Evaluate Potential Crisis in a Planned Change Cycle

Instructions

Assume that you are a change management consultant hired by the consulting firm in the example in this week’s introduction to research and analyze both the likelihood of a crisis among leaders and/or subordinate personnel with the impending training.

You are given authority to interview any leader or subordinate personnel involved in the planned change, inquire about areas of discomfort experienced last year, as well as explore how these areas could be relieved. Per your contract, you are to prepare two documents.

First, prepare a handout to discuss with participants of an all-team meeting that includes your findings and possible remedies to concerns. This document should include:

• Provide an abstract and key points discovered from your interviews and research.
• Explain key discoveries from persons you interviewed concerning discomfort with the Saturday morning training sessions.
• Determine the feasibility among subordinate leaders of possibly conducting training at other days and times or other alternatives.
• Ask for suggestions and a discussion regarding other training possibilities.
• Provide in-text citations in addition to your references page, as many of the personnel at the firm have advanced degrees and will expect academic citing and references.

Second, provide a brief report for the RVP discussing possible and suggested procedures if a crisis does develop over the planned training sessions. Provide suggestions for dealing with the crisis, including the following:

• Recommend how to discuss the crisis with the most vocal subordinate leaders.
• Recommend how to discuss all aspects of the crisis with HR.
• Recommend how to effectively implement the training if some subordinate leaders refuse to participate.
• Recommend how to respond to subordinate leaders who may leave the firm, including the recruiting of replacements.

Support each document with at least two scholarly resources. In addition to these specified resources, other appropriate scholarly resources, including seminal articles, may be included.

Length of Handout: 2 pages
Length of summary for RVP: 3-5 pages, not including title and reference pages

Here is the example:

As an example of an area of discomfort, consider those subordinate leaders of a national consulting firm were asked by the regional vice president (RVP) to work Saturday mornings, with pay, for a month to implement a planned change to a new computing platform for the regional office of a national firm. This amounted to four Saturdays from 8 AM until noon, in which subordinate leaders were engaged in both understandings and using the new platform. When the four weeks were over, these newly trained subordinate leaders were then to conduct training/implementation sessions with their subordinate personnel for Monday through Thursday the last hour of the day for four weeks.

As an indication of a faulty communication structure between the regional vice president and subordinate leaders, consider that the regional vice president (RVP) and leader for the office was told from two subordinate leaders the same concern they heard last year with a similar training period: The Saturday training sessions will bring some hardship upon them and their peer leaders. They reminded the RVP that two of the eight subordinate leaders were single parents who had not voiced concerns but would encounter challenges with their children. At first, the RVP decided to meet with all subordinate leaders and convince them of the necessity of the Saturday morning training but was uncertain how to proceed.

Because the RVP heard the same concern with a similar planned change last year, they were troubled that they had only heard from two of the eight subordinate leaders. The RVP wondered what the others were thinking. This indicated that the RVP’s communication regarding the planned change was largely taken as an edict rather than communication among the office leaders. The communication network for communicating planned change was not in good order.