Management Styles and Roles:Change Agent Roles, Levers for managing strategic Change

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Change Management MGMT625

LESSON # 27

Management Styles and Roles

Education and communication involve the reasons for and means of strategic change. Educating

and communicating about strategic change might be very time consuming activity, and direction

might not be clear to managers especially in large organizations. Change may be ineffective

owing to misinformation and ineffective communication. For strategic change to take place

reliance on top down communication processes may be problematic.

Collaboration or Participation in the change process is the involvement of those who will be

affected by strategic change in the identification of strategic issues, the strategic agenda, the

strategic decision making processes or the planning of strategic change. This can help in

increasing ownership and commitment to change and change process. It may entail the setting up

of project teams or task forces. Nonetheless, this may prove to be more time consuming process

but would lead to enhance the quality of decision. Strategy workshops can be quite useful for

cross levels of management to work on particular strategic problems, provide solution within a

larger strategic framework and drive change mechanisms down to routine aspects of

organizational change

Intervention is the coordination of and authority over processes of change by a change agent who

delegates elements of the change process. Change agent retains control though interventions. For

example, at particular stages of change such as idea generation, data collection, detailed planning,

the development of rationale for change and the identification of critical success factors are

delegated to project teams. If such teams do not take full responsibilities of the change processes

then change sponsors tries to ensure the monitoring of change progress.

Direction involves the use of personal managerial authority to establish a clear future strategy and

how change will occur. It is essentially top down management of strategic change. It may be

associated with clear vision or strategic intent developed by someone seen as leader in the

organization. There are different styles of managing change. Two broad categories are directive

and participative styles. Different stages in the change process may require different styles of

managing change. Directive style is speedy and effective but runs the risk of overall acceptance

while participation or intervention may be helpful in gaining wider acceptance and commitment

across the organization but at the same time tends to be slower in its pace. If the organization

corresponds to the kind of adhocracy, network or learning organization, it is likely to employ

collaboration or participation based styles. In the most extreme for directive style becomes

coercive, engaged in the imposition of change. This is a type of forced learning entailing explicit

use of power but may be necessary for the organization facing crisis or concerned with large scale

and rapid organizational transformation. Such type of transformation is least successful without

crisis or creating crisis.

Change Agent Roles

Change agent is an individual or group that affects strategic change in organization. In simple words

change agent is the creator of change or strategy. These may be senior executives or CEO, middle

level managers, and outsiders like consultants. Traditionally it is the external consultants, especially

in the Western economies who are hired for their specialized job and expertise to come and visit

organization to diagnose the ailment and give prescription for corrective measures in strategy or

structure. Another type of change agents are internal consultants or senior executives, and can be

identified as strategic leaders who are well verse with organization's problems and policies. The

approach of such in-house strategic leaders could be legal, bureaucratic, transactional or

transformational. Nonetheless the common prescription is that strategic change could take place

meaningfully if the CEO or strategic leader is visionary. Therefore we need a transformational or

visionary leadership in order to have strategic change. The question of course now will be what the

Change Management MGMT625

attributes of such type of leadership are. From our own cultural perspective one such prescriptions is

given by our national poet as

The attributes of a leader as someone who is a visionary , true communicator a communication

which touches heart and full of empathy and commitment who stands committed and can have

feelings of others

Another perspective is MOUND model of change management which emphasizes greater role for the

middle level manager as change agent. Therefore, recall your memories for Z theory of management

which says policy making, implementation and organizational actions will be most effective at

middle levels of management instead of top down ( theory X) or bottom up (theory Y). This

essentially is known as "ringsei" in Japanese language which means consensus oriented decision

making. The logic is that is the middle level managers and their network who have greater levels of

collegiality, communicability and placed strategically between senior executives and lower level

workers and supervisors to bridge the gap and hence make organization effective in seeking its goals

and objectives effectively. The MOUND model is illustrated below:

T he Mound Model for Change

MIDDLE

OUT

DOWN

This means ay idea or strategy which is conceived by middle level of any one function area or

department quickly moves out at the same horizontal level to middle level managers in other function

areas or departments. The idea or strategy soon moves upward to senior executives and CEO, and

once they get convinced by newer suggestions make part of organization wide policies. Hence the

new idea or strategy then quickly moves downward. The MOUND model seems more appropriate for

managing change in large organizations and bureaucracies where distances between top level

managers and implementation levels are very high.

Recent concept of change agent might include lower level managers and workers, especially from

knowledge worker and knowledge management perspectives. The concept of knowledge worker is

that all members of the organizations are considered knowledge workers even those who are the

shop-floor level, have tacit knowledge and know their job best, and can contribute effectively for

organization through a conducive learning environment.

3. Levers for managing strategic Change

The followings are different levers that can be employed to manage strategic change:

· Structure and Control Systems

Changing aspects of structure and control of organization are considered important aspects of

strategic change. But most of the time top managers may change strategy but behaviour and

assumptions remain the same, with the result that change programme tends to be ineffective. What

is more important is that whether the proposed strategic change brings in conformity of thinking

Change Management MGMT625

values and system or promotes and incorporates criticality? Generally when we talk of system we

mean to stress uniformity, conformity and stability but systemic thinking also tend to incorporate

different views of reality and critical thinking. Because system itself is composed of various

subsystems having different demands and functions. Therefore it is important for change agents and

change leaders while designing structure and control system that it should not just be considered for

manufacturing consent instead should be directed to promote knowledge and values appropriate for

strategic change.

Routines

Routines are the organizationally "specific ways to do things around here" which tend to persist

over time and guide people's behaviour. Routines may also be considered as a double edge sword

in the sense that it may lead organization to carry its operations in distinct ways and achieve its

competitive edge, but also present a risk to act to block change and creativity, and may lead to

strategic drift.

Changes in organizational routines can be a powerful signal of and stimulus for change because

change in strategy should correspond to change in implementation or operations. But then routines

are closely related with the existing paradigm, hence changing strategy means changes in taken for

granted assumptions and taken for granted routines and ways of doing things that are the cultural

elements. Routines are even considered more powerful than even education and communication

technique of changing people. Thus changing routine is a good technique to change behaviour

which may help people in evaluating and changing their beliefs and assumptions. Therefore it is

suggested for managers who are trying to effect strategic changes to take personal responsibility not

only for identifying changes in routines, but also for monitoring that they actually occur. The

changes may appear to be mundane but they can have significant impact.

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