{"id":810,"date":"2019-02-16T14:45:45","date_gmt":"2019-02-16T22:45:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0028\/?p=810"},"modified":"2019-02-20T11:30:47","modified_gmt":"2019-02-20T19:30:47","slug":"change-management-my-reflections-on-the-impact-of-organizational-size-leadership-and-resilience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0028\/change-management-my-reflections-on-the-impact-of-organizational-size-leadership-and-resilience\/","title":{"rendered":"Change Management: My Reflections on the Impact of Organizational Size, Leadership and Resilience"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 In evaluating change management, I first looked to my own contexts where I’ve experienced change in my career. My current organizational context is a small Canadian private learning consulting company comprised of five employees and a team of under fifty contractors. My prior contexts include a large energy company with 5,000 employees for ten years and then for a not-for-profit company with 500 people for nearly a year.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Change Management Evolution: Through My Career and In Theory<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 In reflecting on these experiences, I think change management has evolved from forcing change on people to a realization that people need to be involved to ensure the change is successful. The majority of the changes that I’ve experienced at work have been related to technology. In my career, I’ve observed change management evolving from changes being implemented all at once to an approach of implementing a change in phases.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 When I reflect on why, I think it has to do with the nature of technological progression in that it increases the degree to which you can control technology and results in a stronger ability to make technology changes in phases. I’ve found this to be true in my own experiences. I remember earlier experiences at the large company in 2008 where a new technology was introduced to all departments simultaneously, whereas experiences in 2016 with the same company were a phased-in approach where departments got a software upgrade on a progressive schedule. Communication was also more present in the phased-in approach and I realize now that planning people for change was more evident.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 In comparing that reflection to Al-Haddad and Kotnour’s (2015) literature review on change management theory, their findings described that change management has evolved to have a stronger emphasis on planning. They also define change management as a \u201cstructured methodical process\u201d (Al-Haddad & Kotnour, 2015, p. 254). This supports what I’ve observed in my career that change management has progressed to be more well-thought out and phased-in as a process. Al-Haddad & Kotnour (2015) also point to the low success rates of change. I think that has shaped the evolution in change management theory to focus more on planning the change to ensure success of the project.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Impact of Organizational Size on Leadership Involvement in Change<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 In working for a small company, I’d assume that we would be more agile to implement change as there are less people involved than a large corporation.\u00a0 For the implementation of a similar technology (cloud services), I\u2019ve observed my current company quickly work through the \u2018kinks\u2019 in a matter of months with minimal interference to work, compared to my prior large company experience with a similar technology implementation that took over a year to implement with multiple issues that seriously impacted my work. When I consider the factors for my differing experiences, I know that company size is one of multiple reasons why I observed these differences. It follows that since there are more people involved in the larger company, a change process may take longer to implement. However, another major factor that impacts the change process is leadership’s involvement. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 When I reflected on leaderships\u2019 role in both technology implementation experiences, I observed that there was a greater amount of consistent leadership messaging, information sharing through social interaction with leaders and shared experiences with leaders at my smaller company. These are all factors that Weiner (2009) identifies as generating a \u201cshared sense of readiness\u201d for change (p. 3).\u00a0<\/span>When I reflect on this more, I think that the company sizes impacted not just the time to implement the change but also leadership involvement within change management. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 It may be more specific to my company, but many of my current leaders are close to the work we do on a day-to-day basis. This correlates to increased shared experiences with the people completing the work that is affected by the technology change. This is different than when I consider my experience with technology change with leaders at the larger company. Instead of a few leaders, there existed multiple levels of hierarchy including Vice Presidents and a CEO. These leaders often led so many departments, I don’t think it would be possible for them to have this same high level of communication and shared experience. Leadership involvement in change may then be more complex to plan for a larger company, than for a smaller one with less levels of leadership. I think the key is to ensure that the leadership approach of a company’s leaders is aligned to support the company’s change management initiatives, as well as the change theory related to them.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Change Theory that Aligns with My Leadership Approach for Change<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 In terms of change theories that best align with my own leadership approach, Theory O is one that resonated for me. First and most important to me, it is a \u201clong-term approach\u201d (Biech, 2007, para. 9). In my career, I have seen too many decisions made for short-term gains. I don’t think this was always done on purpose, but perhaps had to do with an unintentional lack of long-term focus in the planning stage. In observing how those types of decisions were not beneficial for employees as well as the company overall, I strive to look at long-term impacts in my own decision-making as a leader. \u00a0Second, Theory O is related to a flatter organizational structure which aligns with my collaborative leadership style. Third, I will personally only be in a leadership position at a company if I understand and stand by the company\u2019s purpose. My leadership style is not to force employees to be the same way, but I believe that employees should feel bonded to the company\u2019s purpose in their own way. I agree with Theory O\u2019s assumption that by building bridges between the employees and the organization for a change, employees will be more involved in the change and this will result in them bonding more with the organization (Biech, 2007). Without this involvement, there will be multiple challenges to get to successful change.<\/span><\/p>\n

Applying Attributes of a Resilience Model to Evaluate Change in My Context<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 There are several unique challenges in managing change for learning in digital environments including managing learner data transfers, maintaining an old system while phasing in a new system to ensure learners\u2019 learning is not impacted as well as the consideration of digital skills in your team as well as your learners.\u00a0Attributes of Weller & Anderson (2013)\u2019s resilience model that would work well within my context include latitude and resistance. Since we are a small company, I see latitude as integral for evaluating changes since we have limited resources. For resistance, this attribute would also need to be carefully evaluated as we have a small number of people and it can have a big impact if the majority of that small number of people resist the change.<\/span><\/p>\n

References<\/span><\/p>\n

Al-Haddad, S., & Kotnour, T. (2015). Integrating the organizational change literature: a model for successful change. Journal of Organizational Change Management<\/i>, 28<\/i>(2), 234-262.<\/span><\/p>\n

Biech, E. (2007). Models for Change. In Thriving Through Change: A Leader\u2019s Practical Guide to Change Mastery. Alexandria, VA: ASTD [Books24x7 database] [Note: you will need your RRU user name\/password to access as this is in the library]<\/span><\/p>\n

Weiner, B. J. (2009). A theory of organizational readiness for change. Implementation Science<\/i>, 4<\/i>(67).<\/span><\/p>\n

Weller, M., & Anderson, T. (2013). Digital Resilience in Higher Education. European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 In evaluating change management, I first looked to my own contexts where I’ve experienced change in my career. My current organizational context is a small Canadian private learning consulting company comprised of five employees and a team of under… Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":72,"featured_media":811,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-assignments-thoughts-sharings","category-lrnt525"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0028\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0028\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0028\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0028\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/72"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0028\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=810"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0028\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":835,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0028\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810\/revisions\/835"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0028\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0028\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0028\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0028\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}