Write a Reflections on the Role of Leadership in Managing Organisational Change?

Introduction

One of the important realities of human life is change. This is further emphasized through the statement that 'the only thing that does not change is change itself' which shows its nature of actuality (İkinci, 2014). As we experience constant change, the best survival tactic is to adapt to the change rather than being idle.  As a management professional, I have to develop my skills that assist in encountering as well as managing change. In the current global scenario, organizations are characterized by their dynamic nature. Each organization has become an open system which is subject to the influence of various external and internal environmental factors. 

Based on my prior experiences as well as the subject learning, I understood the need for leadership in an organization during changes.  Apart from strategic decisions, there is a need for an effective leadership for the successful adoption of organisational change (Palmer, Dunford, & Buchanan, 2016). If the key executives of an organization with strong leadership abilities have less involvement in managing organizations, a high likelihood for that organization to fail during reengineering and change adoption.  Before enrolling for this subject, I had minimal exposure to the role of a leader in an organization during change.  Various theories and frameworks learnt during this course made me realise that as a management professional I have to be open-minded to accept change and assist others in facilitating the change. Over the duration of this subject, I was able to rethink past change experiences and gained knowledge about implementing subject learning in future practices. With the completion of this subject, I learnt about the human element required as part of the change in leading it, managing it, conceptualization as well as critical assessment. In this report, I reflect only my learnings related to the role of leadership in organization change through my professional experiences, guest lectures, readings and my future plans in professional practice.

1. Personal experience

My professional experience is mainly as an intern at Company X as a part of my under graduate project work. This company gave significant emphasis to its employees similar to that of the business outcomes. Despite the significance given to people leadership, the major issue was the lack of consistent executive leadership. I found that the CEO job was vacant for quite a long duration and a temporary CEO was appointed to ensure the smooth management of processes and to recruit a new CEO. I observed that at his temporary position, the CEO has to assist in the transformation of the company from its current irregularities to smooth processes which would help the new CEO for easy operational management. 

The key characteristic I observed in the CEO was his management style which was transformative. He almost became a coach for each employee wherein he devised strategies to shape each of us to be leaders through training and development program to attain organisational goals. He adopted a participative management approach which saw many positive outcomes in terms of reduced employee turnover and a robust business process management.

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