CHANGE MANAGEMENT

Change Management



Change Management

Introduction

The modern competitive, rapidly changing and highly complex business environment characterized by diminishing customer loyalty, the need to be market-focused and customer-centric is more critical than any other time in the past. It is highly imperative for every organization to retain and use valuable information about their customers to enhance their business strategies and product and service offerings. Gather information, change and innovation are most important assets of an organization. Consequently, change strategically must be a priority for any organization that wants to compete and win in the marketplace. Change begins with developing a strategic plan, implementing the strategy and assessing its effectiveness in the real world environment.

How you would create and encourage a suitable learning environment

The first step to creating an environment ripe for successful organizational change is to create a sense of urgency by evaluating problems and opportunities the company faces (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2008, p. 542). A sense of urgency can be created by introducing to employees concrete objects such as customer complaints that clearly demonstrate the need for change. This opinion is supported by McShane and von Glinow (2008, p. 492) who state, “Another way to fuel the urgency of change is by putting employees into direct contact with customers. Dissatisfied customers represent a compelling driving force for change because of the adverse consequences for the organization's survival and success.” Further support is offered by Gilley et. al, who argues that giving employees access to customer satisfaction data can facilitate urgency because the information is tangible rather than intangible as would be a speech given by management (Barlow & Møller, 1996, p. 38; Gilley et al., p. 90).

Alternatively, some organizations create urgency by restructuring the organization. For example, after Dollar General Stores reported its first ever loss in 1986, the company's Chief executive officer, fired 200 of the top 300 executives to show management that the company was committed to organizational change (Barkin, Nahirny, & van Metre, 1998). In both instances, the genesis of change is based on employees seeing some action that influences their feelings; the new feelings then become the budding agent of change.

Some employees are unaware of the extent of dissatisfaction customers may feel towards the company. In the book, Organizational behavior, a story relating to Shell Europe is given in which employees are taken out to talk with customers to observe the business from customer perspectives as the company found that managers were ignorant of the fact that the company was neither meeting financial nor customer satisfaction goals (McShane & von Glinow, 2008, p. 492). Upon learning of such customer complaints, employees may exhibit a range of behaviors that include complacency, self-protection, pessimism, and rigidity (Kotter & Schlesinger, 2008, p. 132).

The aforementioned behaviors, regardless of whether or not driven by anger, fear or panic all lead to similar consequences, namely a short-circuiting of the proposed change initiative. The use of concrete examples, as indicated above may circumvent such emotions to the extent that the information ...