The change initiative involves concerted efforts at all levels. Top management and the board of directors are as important as change agents, sponsors, steering committees and the general public.
The key roles in the organizational change process include:
The initiator of change : Organizations often understand the need for change only if they suffer some profound damage. Losses may be a decline in sales, a departure from key personnel, a decline in market share or a loss of important customers to competitors. Often, changes occur when someone in an organization responds to it. Events and signals indicate that changes are needed.
Change agent : Change agents are responsible for driving and implementing changes throughout the organization. The change agent can be an external consultant or an internal consultant. In fact, different individuals or teams may take up this role at different stages of the change process. For example, if a change management task is outsourced to an external consultant, he will act as the initial change agent. However, when the project team began to work on the consultant's recommendations, team leaders became the change agents. Basically, change drivers at different stages drive change by strengthening the need for change and supporting the reasons for change.
Official sponsorship team : Typically, the organization will identify the team or department to formally coordinate the change process. In large organizations, the sponsor may be a human resources department or an IT department. In smaller organizations, the senior leadership team can play this role.
Finally, although changes are made at the ground level, top management needs to guide them. The role of top management is critical to ensuring that the initiative does not lose focus or be distressed due to operational or incentive issues.
The role of senior management
Change can "achieve or destroy" an organization. Change will never take care of yourself. The change was initially difficult but extremely stable. These are the three basic facts of organizational change.
Although after the initial negative phase, people will eventually adapt to change, the transition phase is difficult. This is where senior management can help. As we have seen, change is initiated by someone who is deeply affected by the organizational crisis and is moving forward by agents and sponsors. However, the success of the change is quite satisfactory in the hands of senior management. Depending on the structure of the organization, the work is delegated to different levels of staff depending on the level of complexity involved. Therefore, the board of directors can oversee the CEO, the CEO oversees the executive assistant, and the executive assistant delegates the work to the middle management until it returns to the entry level supervisor.
Top management has played an important role in setting the mood for change. It not only plays a key role in conveying the vision and accompanying goals, but it also plays an important role in objectively setting goals and eliminating results to achieve change. People are deeply influenced by the behavior of their superiors. Here, leaders themselves need to absorb the expected behaviors required by change to ensure that they incur such behavior among others.
Senior management teams can strengthen the agenda for change by using their power positions or external links, even through the media, but extremely practical progress can only be achieved by working with workers. Similarly, top management must generate a sense of collective responsibility. The key to instilling this attitude is to really value workers and their role throughout the process. Nothing is more exciting than knowing that your employer has been recognized and appreciated by the company. Adopting a culture that spans a hierarchy, treating all people equally, prioritizing organizational goals over individual goals, is seen as a symbolic act that represents the need for change and the value assigned to it. Therefore, many of them are within the capabilities of top management in issuing the right signals to drive change.
Late, I noticed a brand of shampoo, its products [read: bottles] with signatures and small pictures of the hair experts they worked with to create the product. What are they doing? In my opinion, they are working hard to increase the credibility of the product and let more people start to trust the brand. Similarly, "promoting" change to people requires what I call "reputation management". This is the main responsibility of the senior management team. Top management not only needs to communicate the vision of change, it also needs to link vision to business needs and show how change will affect profit, productivity or quality of work life. Equally important is that management can effectively address the existing gap between the current situation and the expected situation, and show people a strong, reasonable and well-planned strategy - a blueprint for success. Next, it is very important to implement driving quickly. Once people are convinced of this strategy, top management needs to quickly "take action". The faster your strategy takes action, the sooner they may succeed. It's like a "buzzer - round quiz game", the faster you hit the buzzer, the more chances you have to win. On the other hand, you probably know the perfect answer, but if you don't hit the buzzer on time, it really doesn't work! Even with a perfect strategy, immediate action can become a buzzword. With every success, you will be closer to your vision and improve your credibility, so people will usually follow you voluntarily.
Another important observation is that during organizational change, people's resistance is directly proportional to the threats posed by change. Change challenges the status quo and claims that people are taking risks out of their comfort zone. This means giving up "the way things are done" and embracing a range of potentially better conditions. But while change has potential benefits, it is always abhorrent at first. It is accompanied by concerns about unemployment, role shifts, reporting changes, and so on, until people lose their anxiety and suspicion, and they have little reason to think constructively. In order to maximize the benefits of change, top management must minimize the threat of change. Many times, many concerns may actually be groundless, because solving these problems at the top level means reliably placing unnecessary fears On one side, to avoid valuable losses caused by stress and mental anxiety.
Therefore, we talked about the top management's responsibility in the vision sharing, developing collective responsibility, managing credibility, eliminating meaningless concerns, setting goals, setting goals and leading by example, but we still haven't talked about it. Listen, because this is very important...
Now think about it: How quickly did you ignore the last four words in the previous paragraph, and look forward to stumble upon a great management secret in the next paragraph?
In addition to expectations, the simplest fact that top management needs to understand about communication change is that it is important to listen. Just as most of us will miss the information in these four words and hope to follow more things, management often ignores the concerns of employees and tends to advocate rather than listen. Often, issues that employees are concerned about may raise issues that need to be included in your change management plan. Top management teams need to be aware that their communication with the organization is conducted as an interactive meeting rather than a one-way meeting. Don't rush to explain how big the change will be, or provide examples of how people survived early changes and how they do the same thing again. On the contrary, acknowledging change is difficult and each issue deserves attention. A firm agenda, but sensitive to the issue. From there, the secret of effective communication is to listen carefully, because only when you listen, can you respond appropriately. Only when you respond appropriately can you effectively solve employee problems, and only by doing so can minimize the threat to change and maximize the productivity of change. So take time, listen and follow employees. Individuals, special needs or issues when dealing with changes.
Rather than promoting a "new work system" better than the "old work system", senior management can try the "paper-opposing-integration" approach to communicate change. "Thesis - Opposition - Synthesis" is a philosophy, usually related to the 19th century German thinker GWF Hegel, who believes that historical evolution is the result of conflicts. In short, the paper is a statement. Opposition is a counter-statement. Obviously, the thesis and the opposition are contradictory or mutually antagonistic. Integration means providing a higher level solution to this conflict by combining the positives of the paper and the opposite. Then, the synthesis forms a new argument, and the paper encounters opposition in time and solves it at the next higher level through another synthesis. This philosophy is often used to explain Hegel's dialectic about the evolution of history.
How to apply it to organizational change? In our context, let us use the status quo as a thesis. and so...
Orignal From: CEO's role in change management
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