Leading Change: The Essential Role of Managers - Free Essay Sample

Introduction

Managers play essential roles in ensuring high performance and production of the organizations. Furthermore, when organizations are growing and expanding consistently, they have to make changes to ensure efficiency and quality production. They will need to create and adapt changes to improve production. The changes can either be big or small, depending on its structure, size, functionality, and rules. However, when leading the organizations to changes, the managers may make errors hence making the changes to be ineffective in the organization. Besides, this topic's scope is vast, but the discussion is about the mistakes managers make. The essay will expound in details the errors made when leading change in the organization and the effects they have on both the management and staff. The paper will discuss mistakes such as poor planning, lack of vision, the declaration of victory in the shortest time, lack of support from leadership, and lack of skills in changing leadership.

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Poor Planning

The managers may focus on the current solution to solve a temporary problem forgetting that the minor changes can affect the entire organization. They can deploy less focus on getting methodologies without carrying out the upfront planning of the work required. It can lead to an imperfect decision-making process and not implement the right plan to improve productivity.

Managers may facilitate poor planning if they lack enough knowledge about the plan to be executed. For example, you may find a manager has appointed a staff who is not qualified and lacks the relevant skills in the IT department. It can put the organization's data and critical information at risk because the team lacks knowledge of how to carry the security implementation mechanisms to encrypt the data.

The managers may lack good governance skills, which can make them not facilitate the proper planning of strategies to be deployed during the plan execution. Besides, this factor will affect the entire organization's functionality because the manager is overall, and the employees look upon their seniors for the organization's efficient running (Anderson, 2019). Poor governance skills will make the organization lack proper planning as the policies deployed are not fit for the problem solved.

Poor planning makes the resource allocation in the organization uneven, and this leads to a decline in overall performance. It will affect the organization in its planning because some departments or individuals will perform better than others hence ununiformed output in its departments.

Moreover, this factor will lead to a low strategy in stakeholder engagement and communication. Lack of planning will lead to wrong strategizing of the organization's activities with different and irrelevant goals making it challenging to involve stakeholders and investors who can grow. The way of communication from the manager determines a lot because he/she is the overseer. Poor contact may discourage stakeholders from investing in the organization.

Lack of Vision

The other error managers may make while making the change in an organization is a lack of vision (Cameron & Green 2019). Besides, this factor influences the manager to make the wrong move in any matter that concerns the organization simply because they are not goal-oriented.

Under-communication of the organization's vision facilitates error-making when leading it to a change (Doppelt, 2017). It is enabled via happy talk frequently by the managers to staff, lack of sensitization of why the organization has employed them, and lack of consistency in proper communication of the vision. Furthermore, it makes the workers of the organization not to take work seriously.

The misinterpretation of the organization's vision may make the organization move in the wrong direction. However, it makes it not work as intended, leading it to fail in accomplishing its primary goals (Burke, 2017). Misinterpretation makes the organization’s management start to blame each other hence affecting the production.

Failure to understand the mission well will always make the manager unable to remove the obstacles ahead of the mission accomplishment. It may lead to the organization not conducting the activities it was intended for because the manager did not remove the challenges. The obstacles can be either physical or imaginary. The error can be a challenge in the structure of the current organization.

Removing the obstacles, the managers have to understand and comprehend the organization's vision entirely. Some of the narrow challenges is the organizational structure, which narrows job categories and roles to each. It undermines the efforts of each worker affecting the productivity of the organization.

The Declaration of Victory in the Shortest Time

The most common error made by the managers of the organization is declaring victory within the shortest time. In this situation, the manager starts seeing signs of little progress. They report that the work is over, yet, in reality, is not (Lewis & Sahay, 2019). Besides, it facilitates reluctance among the staff, making the performance decline.

Declaration of victory within a short time draws and creates criticism from defamers or detractors. Here, they make the organization go back to its position before adopting change (Tidd & Bessant, 2018). The criticism drawn makes the organizations' managerial team get a significant loss as it is a great step backward.

For the managers to declare victory in the shortest time, they should instead make a celebration of the small achievements. They should award the ones who facilitated them and therefore avoid the error.

Furthermore, the managers have to wait until the changes sink fully and adapt to the organization. Claiming victory at an early stage can make the changes imposed disappear rapidly. Super goal-oriented managers use short-term achievements and manage to tackle the most significant problems encountered.

Lack of Support from Leadership

Lack of support from leadership is another error when making changes in an organization. Organizational change cannot succeed without help from the managerial team. Lack of support makes deploying the transition very difficult. This is because there is a lack of resources to facilitate the operations and make the changes permanent.

When the senior managers fail to fund the changes or the proposals, they make the running of the organization tricky. There are no funds to facilitate the activities and implement the changes (Hughes, 2016). It makes the running of the organization's activities hard because there are no funds.

When the leaders fail to support the changes that are to be adapted and implemented, it makes things so hard. The senior managers should be able to help with the proposed modifications consistently to ensure that they pick and adapt completely (Brunsson & Olsen, 2018). In the process of supporting the changes, the senior managers can hire and come up with a team of experts to facilitate further support. The high rank of the senior officials in the organization makes them put out high urgency on the requirements and resources needed by creating a coalition with the necessary stakeholders.

Lack of Skills in Changing Leadership

Besides, the other error is the lack of skills in changing leadership. It makes the managers plan wrongly for the organization as they are not capable of adapting them appropriately in the new environment of leadership (Bolman & Deal, 2017). In case any problem arises in the new management, they are not able to solve it. It is because they are not able to acquire new skills in the new environment.

Inadequate skills of leadership by some managers make it difficult for leaders to embrace change. It is because they see that it is all about the impossibilities, and it will lower their dignity as the bosses of the organizations they are heading (Christensen, Lægreid, & Rovik, 2020). The leaders will not carry out the company's managerial roles because they lack advanced and appropriate leadership skills.

Lack of skills in changing leadership will make the running of the organization unsmooth. It is because time will be taken to embrace changes, as the managers do not understand changing the environment. If any method or team is to be deployed at the workplace, it will take a long time to adapt to the changes because the one leading is not conversant with it or not competent enough.

Inadequate skills make the managers concentrate too much on the systems deployed in the organization. It makes them forget to train the people who will always interact with it to execute their goals. Besides, it makes the employees produce low in terms of performance, leading the organization backward in terms of productivity.

Conclusion

The errors made by the managers when leading change in the organization affect its future operations. The essay has discussed the mistakes managers can make when trying to show any change in the organization. It has illustrated the ideas clearly with a detailed explanation of the errors discussed. Finally, the essay does not support the mistakes made by the managers as they make the organization decline in performance and fail to adapt to the changes proposed.

References

Anderson, D. L. (2019). Organization development: The process of leading organizational change. SAGE Publications, Incorporated.

Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (2017). Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership. John Wiley & Sons.

Brunsson, N., & Olsen, J. P. (2018). The Reforming organization: making sense of administrative change. Routledge.

Burke, W. W. (2017). Organization change: Theory and practice. Sage publications.

Cameron, E., & Green, M. (2019). Making sense of change management: A complete guide to the models, tools, and organizational change techniques. Kogan Page Publishers.

Christensen, T., Lægreid, P., & Rovik, K. A. (2020). Organization theory and the public sector: Instrument, culture, and myth. Routledge.

Doppelt, B. (2017). Leading change toward sustainability: A change-management guide for business, government, and civil society. Routledge.

Hughes, M. (2016). Leading changes: Why transformation explanations fail. Leadership, 12(4), 449-469.

Lewis, L., & Sahay, S. (2019). Organizational change. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.

Tidd, J., & Bessant, J. R. (2018). Managing innovation: integrating technological, market and organizational change. John Wiley & Sons.