Leadership Challenge: Implementing Unpopular Change

Your supervisor has just informed you of a major restructuring in your area aimed at increasing efficiency. She is assigning you to implement the necessary changes. The plans are coming from headquarters and are not negotiable. In addition to losing a couple of positions, your department will be moved to a new less-desirable location across town and will have to share administrative support with another team. Upper management is further using the restructuring as an opportunity to implement a much needed new Web-based customer relations system.

Your team of 15 people is cohesive, and you know that letting go of two of your members will be hard on everyone. In addition, the new location is farther for all of you, and your offices will not be as nice.

Although the new technology is welcome, there will he a great need tbr training and support before it can be fully implemented. On a personal level, you are very upset about the change. This is the second major change in as many years that you have had to implement without having a chance for input. You experience considerable stress and are worried about your team's reaction and ability to pull this through. Yet, your career depends on implementing the change.

1. How should you approach your team?

2. How much of your personal feelings should you share?

3. What are sonic key actions you should take?

Exercise: Analyzing and Planning for Change

This exercise is designed to provide you with the experience of defining a problem and planning for the change. It follows the model presented.

Part 1: Form Thams and Select a Problem

In teams of three to five members, select a problem (organizational or personal) that one team member faces that requires change. Potential examples include the following: the sales team you supervise does not work well with the development or manufacturing department: the clerks at your agency do not have a customer-focused approach; the team you belong to in one of your classes is unfocused; the spring program committee that you lead at your child's school has been putting together boring programs for several years; the school board would like to seek more parent input in its decisions, and so on. Note that each of the problems-and any you are likely to identify-involves many different individual and organizational issues.

What problem will your group address?

Part II: Define the Problem

It is important for the team to have a clear idea about what the problem really is. As a team: Restate the problem in as many different ways as you can.

Consider all the positive and negative aspects of the problem.

Consider all the related issues.

Agree on a final clear description the problem.