Guiding an organization through a major change

Guiding an organization through a major change
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Leaders experience different hurdles while initiating change in organizational development. In effecting change, individuals require to adapt to new processes and leadership. Lewin indicated that attempting to change something leads one to attain total understanding. Lewin stated that to refer to the necessary knowledge that leaders require before embarking on a change process. They must be knowledgeable on the prevailing state, the expected outcomes and the extent of the impact of the expected changes on the organization’s operations. Understanding these issues is important because a change decision has the potential to impact careers, the size of personnel required to undertake certain tasks as well as the perception of the business to the consumers (Bennis, 2003).
Lewin proposed three primary steps of change in organizational development namely unfreezing, changing and freezing. It is important for organizations to give equal and adequate attention to all the three steps in the change process. It is common place for organization to mistakenly focus only on the changing step and ignore working on people’s receptivity to change as well as implementing strategies to ensure permanency of the change in the organization’s operation (Kaminski, 2011).
The first stage involves communicating about the need and desire for change of the status quo in particular areas of the organization’s operations. The leadership carefully examines organization’s beliefs, attitudes and behaviors and communicates the reasons against continuing with the existing operations even though it may evoke strong resistance. Leaders engage the people in the organization in a force field analysis where they weigh the need for a change. They brainstorm to assess the benefits and the disadvantages of the prevailing system. When the cons outweigh the b...