Managing Organizational Change

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First and foremost in Organizational Change Management a successful project is to develop a plan to produce the desired results and remain within budget. Kotter had the right idea about change when he listed his eight elements needed for successful change (Phelan, 2005). These are to include urgency, build a guiding team, get the vision right, communicate for buy-in, create short-term wins, empower, do not let up, and make change stick. All of these are part of the change that are needed to become a better manager of organizational change. Kotter also had great insight into why failure might occur with change.

He stated that complacency, failure to build coalitions, unclear and poorly communicated vision, road blocks, poor planning, and declaring victory too soon, and loose anchoring to organizational or personal vision were reasons why change does not succeed. All of these can be applied to organizational change management. Businesses are changing from an environment where products and services were standardized and long-lived, to an environment where businesses are competing globally with individualized and short-lived products and services. "Agility in business performance means the ability of a company to prosper in rapidly-changing, continually fragmenting global markets for high-quality, high-performance, customer-configured products and services" (O'Brien and Marakas, 2008, p. 57).

Such agility requires teams capable of cooperating with customers as sources of ideas and innovation in the exploitation of opportunities. Teams also have to re-engineer business processes to accomplish speed, accuracy, and cost effectiveness in a company's comprehensive functions of manufacturing, accounting, partnering, outsourcing, offshoring, marketing, and sales.

Evaluation of the Effort, although various organizational change management competency models exist these competencies consist of interpersonal and functional skills, both of which are important to the practice of organizational change. According to Spencer and Spencer's (1993) research which determined that 21st century managers must be able to display the following competencies:

1. Strategic Thinking - The ability to understand changing market conditions, opportunities, and trends and identify an optimal response.
1. Change Leadership - The ability to communicate change initiatives in a way that inspires adaptive action.
2. Relationship Management - The ability to develop a network of relationships and contacts whose cooperation is necessary to achieve organizational goals.
3. Flexibility - The ability to change processes and procedures when necessary.
4. Entrepreneurial Innovation - The motivation to champion new products, services, and production processes.
5. Interpersonal Understanding - The ability to understand and value the inputs of diverse others.
6. Empowerment - The ability to share information, participative solicit others' ideas, delegate meaningful responsibility, and make employees feel more capable and motivated to assume greater responsibility.
7. Team Facilitation - The ability to use group process skills to ...