Manager's Guide to Change Management

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Phase #1: Form coalition and create dissatisfaction

The first step in planned change efforts normally being with forming leadership coalition and create dissatisfaction. This is the stage where managers notice or become aware of a problem or a need to change or improve. According to Michael Beer in an article called “Leading Change”, the four ways to create dissatisfaction are:

- Organization is in poor competitive position

- Employee difficulties

- Joint understanding of why change is needed

- Setting of expectations by credible leaders.

It is important to include individuals in the organization throughout the whole process since emotions, attitudes, and opinions are involved. This is where Michael Beer’s ways of creating dissatisfaction can be helpful in helping an organization form a coalition as well as keeping in mind of an equation: Amount of Change= (Dissatisfaction x Model x Process) > Cost of Change.

The amount of change that will incurred can be estimated throughout this process due to the siting of resistance to change and the commitment that individuals are willing to put in for the chose solutions. If people are committed to something from the start, it will help motivate them to sustain that change in the end.

Phase #2: Business objective and build the coalition

After being aware of the need for change, an organization must provide a clear direction and clearly define its business objective. This is where an organization must make sure that individuals have clear distinctions between the business and organizational objectives. In order to build further coalition in this phase, managers should decide the extent of people’s involvement throughout this process. It is best to keep people in the loop and get them involve as much as possible to ensure an effective implementation. In addition, this is where a manager should decide if it is in the company’s best interest to hire a consultant for such change process. A consultant can be useful in providing a new perspectives as well as making sure that the planned change efforts are aligned.

Phase #3: Research organizational issues involved

In phase #3, we must research or look for any organizational issues that are correlated with the business objective. This is when it is critical to research about all the organizational components and see if those components need changes to be made. By looking into all the organizational components, the change efforts can then address all the root cause of a problem. Again, in this phase, the manager must clearly define clear communication guidelines about the change effort as well as a way to measure the success of such change effort. This will help keep everything in line and more efficient. In addition, the research phase allows an organization to look at the external environment such as their competitors, which plays a crucial role in the survival of an organization.

Phase 3 is also the start of Kurt Lewin’s concept of “action-research”, where research leads to action which leads to evaluation and further research. The goal is to not only solve problems, but also allowing individuals to learn to become more effective through the completion of each cycle. By learning and identifying all the possible alternatives, changes will be more effective. Also, this is an example of where the process can be repeated before moving forward or backward in the change efforts.

Phase #4: Feedback and diagnose the problem

After doing research on the issues, the manager must get feedback from any stakeholders involved in the change efforts. During the feedback process, individuals must understand the goal of this process that the manager is trying to diagnose the problem, so transparency is crucial. Individuals must be able to open up or managers must be able to understand the culture of the organization to be able to diagnose the problem effectively. The diagnosis answers the question of what components in the organization is needed to be fixed or isn’t working as it should be. This will help with the next phase of the process.

Phase #5: Define organizational objectives and redesign

This is a very important phase where a clear distinction between the business objective and organizational objectives becomes helpful. In addition, the seven organizational components come into the picture as which components are going to be changed. By identifying which components needed to be changed, the organization can make sure that they are also aligned and changes of each component complement each other. Once the organizational objectives are defined, the manager must also establish the measurement of success for these objectives as well. Finding evidences to support success of achieving these objectives can provide deeper understanding of the issue and a more thorough diagnosis to the complexity of redesigning.

Phase #6: Plan the change(s) to be implemented

Another phase that has to do with redesigning is phase 6. This is where detailed planning on the implementation occurs. If possible, it is best to always test the changes before actually implementing them. With such detailed planning in this phase, a skilled project management team is useful. The goals of the plan is to forecast problems by addressing important concerns such as, people and resources that needed intervention, structure of a department or an organization, communication between employees, performance management system or the leadership implementation. Concerns involving the organizational components are to be looked at in detailed and plan out the exact changes that needed to be implemented. It is crucial to give clear directions of how the change will be implemented to avoid confusion in the next implementation phase.

Phase #7: Implement the changes (“intervention”)

After detailed planning, this phase is the actual implementation of the changes. Similar to phase 6, strong project management capabilities are valuable. With great leadership and management keeping people motivated and assuring the quality by coordinating and monitoring can be beneficial with the implementation. It is also vital to look out for any unforeseen problems that may not have arisen in the past phases. By looking into what have been done from the past and learn from those mistakes, but not having them blindsided the