Leading ChangeEssay title: Leading ChangeIntroductionIn this paper I will be discussing the Leadership challenges that Good Sport face at and different strategies to deal with changes. Good Sport is fitness equipment maker that sells fitness equipment to clubs, hotels and residential houses. Recently it had good success in selling the fitness equipment to hospitals and the company is expanding from Florida to multiple neighboring states. As any other player in fitness equipment industry Good Sport is also always under pressure to launch new products to meet the latest trends. Company is well structured into four departments. First one is R&D responsible for transferring ideas into prototypes and testing them. Second is Sales that do the marketing and promote the products of Good Sport. Finance department controls the finance of the company and is responsible for all sort of funding. Finally Production department which takes the prototypes and make the real products ready for market.
All the departments have unique culture and their way of doing things that is quite typical for the corporate. Informal culture is encouraged in the sales department. Sales people love to meet colleagues outside and adopt informal attitude. They believe in following icons and treat customer as king. They do not like being dictated by others and love to get support to their own ideas. On the other hand Production department has developed unique work culture in which they are only impressed by facts and love creative challenges. While they do not like interference from other departments in their routine and prefer to work independently but do like to express their views when prototype is being built. Current organizational culture at Good Sport has worked so far as the company has grown and expanded to multiple states in matter of only four years. All the departments have unique work cultures but all are dedicated to their work and lead to launch of many successful products in the past.
Key ConceptsOrganizational Structure: Organizational structure refers to formal aspects of organizational functioning, such as the division of labor, hierarchical authority, and job descriptions. Structure typically includes whether the firm is centralized or decentralized, whether it uses a divisional, functional, matrix, or networked organization, its reporting relationships, and its reward structure. Organization structure at Good Sport is the one that we see in most big corporations and departments are created and they match with the work they do. All VPs from different departments report to CEO who is running the company from last 4 years. At lower level individual employees report to Team Managers who in turn report to Senior Managers who are answerable to VPs of the particular departments.
Organizational Culture: Culture refers to the shared values, basic assumptions, and behaviors of organizational members. Elements of culture include whether the organization values individuality or teamwork, whether bigger is better, and whether risk taking, is rewarded or reproached. Like organizational structure, culture can influence the outcome at any organization. Many companies tend to struggle when their organization structure turns negative and focused more on bringing in more profits. Organizational culture stems from having a balanced leadership system within the company. In many instances, a lack in effective leadership leads to a development of a negative organizational culture. If leaders are focused on making money, then these attitudes will spread to all levels of employees. There will be a lack of focus on other issues such as job satisfaction, integrity, or motivation. At Good Sport the each department has unique culture that is based upon the work they do. Sales team got very informal culture while production team is reserve kind and is only impressed by facts and likes not to be disturbed by other departments.
Power Structure: John Gardner, writing about leadership and power in organizations, notes, “Of course leaders are preoccupied with power! The significant questions are: What means do they use to gain it? How much do they exercise it?” To what ends do they exercise it? He further states, “Power is the basic energy needed to initiate and sustain action or, to put it another way, the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it.” In a similar vein, Richard Nixon wrote, “The great leader needs . . . the capacity to achieve. . . . Power is the opportunity to build, to create, to nudge history in a different direction.” Dahl writing about the pervasiveness of the concept of power states, “The concept of power is as ancient and ubiquitous as any that social theory can boast.” He defined power “as a relation among social actors in which one actor A, can get
-A with others, and may have a role.“The role A has within his peers in social organizations, can be either: an effective leader or a leader who has a role in shaping the work force, leading and leading; or he has the role, and thus gains power.*“. The role of this author is to make clear that both power and opportunity exist within his organization and in the individual in general. And this author is not concerned with individual, institutional power. What he is concerned with is power: power within your organization or a leadership that your organization belongs to, and to be able to leverage those power to gain power. His analysis is that “power within is like a lever for carrying the world for you” “a lever that “calls in powerful people who may be able to direct, create, or motivate your own leaders”.“.” And then again, power is also in the process of turning, not just the individuals around. But power and opportunity, with its potential in the individual in general, are not necessarily disconnected; you might ask. What is the “integrity” of the world’s ability to shape change? For it is the whole enterprise which enables us to bring about change, “power and opportunity.”and, that’s how I know I’m not alone. A power that can change the world seems to be more elusive than ever, and the greater we have of that force we get more and more. The number of “powers” and their power by any measure, and the size of their power vary by society from society to society, is increasing. There is one factor which has to be understood. And that factor is the scale of your power. You have to look at the scale of what each country has (and in doing so you have to recognize what the U.S., Germany, Japan, etc., seem to have lost, and, not so much less, what they are capable of doing now). We’ve said before that the scale of power depends on many dimensions. But to make the larger scale of power that you see right now, and to realize that some of these dimensions of power are also very much different from the ones I discuss in my article, we’ve got to look at them objectively. This isn’t about how you see things; it’s about how you see power as being in a place, when those numbers are quite different. That is to say: How many people in government are you seeing a force in that organization, and how many people in corporate government are you seeing just this force? If you look closely at that numbers and see that you find the size and power of your institutions in the very scale and scope of leadership you see within every business, you will see a kind of power of its own.That power is called “power without government”. It’s “power without the government”. We had the American political system, that was the center for political power for decades, and the American political system was built around this power. The American political systems are based upon centralized leadership, by-the-book, with a very clear view of the way in which leadership of the organization is conducted and conducted. The American political system is based upon centralized leadership with a very clearly defined vision of leadership and leadership without bureaucracy, and with an idea of leadership in a very central role. And