Question

1- Write down the actions leaders took to try and effectively manage the change. If you feel leaders of the change were ineffective write down the actions they took that were not productive. What would you recommend they do differently? (Minimum 500 words for this #3)

2- Google “building a change culture” – read a few articles that interest you. What similarities do you notice across the multiple articles? Are there opposing thoughts?Share your research with your team.

3- The difference of leading change globally vs. leading change nationally or locally in an organization. What additional best practices would your team recommend to an organization leading change globally?

Answer 1

1(a)Leadership is about taking the initiative to do the things others would rather avoid doing – and about allowing risk to be your best friend. Leaders make those around them better by being wise enough to anticipate the unexpected and by being accountable to take action all the way through to the end. They know how to help their teams tackle change head-on and remove the fear-factor from their minds.

Here are five things effective leaders teach their teams to prepare for and manage change:

Clarity of the Issues

Teams learn how to embrace change when leaders take the time to clarify the issues at hand.   This requires leaders to make sure their teams understand the changes they are faced with – and what they potentially mean to the organization, its supply chain, and its clients.

Embrace Diversity of Thought

True collaboration means embracing diversity of thought, and the different ways people think, act and innovate. Collaboration is just an overused word when the intention behind the action is not fully leveraged.   Collaboration done rightly means not just working closely with and learning from each other – but cultivating a treasure hunt of ideas and ideals.

Strengthen Your Ecosystem

An ecosystem can only be designed and subsequently strengthened when teams have clarity about the change they are solving for and have fully mastered and leveraged the ability to collaborate by embracing diversity of thought.

Create Competitive Advantage

With an environment that embraces clarity around the issues, collaboration to produce new ideas, strategic focus to build solid ecosystems that challenge the old ways of doing things – teams are now ready to create competitive advantage.

Creating competitive advantage means more than teams making the ecosystem that they are assigned to stronger – it means creating distinction for themselves throughout the organization at-large.   

Encourage Critical and Strategic Thinking

We all recognize that we must create a strategy for change. Most teams don’t take enough time to define their strategy, since this is the basis for accountability.   Unfortunately, many teams fall into the trap of wanting to be accountable more for what others want them to be, rather than what they seek to be themselves.

1(b)The success rate of major change initiatives is far too low. The costs are high when change efforts go wrong—not only financially but in confusion, lost opportunity, wasted resources, and diminished morale. When employees who have endured real upheaval and put in significant extra hours for an initiative that was announced with great fanfare see it simply fizzle out, cynicism sets in.

Change initiatives also flounder,because companies lack the skills to ensure that change can be sustained over time. Leaders might set out eagerly to raise product quality, but when production schedules slow and the pipeline starts looking sparse, they lose heart. Lacking an effective way to deal with production line problems, they decide their targets were unrealistic, they blame the production technology, or they accuse their frontline people of not being up to the task.

1(c) Lead with the culture. Lou Gerstner, who as chief executive of IBM led one of the most successful business transformations in history, said the most important lesson he learned from the experience was that “culture is everything.” Businesspeople today understand this.

Start at the top. Although it’s important to engage employees at every level early on, all successful change management initiatives start at the top, with a committed and well-aligned group of executives strongly supported by the CEO. This alignment can’t be taken for granted. Rather, work must be done in advance to ensure that everyone agrees about the case for the change and the particulars for implementing it.

Involve every layer. Strategic planners often fail to take into account the extent to which midlevel and frontline people can make or break a change initiative. The path of rolling out change is immeasurably smoother if these people are tapped early for input on issues that will affect their jobs.

Make the rational and emotional case together. Leaders will often make the case for major change on the sole basis of strategic business objectives such as “we will enter new markets” or “we will grow 20 percent a year for the next three years.” Such objectives are fine as far as they go, but they rarely reach people emotionally in a way that ensures genuine commitment to the cause. Human beings respond to calls to action that engage their hearts as well as their minds, making them feel as if they’re part of something consequential.

2. Google did a lot of things that seemed crazy at the time. Many of those crazy things now have over a billion users, like Google Maps, YouTube, Chrome, and Android. And Google haven't stopped there.It is still trying to do things other people think are crazy but it is super excited about.It has long believed that over time companies tend to get comfortable doing the same thing, just making incremental changes. But in the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant.

https://www.businessinsider.in/Google-just-announced-a-massive-overhaul-of-its-business-structure/articleshow/48430030.cms

Much more than a renaming, the reshuffle at the US search group suggest there’s more going on than meets the eye:

Analysts are trying to uncover the unspoken benefits the restructuring brings Google. For one thing, the absurdly complicated method with which it’s carried out the restructure suggests that there’s more than meets the eye. Why not just change the name of the company, for instance?

The reshuffle may also provide the company a bit of insulation from regulatory issues, particularly in the EU. Google itself is still a massive beast, which will have to tread carefully around regulators, but it will be easier to present firms such as Nest, Calico and Fiber as separate entities if they are only united by a common owner. And, if the worst happens for Google, it would be easier to hive off the subsidiaries entirely.Go through the below link.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/11/google-alphabet-why-change-restructuring-what-it-means

3.In today’s global marketplace, organizations who can change more effectively domestically and abroad will increase their competitive viability, making a global strategy for change management a strategic imperative. Here are three keys to implementing change management on a global scale:

PLAN GLOBALLY, IMPLEMENT LOCALLY

Consider the critical success factors for building organizational change capability, and apply the concepts with a global perspective:

• Secure executive sponsorship for your change efforts
• Build critical competencies at all levels
• Build a common language for change and make the methodology and tools work for your organization.

SECURE EXECUTIVE SPONSORSHIP FOR YOUR CHANGE EFFORTS

When your organization operates on a global scale, it is important to find influential leaders in each region to sponsor change management capability. Consider who will sponsor change capability for the North American operations? For the European operations? For Asia? Ideally, if you have access to these high-level sponsors across the organization, you can support them with a sponsor roadmap that ensures these executives act in a cohesive manner, taking consistent action and communicating consistent messages to the organization.

BUILD INTERNAL COMPETENCIES AT ALL LEVELS

Many global organizations benefit from strategically selecting local trainers for each region of the organization; people who are embedded in the processes of that region and are ingrained in the culture. Sending these individuals through the Trainer Program allows them to conduct role-based training programs in their regions with the cultural norms and business operations at the forefront of their mind, ensuring successful training delivery and skill building.

BUILD A COMMON LANGUAGE AND MAKE THE METHODOLOGY AND TOOLS WORK FOR YOUR ORGANIZATION

For change management capability to be successful in a global organization, it is important that each region sees change management resources and tools as something meant “for them,” not something that is being handed down from a corporate entity in another hemisphere. While having a common language and process for change is essential, it is equally important that the common language and process be communicated in ways that resonate with each region.