Introduction to Change Situations

There are many reasons why over 70% of Change Initiatives fail to perform up to expectations. This entry will introduce two change situations that will be used by future entries to demonstrate how Communications, Relationship Building and both Formal and Informal Leadership can impact a change initiative’s success or failure.

Below are the two change situations:

Situation one: A major healthcare institution has a sweeping long-term change initiative going on in a technical department. As part of this change two related but formerly separate department have been merged into one overall department with several specialized units. During the merger the small of the departments, which is the concentration of this case study, was positioned in the device support unit. Historically throughout the change initiative this former department, made up of mostly long-term employees, has had management issues. They have gone through a series of managers and team leaders that have not performed up to expectations. Additionally, during the early days of the change initiative the senior management and most of the now merged department was relocated to a geographically separate site due to space issues within the organization.

At one point during this still ongoing change initiative they reassigned the manager prior to hire a new manager. The unit’s senior officer stepped in to handle the management of this group while they searched for a new manager.

The situation during that time is bulleted below:

• The group’s client forms and process where being transferred over to the databases used by the rest of the department
• Most of the employees were long-term, between 5 - 20 years
• As part of senior management, interim manager was physically located in a different area of the city
• He came over to the office once a week
• He entered the office, rarely said more then hello and then only to the people he passed, before going into meetings with the team leader
• At the time only one of the team leads was actually an employee, the other had been brought in as a financial consultant (this was not a financial unit)
• Two long-term technicians who had functioned as team leads previously had been replaced by the current team leads
• The contractor had been in the department before and was disliked by most of the group because of questionable competency and ethics
• Group members felt the other team lead lack knowledge and experience to perform the position

Situation two: This situation comes from a job interview for a contract position. The company is a major retail organization. The interview was with two 20 year employees. The organization had recently changed CEOs. Their new CEO has stated that he wished to double the organizations size in two years. The organization is 20 years old and has a lot of long-term employees.

The situation facing the change initiative is bulleted below:

• Historically and currently the organization has a silo structure with limited cross-function between departments.
• The CEO is new
• The employees are mostly long-term
• The two senior employees conducting the interview describe the new CEO as wonderful
• The CEO is know for walking around the building and stopping to talk to employees and visitors

The organization faces several new regulations which impact operations