Question

To prepare for the Week 2 Assessment, consider a past or current professional experience where a culture change was needed.

Using the Organizational Change Chart, outline information about the experience and organization following Kotter’s 8-Step to Change Model as a guiding line.

Kotter's 8-Step Change Model Step One: Create Urgency. Step Two: Form a Powerful Coalition. Step Three: Create a Vision for Change. Step Four: Communicate the Vision. Step Five: Remove Obstacles. Step Six: Create Short-Term Wins. Step Seven: Build on the Change. Step Eight: Anchor the Changes in Corporate Culture.

Answer 1

The last experience where there was a need for change was when I interned in a startup. I was in the strategy development team and we were working on building a new strategy for the HR team. Previously, in that firm there was no proper format to collect data and manage the performance of the employees. So to shift the informal culture of the HR team to a formal way of operating the Kotter's 8-step change model came out to be very helpful. First of all, for the performance mangement system there was a need to keep the record of their daily tasks of the employees in a systematic way. For that we made a HR daily tracker dashboard for all the employees. Then a group of employees came together in a team to work on this project. We convinced some of the senior authorities to let us work on our proposal and consider our idea. To bring this change in the organization we had to work closely with all the employees and get to know their feedbacks on the new HR strategy. We had to work towards explaining the employees how this change in the organization would help them get recognition and rewards. After everyone was on the same page we trained the employees to effectively use the new dashboard to submit their daily work. There were a lot of road blocks in our work both technical and human.There were people in the organization who were not on the same page as us and we have to make extra efforts to remove these obstacles. As soon as the new performance management system was implemented on a pilot scale we started giving out weekly star performers to show the employees how our system worked and built their belief in the system. After the pilot run was successful, we implemented this performance mangement system for the entire HR department of the organization and brought in a more organized and formal work culture in the startup organization.