, p. 57).. Even though there are arguments regarding whether vision drives change or emerges during a change process and whether it helps or hinders changes, the first two arguments in each case seems to be stronger, due to that many literatures have emphasized that vision drives changes and it always helps changes. References Cameron, E and Green, M, 2004, Making sense of change management: a complete guide to the models, tools & techniques of organizational change, Illustrated edition, Kogan Page Publishers Crosby, B. C and Bryson, J. M, 2005, Leadership for the common good: tackling public problems in a shared-power world, Second illustrated edition, John Wiley and Sons Holland, W. E, (nd), Change Is the Rule: Practical Actions for Change on Target, on Time, on Budget, WinHope Press, dba Holland & Davis, Palmer, I (2005), Managing Org. Change, Tata McGraw-Hill Palmer, I, Dunford, R and Akin, G, 2009, Managing Organizational Change: A Multiple Perspectives Approach, Second Edition, McGraw Hill Companies Ventris, G, 2004, Successful change management: the fifty key facts, Continuum International Publishing Group Read More