Change Management Project
Change excites some people and it terrifies other people. In his book, Leading Change, John Kotter identified 8 Steps to Transforming An Organization as well as 8 Errors that people and organizations make which cause change efforts to fail.
After reading the article Leading Change and watching the YouTube videos by John Kotter, examine an organizational or personal change effort which has taken place (successful or unsuccessful) and examine the change effort using Kotter’s 8 Steps and 8 Errors.
In my early career when I was working as an intern in Mega bank, back in my country, I got a chance to work closely with a project Manager for the company. It was the time when Anil Keshari Shah first took over hardly existing company, Mega Bank, as a CEO and within 5 years it became one of the best bank in Nepal. He always endured change and took risk even when he was in the highest peak of achieving success. He has unique attitude towards how he achieves his goals and doing things differently than others (Ujwal, 2010).
With all that said, in that time-frame Mega Bank went through lot of changes. For me it was very hard to figure out than, but all the steps that company went through, I can clearly relate to the process now as I have gone through many articles and videos by John Kotter. Mega bank initiated a change process whereby the organization tried to implement 360-degree performance appraisal system for better evaluation and comprehensive appraisal of all the manpower.
A 360-degree appraisal system is one where both the senior and junior staff member evaluates each other on different parameters i.e., it is not traditional top to bottom appraisal in fact, it can be seen as cyclic appraisal system i.e. from top to bottom and bottom to top.
This change process can be said as a successful attempt though there were some initial problems while implementing this process. This change process has all the eight steps which are used in Kotter Model described as below: –
1. Establish a sense of urgency: – In this step, the management have the task to the HR department to implement the process in the organization before the commencement of new appraisal cycle. This created a sense of urgency in the entire HR department and the organization so that the employees can be trained and explained the steps required for the 360- degree appraisal.
2. Developing a guiding Team: – The HR department formed some teams of HR executive which were given the responsibility of communication, guiding and explaining the process of new appraisal system to the each and every individual. They were also given a responsibility of conducting a mock evaluation in order to make the employees understand the process involved in this.
3. Develop the vision: – Webster V & Westar M quoted that” Creating a vision that can be conveyed in a matter of minutes is going to move people into action much more effectively than detailed analyses ever will”. The main vision of this process was to have a comprehensive evaluation of manpower so that a better performance and training can be provided to the manpower and improvement can be imparted.
4. Communication for buy-in: – There were regular training sessions and meetings so that the employees especially the manger do not have any issues while dealing with such a system. The meetings and training were directed to address the concerns and quires of all the manpower so that they can understand the process well (Kotter, 2018).
5. Empower action: – There were some employees who were made team leader and were empowered to see how the things were going on in the organization. These employees were given the power to conduct meetings, train the employees but if we look closely, these were even under the influence of HR executives.
6. Development of short-term wins: – The HR team which was responsible for the implementation process established short targets such as communicating the process, providing training, addressing the concerns and so on they were able to fulfill these short terms goals within the time frame.
7. Consolidating improvements and producing still more change: – the HR team did not give up with the entire process despite facing some initial resistance, time limitation and other practical hurdles but those people in teams were very motivated and thus consolidate the process with each passing day and were able to fulfill their given responsibility on time.
8. Institutionalizing new approaches: – After the long training process, the new 360-degree appraisal system was successfully implemented in the organization and it is still operative in the organization.
There were some resistances from the managers and the senior employees against this appraisal system. Most of the mangers were of more than 15 years of experience and thus they had the conventional way of thinking and performing and thus were not welcoming the process of being appraised by their junior staff members.
The staff members had to leave their job and attained the training session and this really proved a hurdle in their normal performance and overtime and this created a resistance among the employees as they were losing some extra earning opportunities in the form of overtime.
The employees were treating this process as a waste of time as they thought that no action will be taken by the management if they evaluate fear that any negative evaluation of mangers can endanger their job in the organization as a manger can sack the employee after coming to know about the negative evaluation given by a certain employee.
In my opinion, the step of Empowering the team was not executed well as the employee team leaders were not given free hands and they had to take the permission from their senior for conducting any meeting or training session with other employees.
Refrences:
Ujwal. (2010, May 22). Last Thursdays with Anil Shah, CEO of Mega Bank (former CEO of NABIL bank). Retrieved from http://e4nepal.com/social-entrepreneur/anil-shah-ceo-mega-bank/
Kotter, J. (1995). Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail. [online] Harvard Business Review. Available at: https://hbr.org/1995/05/leading-change-why-transformation-efforts-fail-2 [Accessed 13 Dec. 2018].
Webster, V & Webster M. (2018). Successful Change Management — Kotter’s 8-Step Change Model. [online] Leadership Thoughts. Available at: https://www.leadershipthoughts.com/kotters-8-step-change-model/ [Accessed 13 Dec. 2018].