Week 3 activity

Reflection on Fullan’s framework for leadership

                                                                                      by Dai Xiaoxiao, Cindy

What can we learn from this framework? What are the implications in the workplace?

According to Fullan, change is too complex to be controlled, and instead needs to be understood and “disrupted” in desired directions. The more complex society gets, the more sophisticated leadership must become. Complexity means not only change, but rapidly occurring, unpredictable, and nonlinear change.

For achiever an effective leadership, the manager need pay attention to what is happening within the organization; focus on building the five core components: moral purpose, understanding change, relationship building, knowledge creation and sharing and coherence making. Moreover, the leader should have enthusiasm, energy and hope to let all the employees”feel that even difficult problem can be tackled productively”.

As far as I am concerned, this framework is ideal for an effective leadership, if a leader follow every step and perform quite well in each step, it would be excellent. However, as the author said, change always can be very complicated; many unpredictable things might happen during the change, it is not easy for a leader to control every step, like people’s emotion. Something may be hidden and influence people’s work gradually.

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

Moral purpose: means acting with the intention of making a positive difference in the lives of employees. As I talked about the change of personnel in our department, both the previous manager and the Brunch manager have told us one month before. We’ve already prepared.

Understanding change: Fullan said that understanding the change process is exceedingly elusive. It could be effective if the leader have right kinds of sensitivity to implementation of initiatives. Reculturing is an element that would leads to success.

Relationship building: According to Fullan, his basic premise is thatt if relationships improve, things get better, if they remain the same or get worse, ground is lost. Thus leaders must be consummate relationship builders with diverse people and groups, especially with people different from themselves. So in my situation, if they organize some activities in our department, we join together with the new colleague, which may facilitate the relationship building.

Knowledge creation and sharing: Knowledge creation and sharing requires a collaborative culture. According to Fullan,

•People will not voluntarily share knowledge unless they feel some moral commitment to do so;

•People will not share unless the dynamics of change favor exchange;

•Data without relationships merely cause more information glut – turning information into knowledge is a social process, and for that you need good relationships

In HSBC, the branch manager organizes a morning meeting and an afternoon meeting every day for all the employees. He encourages them to share knowledge with each other and he also gives some suggestions.

Coherence making: Organizations and processes of change are highly complex. Every situation will have its own unique structures, personalities, relationships, and cultures. It is very important for the leaders to make coherence in the workplace. In my situation, I don’t think the manager made effective coherence, because when the new colleague came with some knowledge of our department, but she was not familiar with the onging project and some details, we need always answer her questions and spend time telling her details, it increased the other employee’s burden.