CHANGE MANAGEMENT IN SMES

Change Management in SMEs



Change Management in SMEs

Introduction

One of the major issues facing the British SMEs is change management. Change management is not a new phenomenon. It is a fact that when there is a change in an organisation, employees tend to resist. It is not easy for them to accept the reality of change. This is why change management has emerged as the most debated issue within large and small organisations. This paper is divided into two parts. In Part A, a potential issue in a particular SME is analysed and discussed. In Part B, a personal reflection on learning experience is presented. For this paper, I have selected a British firm, essentially an SME, called XYZ Enterprise. The company is engaged in import and export of chemical dyes for British textile firms (Ancona, 2008, 34).

Part A: Change Management at XYZ Enterprises

The reason why I have selected this organisation is the fact that this particular firm is finding it difficult to manage change. In the past, the marketing operations were handled manually. After the company received complaints regarding late delivery of dyes, and increasing demand of the textile firms, the XYZ Enterprise is now considering overhauling of the existing manual system with the latest technology to streamline sales procedures. The employees are now resistant to change. The marketing and advertising teams of the company are not willing to work under the new setup. The targets have been revised. The company has decided to implement a new system, meant to monitor the performance of sales and marketing team on the day-to-day basis (Ancona, 2008, 34).

Discussion on Change Management

During the crisis, the main challenge for leaders is to mobilise the organisation to identify the challenges they face and develop adaptive capacity to face them. Same is the case with my organisation. At that time the leaders of my company were facing the challenge to mobilise the organisation. Difficult times are times of crisis, change and opportunity. They are not necessarily bad times. Hard times may be adverse or not depending on how you face it (Baron 2006 190). There are many companies that successfully make it through difficult times by using their ability to turn problems into opportunities and threats. When an organisation faces troubled times and having the adaptive problems to overcome, it faces the challenge of making radical changes in many of the habits and organisational practices (Mann 2008 73). This requires profound changes in the behaviour of many people within the organisation. An important feature of many adaptive problems is the difficulty of diagnosis and another is the difficulty of finding solutions (Baron 2007 25). Those cases do not come to understand what is happening or why they are the hardest. The task of leadership in times of crisis management is to create within the organisation a new culture, new values, new standards, new beliefs, and especially, new patterns of behaviour (Andrew, 2008, 17).

The change is in itself an adventure, is a risk, but ...