Culture: Post #7--Leading Change

How Leaders Manage Culture Change   When

leaders want to move change along, leaders have to create disequilibrium (unfreezing) that pushes people to change. Stages of learning/change (based on Kurt Lewin’s Change Management Model): 1. Unfreezing: Leaders motivate by providing discomforting data, connecting it to goals and ideals that produce anxiety, and creating a psychologically safe place to solve the problem as well as maintain integrity and identity. Basic principles of change: survival anxiety must be more powerful than learning anxiety, but it’s better to reduce learning anxiety rather than raise survival anxiety. 2. Cognitive Restructuring (Change-Transition): After unfreezing the organization, people have to change one of two ways: By imitating role models or by trial and error—Imitation or Experimentation.           3. Refreezing: New learning will stabilize and become the new norm only when people see results of the change efforts. However, if there’s no evidence that change is working, people revert back to old ways.

Culture: Post #6--Stages

Organizational Stages   Founding and early stage (led by founders, distinctive, clannish); Midlife (founders leave, outsiders come in, succession’s tough); Organizational Maturity and Potential Decline (success breeds entrenchment, unwillingness to change).

Culture: Post #5--Leadership & Culture

Leadership and Culture   Culture comes from founders and groups. Founders have a profound impact on culture. Even mature companies retain their founders’ beliefs and values. Founders offer up answers to early questions that calm anxiety and give the group a set of guidelines worthy of passing along to newbies. Groups must come to grips with group membership, goals of the group, group influencers, aggression and love, and adaptive norms that become part of the culture.