Deliverable 1 - Analyzing Leadership

Running head: LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT IN CHANGE MANAGEMENT 1

Running head: LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT IN CHANGE MANAGEMENT 4

Leadership and management in change management

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Leaders have a role of influencing, engaging and encouraging people to work towards achievement of common goal. This makes leadership strategies like authoritarian strategies to be less admired in today’s workforce. Many managers and leaders do not have awareness on how to employ leadership strategies in order to improve their ability to influence workforce and improve their performance. Encouraging recognition is one of the leadership strategies that encourage continued commitment to the vision, mission and goals of the organization. Employees want to be appreciated and this creates feeling of being valued. It in turn instills sense of engagement and commitment. Celebration and recognition should be done when employees work above and beyond expectations to achieve great results. This encourages employees to continue performing well even during times of high production volume and stress (Hersey, Blanchard & Johnson, 2007).

Another leadership strategy is delegating and empowering. The best leadership strategy is to engage workforce through empowering them by delegating greater responsibility. This creates sense of self-worth in them and every task can be done without the presence of the manager because they know their responsibility. Workforce can be empowered by coaching them, training them, encouraging them and rewarding them. These two strategies help leaders to retain employees who have know-how, experience and confidence necessary for fundamental changes in the organization. Competition forces organizations to change the way they do their business. Having empowered workforce helps during such times since the workforce is competent to tackle any problem facing the organization. When top leaders push power downwards across the organization, they empower the team to make decisions.

Change management is the use of tools and processes to manage change from current state to future state in order to achieve expected results. The aim of implementing change is to improve organizational effectiveness. Individual change is also required during organizational transformation. People should be managed in order to minimize resistance to change. When employees feel part of the organization, they are capable of adopting the organization transformation in a speedy manner.

Organizational transformation is always tough and it requires resources. Top leaders should build strong team that help in driving organizational change. Today’s business environment is ambiguous, uncertain, volatile and complex hence need for organizational change. In order to have significant change, organizations require more than just management. Therefore, true leadership and visionary guidance is very important in organizational change. Great companies have highly intelligent and capable workforce who can come up with solutions in a quick manner. They can deal with complex obstacles that face the companies. An individual cannot have enough knowledge, experience and expertise to solve many problems that face businesses today (Provan & Kenis, 2008).

Most leaders assemble a powerful transformation workforce but do not go ahead to initiate organization change. They do not see urgency of investing time and resources in the change. This is where most of the companies go wrong. They should use the best managers they have in initiating the change. Many organizations focus more on management than leadership. This makes several things to happen. Senior leaders are assumed they don’t see effort as a priority. They miss the chance of knowing what is going on. Senior leaders have capacity to disrupt what management plans to accomplish. The management does not have credibility and power to make things happen regardless of competence and respect they have. Senior leaders should actively be involved in organizational change.

References

Hersey, P., Blanchard, K. H., & Johnson, D. E. (2007). Management of organizational behavior (Vol. 9). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice hall.

Provan, K. G., & Kenis, P. (2008). Modes of network governance: Structure, management, and effectiveness. Journal of public administration research and theory, 18(2), 229-252.

Comment from my instructor:

Overall your discussion on analyzing leadership was satisfactory.  You provided an appropriate review of leadership strategies including those used in the last ten years.  Your analysis could have been enhanced with more specific details and related examples to support the discussion. What is the effectiveness of the strategies selected?  How effective is the organization if organizational change is not implemented.  Though your assignment was satisfactory, if you decide you can make the suggested changes to increase your grade.