Leadership and Change

 
 

It is important for the leader to understand the process of change and be an example. Leader must craft an appealing vision. Once developed, the leader must implement the change. This could be done through intellectual stimulation, whereby the leader sets challenging goals for the employees and motivates them to rethink old ways of doing business. Here it's important that leader also lives the vision and he does what he/she expects the staff to do. Top management needs to provide adequate resources and shall remove any obstacle that might come in the way. There is also a Need of showing the progress though achievement of short term victories that lead to long tem success.

Role of Leadership in bringing Change

At an organizational level, a change management plan means defining and implementing the best strategic and tactical plans to deal with changes in the business environment and to profit from those opportunities. It is common for leadership teams to focus their attention on creating the best strategic and tactical plans, failing to consider the human side of change management. Failing to address the human side of change can be costly.

It is important for the leader to understand the process of change and be an example. Leader must craft an appealing vision. Once developed, the leader must implement the change. This could be done through intellectual stimulation, whereby the leader sets challenging goals for the employees and motivates them to rethink old ways of doing business. Here it's important that leader also lives the vision and he does what he/she expects the staff to do. Top management needs to provide adequate resources and shall remove any obstacle that might come in the way. There is also a Need of showing the progress though achievement of short term victories that lead to long tem success.

Here are a few practices that could help in creating a solid foundation for successful change.

Involve the Stakeholders

Change is something people at the workplace would get unsettled with, no matter what level they are at. It is for the leadership to be a model in the situation and provide guideline and support while the change occurs. It is more about adopting the new approach then directing them, this will help in the due motivation and would be a challenge for the rest of the Organisation. An Important ingridient to successful change efforts in introduction of flexibility at work, it may be through offering flexibility to learn different norm of change that is taking place at the organisation, its effects on the employee, or arguably through offering working flexibilities that could help absorb the disturbances the employee might have to face while embracing the change. 

Employee and Change

There is a strong opinion that the aim is to get the ownership a feeling amongst people that change is something that they are happy with and the reason being that they have been involved in the planning and introduction of change.

An option for the organisation to ease its way through change is Action Learning which fuels the ability to change in the organisation and this will also helps establish communication channels between the diverse groups thus also helping in developing company wide initiatives.To deal with resistance, Individuals, who resist change, discuss their concerns but it's important that they shouldn't feel the organisational dependency on them as it might result in black mailing the organisation. Failure to make them recognise the importance of change they may spread the discomfort and might result in Group Inertia.

Timely

Prepare employees well in advance of possible changes that are to take place be it a merger, an acquisition,a downsizing or layoffs.  Employees are better able to deal with negative information personally from their managers than from other parties.

Learning

Greater the amount of learning offered to the employees higher the chances of survival and successful will be the change initiative. Training early would aik employees to build competence and confidence which in turn reduces stress and resistance. In addition to understanding the change managers need to be trained on the skills that will help manage resistance to change.

Reflection

It is a mean to complete the learning process, and is massively important in change initiative, the change agents shall question them selves on How would they do it the next time, What they could have done differently. Getting the feedback from the stakeholder can be very important and would also help in motivating the staff, as they would feel valued at being consulted.  

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