Reflect on how change management is handled in your professional life. How is this related to strategic management principles? Explain your answer and provide an example. Practicum Project Preparation: Explain how your project goals align with the mission and vision of your organization
Write a journal entry of 750-1,500 words on the subject of authority, including the following:
Practicum Activities Reflection: Provide observations and thoughts on the activities in your practicum setting during Weeks 3-4.
Application of Leadership: Reflect on how change management is handled in your professional life. How is this related to strategic management principles? Explain your answer and provide an example.
Practicum Project Preparation: Explain how your project goals align with the mission and vision of your organization, as well as with the organizational needs. Is it important that these align? Provide your rationale.
Leadership Video Reflection: Reflect on at least two things you learned from the “Servant Leadership – Issue of Authority” video.
Although it is sometimes called the soft side of change, managing the people side of a change is often the most challenging and critical component of an organizational transformation.
Consider a merger or acquisition. The technical side of the change is certainly complex. You must work out the financial arrangements of the deal, integrate business systems, make decisions about the new organization’s structure, and more. But getting people on board and participating in the merger or acquisition can make the difference between success and failure.
Why? Individuals will need to perform their jobs differently. The degree to which they change their behaviors and adopt new processes has a significant impact on the initiative. This is why the soft side of change can be the harder side of change. Fortunately, you can apply a structured approach to managing the people side of change and make a big impact on overall success.
Change management addresses the people side of change. Creating a new organization, designing new work processes, and implementing new technologies may never see their full potential if you don’t bring your people along. That’s because financial success depends on how thoroughly individuals in the organization embrace the change.
Change management is the application of a structured process and set of tools for leading the people side of change to achieve a desired outcome. Ultimately, change management focuses on how to help people engage, adopt and use a change in their day-to-day work.
When defining change management, we recognize it as both a process and a competency.
The change management process enables practitioners within organizations to leverage and scale the change management activities that help impacted individuals and groups move through their transitions. The Prosci Methodology includes a robust, research-based process called the Prosci 3-Phase Process:
During Phase 1 – Prepare Approach, we ask and answer:
During Phase 2 – Manage Change, we ask and answer:
And during Phase 3 – Sustain Outcomes, we ask and answer:
At the organizational level, change management is a leadership competency for enabling change within an organization. It is also a strategic capability designed to increase the change capacity and responsiveness of the organization.
For senior leaders, change management competency means being able to lead change for the organization, including being an effective sponsor of change and demonstrating commitment to the change, both individually and organizationally. For people managers working with front-line employees, competency relates to effectively coaching direct reports through their change journeys. Although competency varies according your relationship to change, organizations are more effective and successful when they build change management competencies throughout their ranks.
Change management is not just communication and training. Nor is it simply managing resistance. Effective change management follows a structured process and employs a holistic set of tools to drive successful individual and organizational change.
There are numerous reasons to employ effective change management on both large- and small-scale efforts. Here are three main reasons:
It is easy to think about change only from an organizational perspective. When you consider a merger or acquisition, you might focus on financial structuring, data and systems integration, and physical location changes. However, organizational change of any kind occurs one person at a time. That is because an organization-wide change only occurs when Andre, Becky, Carlos and Dharma do their jobs differently.
Organizations don’t change, people do. It is the cumulative impact of successful individual change that brings about successful organizational change. If individuals don’t make changes to their day-to-day work, an organizational transformation effort will not deliver results.
Poorly managing or ignoring the people side of change has many consequences:
Projects also suffer from missed deadlines, budget overruns, rework and even abandonment. These consequences have tangible impacts on project health and the organization. Fortunately, you can mitigate these issues when you deploy a structured approach to the people side of change.