Week 3 Activities-Sophie

Develop and articulate ideas for describing leading changes in an organization of your choice.

For personal opinions, the majority of people do not like change not only for the reluctant to taking extra efforts, but also results from the afraid of uncertain future. However, the case is that we have to make changes every now and then in order to adapt to the dynamic environment.

Start to making changes seems easy but it is much harder to maintain its effects. Thus, setting up a decent long term plan to explore, leverage the change is necessary.

According to Fullan’s framework, making change could be divided into 5 different parts for leaders.

1. Moral purpose

I was in marketing department and one of our responsibilities is collecting the intended users’ opinion on our coming events and makes analysis. The manager tries to introduce a new way of connecting customers to improve the effectiveness and new format of reporting to make it clearer.

2. Understanding Change

The leaders should be clear about the whole process as well as the details of implementing changes. The process should cover from how to start changes to maintain the effect of changes. Further strategies would be made on the leaders’ understandings on the change.

3. Building relationships

Good relationships within the team could help introducing changes and decreasing barriers. People tend to accept opinions of people they like and familiar. Therefore, a cohesive team is easier to conduct change. Besides, leaders need to build relationships within the team to share the values, interests to make changes to improve performance.

4. Knowledge creation and sharing

People are the holders of knowledge and knowledge is one of the most valuable assets. Building a culture of creating & sharing knowledge could involve everyone in improving performance and thus make changes more smoothly.

5. Coherence making

In an organization, there must be conflicts and complexity. As a consequence, leaders must be able to balance the conflicts and make everyone work together to the same direction to achieve the same goal.

Although I have just spent about half a year for my internship in the MMI, I also faced a change in this period, which is about changing the format of reporting and contracting intended consumers. The manager was asked by senior managers to improve the effectiveness. He first talked with people from other divisions that need to use the results produced by the marketing department to ask for their requirements. Next, he organized meetings within the marketing department to work out the solutions. Through a series of team building activities, the manager achieved to conduct the change and get applauded by staff form both the marketing departments and other departments.