CONTENTS

Introduction

My journey and thoughts

Change management and case study
Concepts of change management
My learning from lectures and tutorials
Future Methodology

Conclusion

References

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Introduction

Change management is the subject of designing techniques for implementing effective change in
organizations, controlling and adopting the change. My experience about change management
began when I thoroughly studied change management models and theories in Managing Culture.
Though I had undergone through many changes in my professional and private life without being
aware of Change Managing. This paper is a summary of my experiences I had in the subject of
Change Management. The first half of the paper revolves around my experiences about
significance of communication in managing the change. The other half consists of my learning and
assumption about change management theories. At the end I will share my knowledge from
tutorials.

My Journey and personal thoughts

Innovation, creativity and change are three interrelated concepts that I have always focused on. I
have learned that innovation is an opportunity that leads to creativity and creativity brings change.
To learn a new knowledge or to apply change in personal and personal life is not easy without
learning the subject of change management. Everyone experiences change in their personal and
professional life but only few are aware of the concept, theories and structures in Change
Management Subject. I have made myself able to apply changes by learning the models of
management and apply changes effectively. The hidden secret I discovered in my experiences of
managing changes is that personal, professional, organizational, and social changes depend on a
key element that is “communication”. In organization and work places, effective communication
is most necessary feature to assist employees resolving their issues and get them understand the
process and importance of change management in order to get fruitful yields. Change is a process,
not an event (John P. Kotter, 2002).

In this modern and technologically advanced time, companies need to bring innovative, convincing
and new products in market to meet customers’ needs and fulfill their demands. Organizations
need to keep changing their policies, processes and products while being cost efficient, in order to
give huge outputs and stay competent in the market (Nohiria and Beer, 2000). I learned that there
are two approaches which industries and companies can adopt to implement changes. The
approaches are transformational changes and transactional change. We for example, studied
Qantas Airline in our group project which undergone transformational change. Transformational

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change as the name suggests completely transforms the organizations. First the strategies are
changed, then change is applied to small processes which lead to organizational changes
ultimately. Abdallah et al (2005) stated that there is always resistance to change and resistance to
ideas. Resistance is mostly by the employees of the company or by external factors. Qantas air
also faced resistance from its employees at first, because of lack of effective communication in
delivering the strategy, and purpose of change. The management team had failed in convincing the
employee staff. According to Qantas (2003), to overcome the miscommunication they adopted
various communication approaches including McKinsey 7s model and finally got successful in
delivering the new goals and targets of company and achieving them

Change management case study

Woolworth’s supermarket is Australia’s biggest food seller company since decades. It has low
prices and thus attract many customers. However after 2000, it lost focus on their major product
and shifted their attention in other projects like beauty products, Croma stores and home
improvements. The company’s biggest flop project was Masters – Home Improvement. They had
stopped innovation in their stores until 2016, when new CEO Mr. Band Banducci was appointed.
He introduced new business plans and brought the company back to its track. He started
communicating with the staff, told them about the losses and encouraged them about their
performances. He made it his routine to communicate with the hundreds of employees in the head
office of the company. Slowly the innovation had started and the staff members with all boosted
will, started working hard to lift the company once again. The communication channel enhanced
gradually. Regular emails, workshops, notes and media was applied for proper communication led
it to gain its marketplace again. They regularly asked questions to employees like

 Do you notice the change?

 Does changing has an impact on you?
 Do you think something must be changed or not?
 Do you understand the strategy?

Like Qantas, Samsung and McDonalds, Woolworths also adopted the McKinsey model that helped
it to improve their performance and to deliver successful outcomes.

Concepts of change management

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For me, change management is basically answer to the question that how, when, what and why
change occurs and how this process can be managed efficiently. Changes are inevitable and
uncontrollable. Only controllable is the process of managing, reacting and working through this
process (Kelly A. Morgan). In my thoughts change management is easy to understand and
implement, when you recognize the difficulties in making new policies, the resistance that may be
offered by the staff or external factors, time estimation about complete application of “”change”
and how it affect the business. There is a frequently asked question that “Why is change
necessary?” My answer to them is that companies that do not adopt changes according to the needs
of the customer and market strategies, fail most often. There are many examples of this failure like
“Kodak”. Kodak was once a leading camera brand all around the globe and had the top market
value. But it didn’t change its product according to the market and brought no innovation. The
world was moving toward digital photography while Kodak was still in the manual old fashioned
business. Lack of change management brought the company near Bankruptcy in 2013, and didn’t
get away with Canon and Nikon which rule the digital market till now. (Valier 2018).

Change management depends on effective communication and strong leadership, according to my

experiences. Communication is needed in change management to educate the employees and
workers about the purpose of bringing change. The whole team of an organization must be aware
about the planning and strategies of the company. When the staff is aware about the strategies,
goals and possible outcomes that will benefit the company and the staff also, they feel motivated
and two-way communication also begins. The employees also give suggestions or share their
issues which can be solved by effective communication and company leads to more positive
change.

Most companies scuffle in the management of change. Lack of communication can be a reason of
it. I believe that a company if doesn’t spend time and money in adopting new change management
techniques and continues to follow old patterns fail in achieving its goals and eventually lose the
market. As the competition is too high, situations arise when quick responses and sudden changes
are required. There must be a proper communication plan and change management strategies
available for the implementation of required changes. Or else the business run directionless leading
to nowhere and eventually drops to failure. I believe, effective communication in an organizational

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change management process can save it from such disasters. The world hates change, yet it is the
only thing that has brought progress (Charles Kettering).

My learning from lectures and tutorials

The lectures and tutorials were interesting and have proved very though provoking to me. The
topics were interesting and widened my mind. Though communication techniques were very
beneficial for me to understand the importance of communication in every aspect of organizations
specially change management. I learned from communication strategies that a company can’t
promote or demote a person without explaining the reason (NBC News, 2018). The subject taught
me different communication techniques, frameworks to adopt for effective communication and
consequences of not adopting the change. I learnt that every company has specific environment
and have different kinds of people working in it. Every communication method can’t be applied
in every organization. Different strategies are applied according to the culture of organizations.
The communication strategy must be designed while keeping in mind the company’s environment,
employees’ attitude, culture and change suite. The model must be a hybrid model. Example as we
discussed Qantas initial failed plan, and saw in the tutorial; that employees showed resistance and
raised many questions against change. They out management in a very difficult situation. Later,
new communication plan was developed in which compassion and sentiments were kept in mind.

Another topic that captured my interest was relation of change with innovation, which included
examples of Blockbuster and Nokia. How innovation in smart phones brought by Apple and
Samsung killed Nokia’s market and Netflix’s rule on entertainment industry took over
Blockbuster. Nokia and Blockbuster failed to bring innovation and fulfill customers’ demand and
lost the battle against innovative and smart companies. I always suggest to bring innovation and
adopt change according to market.

Future Methodology

“Change Management” is a tool of moving forward in future. In the subject of “Managing culture
and change”, I have learnt that change is not accepted by many organizations and consider it a risk,

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but for me it is first step to innovation and growth and success of business lies in change
management and change application. It is very necessary for being competitive in the market. I
believe that biggest issue in change management is employees’ resistance. This resistance can only
be reduced by effective communication. This is the reason I keep influencing on promotion of
communication. Sometimes big companies also fail in communication within staff and
management. Qantas, for example, had major communication gaps in the employees and
management. Even customers’ feedback was not being transmitted properly. Thus, it was losing
its market and customers (Qantas 2014). Realizing it earlier, Qantas decided to adopt
communication plans and made structural changes that recovered its marketplace and customers
trust also.

Communication is very much effective in personal life also. In domestic and organizational
behavior, effective communication can save you from conflict. Being a leader, it is very important
for me to learn change management and to facilitate others with it. Managers are a requirement in
the success of a change initiative. In times of change, those who lead the teams wedged by change
can be a great helper for change leaders (Prosci 2018). This helps in lowering resistance by staff
members.

I believe effective communication methods in every organization must be planned in an order to

challenge the issues faced by the employees, and thus remove the resistance. Change made in the
business must make staff feel secure and trustful. Their recommendations and suggestions must
be considered while decision making, and required facilities must be provided. Effective
communication is a key of change management. In future, it is my target to implement all the
changes in the organization by communicating properly with the staff, shareholders, investors and
other team in order to get minimum resistance

Conclusion

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Managing culture and subject of change has made me able to understand the strategies of change
management. I learned that change management is not about totally changing work structure of
organization and running it in a new framework, it involves a large number of processes. Managing
the resistance and understanding the current environment is the first hindrance in management.
My experiences, tutorials and readings taught me the only way of clearing the conflict, resistance
and possible chance of failure in project is effective communication. I can say that change
management is a vast subject and I will learn it more thoroughly by my experiences in this field.

References

ABC News,2018 “Woolworth Widnes the gap on Coles as supermarket China goes back basis’.
Available online assessed on 1 June 2019.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-07/why-supermarkets-are-moving-away-from-
price/9524110

ABC News,2017, ‘ABC boss Michelle Guthrie announces $50m content fund, with management
positions cut’. Available online assessed on 1 June 2019

Beer, M.& Nohira , N. 2000 , ‘cracking the code of change ‘, HBR’s 10 must read on change ,
vol, 78, no.3, pp. 133-41.https://www.12manage.com/description_beer_nohria_theories.html
Available online assessed on 1 June 2019

Aspara, j. Lemberg, j.-A, Laukia , A.& Tikkanen, H 2011 . “Strategic management of business
model transformation lessons from Nokia’. Management decision: Management decision, vol 49
no. 4 pp. 622-47 Available online assessed on 1 June 2019

English, E 2018 managing culture and change guest lecture 24th May’. 21926 lecture notes UTS
Sydney, Available online assessed on 1 June 2019

Burnes, B & Cooke 2012 Review Article: The past, present and future of organisation
development: taking the long view’. Vol 65, no 11. pp. 1395-429 Available online assessed on 1
June 2019

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Erkut, A 2016, Current approaches in change management: organisational change management
strategic in modern business. IGI Global, pp. 24-51 Available online assessed on 1 June 2019

https://valuer.ai/blog/50-examples-of-corporations-that-failed-to-innovate-and-missed-their-
chance/ Available online assessed on 1 June 2019