Leadership and Change Management

Chapter 13 : Implementing Change

Transforming an Organization

Establishing a Sense of Urgency Creating a Guiding Coalition Developing a Vision and Strategy for Change Communicating the Change Vision Empowering Employees for Broad-Based Action
Scoring Short-term Wins Consolidating Change

Understanding Organizational Culture

Formation of Organizational Culture
Role of founders in the formation of organizational culture

The Need to Change Culture

Changing the Culture, Changing Culture by Changing Mental Models

Chapter Summary

Transforming an organization requires initiative, cooperation and willingness to make sacrifices from most of the employees and managers in the organization. The transformation process will be successful, when the organization goes through a step-by-step process. John P. Kotter suggests some preliminary steps before attempting to change the culture of the organization.

The steps are: establishing a sense of urgency, creating a guiding coalition, developing a change vision and strategy, communicating the change vision, empowering employees for broad-based action, generating short-term wins, and consolidating change. Real change happens when the change in practices, structures, and strategies and vision are implanted in the changed culture. Without this, the changes made are only temporary.

Organizational culture is the pattern of basic assumptions that a given group has invented, discovered or developed, in learning to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, and that have worked well enough to be considered valid, and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to these problems.

The evolution of culture is a multi-stage process which arises through various stages of group formation. The final organizational culture then depends on the complex interaction between the assumptions and theories founders bring in at the start, and the ways in which the organization learns from subsequent experiences. As long as the survival of the organization depends on its success in the marketplace, it has to pay attention to changing trends.

Culture is a binding force that can give coherence to organizational efforts. It should propagate success, and not failure. Organizational culture is powerful, and changing it is difficult. Since people are selected and indoctrinated with a lot of care, and since culture exhibits itself in the actions and thinking of thousands of people, changing the culture involves changing all these people.

Experiments conducted by Stanford psychologist Leon Festinger in 1957 show that people change their mind-sets only when they see the purpose of changing. When they are convinced about the purpose, they are more ready to change and serve the intended purpose. What needs to be changed is the beliefs that influence specific behaviors.

Organizations often commit the mistake of expecting their employees to change their behavior or culture without providing the necessary skills to do so. Employees generally encounter problems in adapting general guidelines to their specific situations. To transform themselves, the main thing employees need is enough time.

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