Week Three Activity

Develop and articulate ideas for describing leading change in an organisation of your choice.

 

 

Fan Jiajun, Clovis

 

This week I describe a change happened in my organization----an IELTS training institution. In 2009 leaders in this training centre started to sell online courses, who expanded our business from only in-class courses to both in-class and online ones. According to Fullan’s framework for leading changes, leaders in our organization demonstrated the five components in the following way:

 

Moral purpose: Leaders believed that introducing online courses could give teaching staff more opportunities to share their knowledge with students, could produce more profits and improve the institutional image for our organization, and could provide courses for more students who cannot afford our in-class courses. So this was a positive change which could benefit all stakeholders.

 

Understanding change: To ensure the successful implementation of this change, leaders collected relevant and useful information from both teaching and marketing departments, thus obtaining the details of the whole change process, from producing to publicizing and promoting the online courses. So they understood this change well.

 

Relationship building: Although leaders had paid attention to the establishment of good interpersonal relationships among teaching and marketing staff respectively, I still think that they should combine the two departments together and give the staff of the two departments some opportunities to exchange ideas about the online courses. Good relationship across departments could better benefit the introduction of the online courses to the market.

 

Knowledge creation and sharing: When the organizations introduced the online courses, we had not use the online platform for knowledge creation and sharing, which was used in 2010. At that time we teaching staff shared knowledge only by meeting once a week. I believe that currently we can create and share knowledge in a more effective and efficient way by using the online knowledge management platform.

 

Coherence making: When introducing the online courses to the market, leaders insisted on their strategies and led us teaching staff towards a clear direction to produce high-quality online courses to attract more customers not only in Shanghai, but also in other cities in China.