A Change Management Model That All Leaders Must Understand

A few weeks ago I wrote about dealing with organizational change in my post “The Secret Of Organizational Change Management.” This post was based on a great article in Strategy + Business magazine which outlined 10 guiding principles for change.

That post was focused on how leaders should roll out change inside their organizations but it made me think about the flip side of this. How do the employees see change from their point of view? A few years ago I attended a leadership development class that provided a model of how people react when confronted with change. This model is from Spencer, Shenk and Capers . According to the model, everyone reacts to change by moving through the following six stages;

Stage 1: Loss – Employees are shocked by the change and experience fear and trepidation. They are cautious and can be paralyzed and unproductive for a period of time. It is analogous to a period of grieving.

The Secret of Organizational Change Management

In the 2014 summer version of Strategy + Business magazine, there was an article entitled “10 Principles of Leading Change Management.”  This article ties nicely into one of my previous blog posts “The Protean Corporation” that was focused on what corporations need to do to deal with the continuous and explosive change that they are faced with everyday. That blog post was focused on the organizational structure and culture required for our changing environment while this post is focused on rolling out change within the organization itself.

The 10 guiding principles for change as described in the article are summarized below (with some of my commentary added);

1) Lead with the culture – when building your strategy for rolling out the change, take into account your organizations vision, mission, values and overall culture. Does the change align with the vision, mission, values and culture? How can you structure or position the change to leverage these things and make it easier for the organization to accept and embrace the change?