Week 2: Model of Change- Lisa

 

Identify a model of change to help explain change within an organization you have experienced.

Liu Meng , Lisa

 

The period of my internship in HSBC witnessed changes of internal tutor programs about professional knowledge, especially in SAS programming skills. The Kotter’s Eight Step Change Model is able to effectively describe such changes.

 

1.       Increase urgency for changes

-Convince the employees and interns that the changes are essential for the company to perform better. This also means that such changes are achievable without any detrimental influence on the original job.

 

2.       Build a team for the change

-Gather some respected employee, which are excellent in SAS programming skills, to form a team within the company.

 

3.       Construct the vision

-Show clear directions to the employees and interns how improving the skills can benefit their jobs in the future.

 

4.       Communicate

-In order to carry out the changes effectively, communications between the leaders and employees are necessary. Only in that way can the changes be fully understood by employees.

 

5.      Empower

-Empower employees to execute the changes.

 

6.      Create short term goals

-During the process of this tutor program, short term goals are created for the employees to ensure their progress. There are also some rewards to arouse their interests.

 

7.      Be persistent

-Persistence is important because more changes should be influenced even after short term tutor goals are met.

 

8.      Make the change permanent

-The tutor program proved to be successful finally, which is part of the company’s culture and practices now.

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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.

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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.

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Week 3 Fullan's Framework for Leading Change

 

 

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

 

 

Fan Jiajun, Clovis

 

Fullan’s framework for leading change reveals that in order to successfully implement and manage change in an organization, leaders, who work with enthusiasm, energy, and hope, must act on the following five components for leading positive changes:

 

Moral purpose: It is important for leaders to consider the benefits of all the staff, the organization and the society as a whole when they decide to implement changes. The changes made should have a favorable impact on all the stakeholders.

 

Understanding change: In order to manage the whole change, leaders should know the process in great detail. Detailed strategies and projects should be designed according to the leaders’ deep understanding of the change process.

 

Relationship building: Good interpersonal relationships can help organizations implement changes smoothly and successfully because changes are normally achieved by the efforts of all staff rather than those of leaders alone. Leaders, who are skilled at building good relationships among colleagues, tend to motivate staff to follow changes and to manage changes in organizations well.

Knowledge creation and sharing: In the current knowledge economy, knowledge has become the most valuable asset in organizations. Leaders who have realized to capitalize on the power of knowledge are more likely to manage changes successfully. Creating an organizational culture which advocates creating, sharing, and learning knowledge among staff can provide a solid foundation for implementing changes.

Coherence making: Complexity and contradiction inevitably exist in organizations. Leaders should be capable of handling complex and contradictory situations and lead colleagues to work and learn towards a correct direction during the period of implementing change.

 
Leaders in my organization----an IELTS training institution, have demonstrated that they have three of the above five components, namely moral purpose, understanding change, and coherence making when they managed previous changes during the last several years. Therefore, it is of great importance for these leaders to develop their capabilities of building relationships and creating an atmosphere for sharing knowledge. As a foreign language training institution, the success of my organization largely depends on the quality and performance of our teaching staff. So the relationships among teachers and between teachers and the management and the knowledge of teachers are the most important elements in my organization. When implementing changes, our leaders can attach more importance to the aspects of relationship building and knowledge sharing.



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Week 2 Activity - Sophie

The Satir Change Model

The Satir Change Model  is a five-stage change model that describes the effects each stage has on feelings, thinking, performance, and physiology. By refering to this model, people can improve how to process change and how to help others process change.

Stage 1: Late Status Quo

At this stage, the group is at a familiar place and stable relationships give members a sense of belonging and identity. Members know what to expect, how to react, and how to behave.

However, poor communication lead to a dysfunctional group. Members use blaming, placating cope with feelings like anger and guilt. Stress may lead to physical symptoms such as headaches and gastrointestinal pain that create an unexplainable increase in absenteeism.

Caught in a web of dysfunctional concepts, the members whose opinions count the most are unaware of the imbalance between the group and its environment. New information and concepts from outside the group can open members up to the possibility of improvement.

Stage 2: Resistance

The group confronts a foreign element that requires a response. Often imported by a small minority seeking change, this element brings the members whose opinions count the most face to face with a crucial issue.

A foreign element threatens the stability of familiar power structures. Most members resist by denying its validity, avoiding the issue, or blaming someone for causing the problem. These blocking tactics are accompanied by unconscious physical responses, such as shallow breathing and closed posture.

Members in this stage need help opening up, becoming aware, and overcoming the reaction to deny, avoid or blame.

Stage 3: Chaos

The group enters the unknown.  Old expectations may no longer be valid; old reactions may cease to be effective; and old behaviors may not be possible.

The loss of belonging and identity triggers anxiousness and vulnerability. Managers of groups experiencing chaos should plan for group performance to plummet during this stage. Until the members accept the foreign element, members form only halfhearted relationships with each other. Chaos is the period of erratic performance that mirrors the search for a beneficial relationship to the foreign element.

All members in this stage need help focusing on their feelings, acknowledging their fear, and using their support systems. Management needs special help avoiding any attempt to short circuit this stage with magical solutions. The chaos stage is vital to the transformation process.

Stage 4: Integration

The members discover a transforming idea that shows how the foreign element can benefit them. The group becomes excited. New relationships emerge that offer the opportunity for identity and belonging. With practice, performance improves rapidly.

Awareness of new possibilities enables authorship of new rules that build functional reactions, expectations, and behaviors. Members may feel euphoric and invincible, as the transforming idea may be so powerful that it becomes a panacea.

Members in this stage need more support than might be first thought. They can become frustrated when things fail to work perfectly the first time. Although members feel good, they are also afraid that any transformation might mysteriously evaporate disconnecting them from their new relationships and plunging them back into chaos. The members need reassurance and help finding new methods for coping with difficulties.

Stage 5: New Status Quo

If the change is well conceived and assimilated, the group and its environment are in better accord and performance stabilizes at a higher level than in the Late Status Quo.

A healthy group is calm and alert. Members are centered with more erect posture and deeper breathing. They feel free to observe and communicate what is really happening. A sense of accomplishment and possibility permeates the atmosphere.

In this stage, the members continue to need to feel safe so they can practice. Everyone, manager and members, needs to encourage each other to continue exploring the imbalances between the group and its environment so that there is less resistance to change.

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