Business Leadership

Change Leader
Prof. Y. K. Shriram

Submitted By: Nidhish Agrawal (10319) Nikunj Ramani (10320) Piyush Bajaj (10324) Pradyumna Malpani () Sukanya Bose ()

Various factors including globalization, work force diversity, disruptive technologies, increasing business complexities, increasing product portfolios, changing consumers lifestyle and others has forced organizations to change constantly with time. There are three type of change leaderships that could be learned from Infosys as an example: 1. Change Leadership: It is related to managing through resistances pursuing for the benefits in the organization. 2. Adversity Leadership: It is related to managing crisis situations. 3. Transition Leadership: It deals with acquiring and integrating new business lines. There are two categories that have been researched extensively with regard to change in the corporate context which are 1. Individual level change models and 2. Organizational level change models. Companies look to recruit/retain the individuals who are willing to change as per the requirements of the situation. Similarly many research theories have been develop in studying and successfully implementing an organizational level change such as Force Field Analysis, McKinsey 7S framework, Organizational Intelligence model and many others. There are 8 common factors affecting the change efforts of an organization: Allowing too much complacency Failing to create a sufficiently powerful guiding coalition Underestimating the power of vision Under communicating the vision by a factor of 10 Permitting obstacles to block the new vision Failing to create short term wins Declaring victory too soon Neglecting to anchor changes firmly in the corporate culture Above factors resulting in many problem for the organization pursuing for change such as new strategies are not implemented and accepted properly, expected synergies are not achieved, re-engineering attracts longer time with high associated costs and many others. Also one needs to create a sense of urgency to avoid the complacency in the attitude in the organization. Pushing up the sense of urgency is very important for bringing in a changing environment in the organization. This could be done by:

 Create a crisis by exposing managers to major weaknesses Allow errors to blow up instead of being corrected at last minute Eliminate obvious examples of excess Stop measuring sub unit performance based only on narrow functional goals Insist people to talk regularly to unsatisfied customer, unhappy suppliers and disgruntled shareholders Leader plays a very important role for bringing out a change in the organization successfully. From the studies it has been found out that about 75% of the transformational efforts in the organizations fail to realize the results they are original sought for in the allocated timeframe. According to a survey conducted by ZDnet in UK (2010), surveyed companies lose 1.7 billion a year from the change initiatives. So a proper selection a leader is very important. A change leader should possess strong position power, broad expertise and high credibility along with good leadership and management skills. He should be able to create trust among the associates through carefully planned offsite events, outgoing nature and inclusive practices. He should be able to create a sense of belongingness among the associates by imparting a common goal across the organization. So effective a good change leader should possess following characteristics: Effective communication of the change vision the key elements of which could be the simplicity, metaphoric, leading by example, proper explanation and others. Ability to empower broad based actions such as communicating a sensible vision and providing a compatible structure as well as training for the employees, confronting the supervisors hindering the change process and others. Generate short term wins through rewards for change agents, fine tuning of strategies, building momentum, keeping bosses on board and others. Consolidating gains and enabling more changes through efficient leadership, reduced interdependencies, and project management from below thus bringing in the trust factor. Anchoring new approaches in the culture by building efficient and effective communication framework, proper delegation processes, open atmosphere and others.