To be an effective leader, you must be able to lead change efforts in a collaborative way that demonstrates the culture of the organization. At some point, all leaders will need to lead an organizational change effort or be part of an upper-level team that plans and implements it.
Your final project in this course is to develop a change plan based on a case study. Your plan will use Kotter’s change implementation plan components for an organization. Kotter’s plan will explain what you should look at during each step of a change effort. Changes take time to put in place. You should consider all parts of an organization when making these changes. Be sure to use scholarly research to defend your responses and support your explanations.
This project addresses the following course outcomes:
- Determine the root causes and driving forces for effectively implementing an organizational change effort
- Diagnose gap differences between current situations and targeted goals of change efforts for determining the needs of a change effort
- Analyze the impact of a change effort for its implications on the roles of employees
- Predict areas and causes of resistance within an organization to develop a well-informed, effective change plan
- Determine the communication needs in a change effort involving employees for successfully implementing a change effort
- Enhance the influence of organizational culture on organizational change efforts
Prompt
For this project, you will create a change plan based on a case study. Your plan will include stated objectives that you will follow to accomplish an intended goal or goals. After setting your objectives, you will work backward to create a timeline for each phase of the change plan. This change plan will analyze what the organization needs to make the change successful and what to look out for.
Specifically, you must address the following critical elements:
- Analysis and Diagnosis
- Identify the problem in need of addressing and describe which forces are driving the change effort.
- Establish how the problem arose and determine the current impact of the problem.
- Identify the specific organizational needs driving the change and explain each.
- Identify specific variables, conditions, issues, and individuals that will impact the change effort negatively and describe how these should be handled prior to planning the change effort.
- Identify underlying causes of the problem and determine how these causes should be addressed.
- Identify the gap between the current situation and the targeted outcome and establish what needs to occur to build a process to address the gap.
- Developing a Change Plan Using Kotter’s Model for Implementing Organizational Change
- Create Urgency
- Describe a plan to create urgency within the organization and convince stakeholders that this change needs to take place.
- Identify current processes for implementing change and describe how processes will need to be updated for the proposed change
- Describe a strategy to gain support from employees and describe how the strategy will be effective
- Build a Guiding Coalition
- Identify who should be involved in the guiding coalition and provide a rationale for each choice. Kotter likes 50% leaders and 50% managers with experience. Others prefer the composition to be 33% leaders, 33% managers, and 33% informal leaders. You can assemble the guiding coalition as you see fit.
- Determine steps for ensuring commitment from those involved and describe each step
- Form a Strategic Vision
- Determine the values that are essential to this change and defend why the values are essential.
- Establish the vision for this organizational change effort and describe how the vision will be effective in promoting the change effort.
- Identify your intended targeted outcomes and defend each choice.
- Determine what must occur for the organizational change effort to be considered a success and defend each response.
- Communicate the Change
- Establish what is required for the change to be communicated effectively and explain your response.
- Determine actions you will take to encourage two-way communication and explain why these actions will be effective.
- Establish how direct supervisors within the organization will be supported in their efforts to communicate with employees regarding the change effort.
- Describe how you will address any concerns or anxieties regarding this change.
- Determine who will need to be involved in the change effort and describe the capacity in which they will be involved.
- Enable Action by Removing Barriers
- Identify the forces, barriers, and hindrances to the organizational change effort and describe each.
- Describe how resistance can be recognized and determine how resistance can be eliminated or mitigated.
- Describe actions that enable and empower employees to help drive the change effort.
- Generate Short-Term Wins
- Determine how you will generate short-term wins and establish how these wins will be rewarded.
- Determine what can be gained from short-term wins and defend your response.
- Sustain Acceleration
- Describe how to ensure that the momentum driving the change effort continues.
- Institute Change
- Determine what actions need to occur for this change to become part of the organizational culture and defend each action.
- Establish infrastructure mechanisms that need to be in place to maintain and sustain the change into the future and describe the importance of each.Your change plan must be 13–15 pages (not including the title page or references) with double spacing, 12-point Times New Roman font, and APA formatting
- Create Urgency
