Salesforce.com : Change Management As this is the final term paper, what we are looking is how much you have learned out of this subject. What did change management impacted on you. To showcase your l
Running head: SALESFORCE.COM: CHANGE MANAGEMENT 0
Salesforce.com: Change Management
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Salesforce.com: Change Management
Throughout the course, I have learned that change management has many guises. Change management uses several repeated cycles and a holistic set of tools to obtain approval for changes to the scope, budget, timeline, and budget to increase organizational effectiveness. Since change is an event that takes place to individuals at different times, several human factors should be taken into consideration when implementing it. For example, organizations need to take into account ways of managing conflicts, teamwork, communication change, and providing leadership. This implies that the more an organization affects a given change through collaboration with employees, the closer it is to achieving desired outcomes. From the course content, it can be deduced that change management is an enabling framework for ensuring effective management of people, processes and resources. I have also learned that while implementing change, there will be resistance from different sides, particularly in change-saturated environments. In this regard, change management requires the incorporation of people who will design new work processes and implement the change effectively. The process of change requires preparing employees for change, managing change through a project plan, and reinforcing change by ensuring compliance with set standards as well as mechanisms required to cement the change process. Therefore, the success of organizational change management depends on how good individuals within an organization embrace change.
Dealing with Conflict
The key among the important details I have learned in dealing with conflict. Conflict may arise out of a disagreement over needs, values, perceptions, beliefs, and expectations. Conflict can also arise from ineffective and unclear communication. Conflicts are part of an organizational way of dealing with issues that may hamper its growth. Although conflicts are essentially associated with negative outcomes, sometimes, they are necessary for an organization to move forward. Since all employees are different, perceptions cannot be the same. Thus, differences are inevitable. Conflict in an organization such as Salesforce.com is necessary because it has the potential to increase understanding, enhances human relations, and helps stimulate positive change. However, it can also lead to relational stalemates.
Nikolaou (2018) contends that conflict resolution skills are important in all aspects of life. In organizations, supervisors and managers need to develop appropriate conflict resolution skills. A supervisor or manager with poor conflict resolution skills shows least concern about morale, has quite a low rating for mentorship and hardly treats employees fairly. On the other hand, employees who consider their managers or supervisors to be possessing poor conflict-resolution skills have negative perceptions about their work environment. For instance, they consider their workplace to be least concerned about a job well done by employees, low level of trust in the supervisor, poor rating for information promptly shared, and low ratings for employees who easily admit and correct mistakes made.
Diagnosing Resistance
The course has also enabled me to identify ways of diagnosing resistance to change and change management. If an organization is undergoing the change process, it is important to implement new strategies that can lead to change (Cummings, Bridgman & Brown, 2016). It is the onus of the management to ensure they are aware of which phase they may experience unusual challenges and resistance to change. Diagnosing resistance to change is the main way of ensuring change management and improved performance of organizations. Handling resistance to change largely involves timely recognition of the actual causes of resistance, and identifying ways to minimizing, overcoming, or completely mitigating the resistance. The pace of change in internal organizational environments is likely to spark resistance when it does not keep up with the rate of change in the external environment. Such a disconnect may harm the internal and external organizational ecosystem by devastating the political, economic, social, and cultural aspects of an organization which may lead to stress. Against this backdrop, the course has articled ways of diagnosing resistance to reduce inefficiencies in the change process or workplace stress. In the same vein, diagnosing resistance in an organization involves key processes such as: identifying the root cause of the resistance, developing effective plans to address the major causes of resistance, and preparing individuals such as sponsors and coaches who can help in managing resistance.
Figure3: Diagnosis of resistance
It is imperative to take into account the fact that diagnosing resistance and managing gaps in change is an ongoing process, and does not stop with a single instance of success. Nonetheless, identifying gaps in change management and containing resistance is critical in both preparing employees for change, but equally in reinforcing as well as managing the change process. There is an interconnection between a single process of change and the other activities. In the same way, the main change needed in an organization is usually linked to other issues that the change may impact. Managers, supervisors, and directors should be prepared with the background knowledge and tools requisite in managing resistance to change so that they can easily implement corrective measures to contain the challenge. The changes may be unplanned, planned, catastrophic, positive, negative, evolutionary, slow, or rapid. The top-level managers in an organization, therefore, need to be cognizant of the different states of resistance, such as emotional, cognitive, and behavioral. Jones & Van de Ven (2016) argues that timing is a critical factor in managing resistance to change.
Creating Team-work
The other important lesson worth learning is the importance of creating teamwork. Taking Salesforce.com as a case in point, developing team-work is important as it ensures that work is performed iteratively so that implementation of the change process can be successful (Denning). Building an effective team requires an overall roadmap for effecting the change process by providing guidance and coaching, identifying and getting rid of the systemic impediments to change, evangelizing the organizational change process, and monitoring success throughout the organization. A major aspect of the change process is the increased focus on team output as opposed to individual productivity, alongside cross-functional team building in which team members share their experiences in relation to the change process (Van der Voet & Vermeeren, 2017). Salesforce.com managed to succeed because of the timely implementation of Scrum as a crucial philosophy of ensuring a radical shift from the traditional role of managers acting as controllers of individuals to enablers of team processes to promote creativity and productivity.
Figure 1.0: Change Management Team Ecosystem
Source: Week 3 Dr. Eli Sopow presentation
Based on the figure above, every team player and each sub-team has not only a structure that matches that of the main team in the changing ecosystem but is also driven by the goals of the main team. The components of the change team include people, processes, and parts. However, the change management team must possess certain qualities, which include: knowledge, skills, motivation, and abilities. These qualities can be summed up into change leadership competency.
Change competency requires leadership competency. Moreover, competency depends on people’s relationship to the expected change. For example, for managers and leaders, change management competency implies being an effective sponsor and promoter of change as well as demonstrating personal and organizational commitment to change. For employees, change implies embracing a new way of doing things in the organization. Based on the course content, it is worth mentioning that while competency varies depending on individual relationship to the change process, organizations are likely to become successful when they foster change management competencies through teamwork. Managers can build teamwork by following a structured process that makes use of a holistic set of tools and processes to drive organizational change.
There are several purposes for which teams are created as far as change management is concerned. For instance, teams are usually built to enhance communication. This helps to foster a common understanding in a timely and relevant manner. Teams are also built to impose authority. This gives tea members the power to make decisions and to gain support from higher authorities. Teams are also formed to promote collaboration during the change process so that appropriate linkages between groups can be achieved through consensus. Moreover, while implementing change, teamwork enhances responsibility as it ensures that employees are conversant with their job descriptions and ensure that skills match their jobs. Furthermore, teamwork enhances accountability and cooperation during the change process. these are achievable through shared knowledge, mutual respect, timely reporting of results, providing help to those that need it, and applying reasonable rewards and punishment when need be.
Figure 2: The Change team
Source: http://clipart-library.com/clip-art/teamwork-transparent-24.htm
Communicating Change
There are various strategies learned regarding communicating change. In every organization, communication is regarded as a fundamental process of facilitating business processes. Therefore, management can only implement the change process through effective communication. Based on the course content, for the management to communicate change in an effective way, there are certain considerations that should be in place. For example, the management should be aware of the most trusted employees to make them aware of the expected change. Further, communication should involve outlining clearly, the main purpose of implementing change, and why it is necessary. This should be outlined inappropriately and in a language that employees’ best understand. Besides, it involves explaining to all the stakeholders the vision of the organization and how they will benefit from the change process. Stakeholders need to know that the change process is good for the organization as well as for all of them. Communicating the benefits of the change process requires a clear emphasis on the personal, emotional, and psychological benefits of the change. Communicating change should be done consistently and frequently through reliable channels such as focus groups, writing, speaking, and intranet. Communication should be regularly even if the stakeholders seem not to be willing to embrace change. Again, appropriate channels of communication that should be used should be in line with what those targeted are familiar with. Moreover, while communicating change, it is imperative to provide a significant amount of time for people to ask for clarifications, provide input, and respond accordingly to alleviate doubts that may emerge from the change process. Effective communication allows people to feel involved and valued in the change process. It also creates commitment towards the change process so that cases of resistance are minimized. However, for communication to be implemented, there have to be effective leaders.
Leadership
Based on the course content, leaders must have the spirit, grandeur, fortitude, gravity, mercy, and humane heart to ensure that all stakeholders are involved in the change process. Leadership aims at accomplishing more than is expected of the management. From the case study of Salesforce.com, when the various change processes such as innovation are threatened, leaders need to adopt different of managing business processes. This involves the implementation of an array of agile, outcome-oriented, customer-centric, and iterative management practices in the form of Scrum. Effective leadership also entails ensuring that those performing tasks can shift from being controllers of individuals to enablers of the self-organizing teams by outlining responsibilities and priorities in a more efficient and timely manner. This ensures that as the change process is being implemented by leaders and managers, resistance and impediments are identified and eliminated so that stakeholders within an organization can work as a team by taking responsibility and accountability as opposed to reporting directly to the management.
Conclusion
Change is an inevitable part of business processes that everyone should embrace. In retrospect, while there is a wide range of issues I have learned from the course, there are certain critical issues that are worth pointing to. Foremost, I have learned that change effective change management calls for a continuous reassessment of the impact of the change on the organization. Also, the change process requires change leaders to adopt team-building to achieve the expected outcome. While embracing change, change management needs to take into consideration the fact that change is both an institutional journey and a personal one. Its implementation must, however, be done through effective communication. Effective communication makes it possible for all employees to embrace change, with minimal resistance. Leaders must ensure that the change process is successful through nurturing the workforce in favor of the change. It demands ownership and willingness to take responsibility and accountability. The course has also enabled me to learn that change management is usually employed in an organizational setting because poor management of change is costly for organizations. Again, effective change management is a sure way of increasing the likelihood of organizational success because failure to implement change may lead to missed deadlines, overrun budgets, unnecessary rework to ensure tasks are performed as initially expected, or completely abandoning of projects after investing massive resources.
References
Cummings, S., Bridgman, T., & Brown, K. G. (2016). Unfreezing change as three steps: Rethinking Kurt Lewin’s legacy for change management. Human relations, 69(1), 33-60.
Denning, S. Successfully implementing radical management at Salesforce.com. Salesforce Case study.pdf
Jones, S. L., & Van de Ven, A. H. (2016). The changing nature of change resistance: An examination of the moderating impact of time. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 52(4), 482-506.
Nikolaou, P. (2018). Effective strategies for human resource management in educational organizations. Conflict management case studies.
Van der Voet, J., & Vermeeren, B. (2017). Change management in hard times: Can change management mitigate the negative relationship between cutbacks and the organizational commitment and work engagement of public sector employees?. The American Review of Public Administration, 47(2), 230-252.
