Organizational Culture and Leadership, 5th Edition

16A MODEL OF CHANGE MANAGEMENT AND THE CHANGE LEADER

If you are a leader or a manager and want to create, evolve, or change your culture because you believe that it is some aspect of culture that matters to the functioning of your organization, you need to understand what we have covered so far in this book, but it may not seem very practical to you. What you want and need in addition is a model of the change process itself and some guidelines for how to get started. In this chapter we will define you as the “change leader” and provide you a model for managing change.

We will look first at a general model of how organizational change works, because you can’t change culture if you don’t understand the general change process in human systems. Before you get to culture change you have to answer first what is the problem, what is worrying you? If you conclude that you do need to change something, you have to get very precise and concrete about what you want to change and why. Paradoxically, you will have to answer these questions without using the word culture because culture is just an abstraction that refers to lots of concrete things such as structure, process, beliefs, values, and behavior.

If you think of culture as being for the group or organization what personality or character is to the individual, you will realize that just assessing a personality without having some reason to do so can be an endless and pointless exercise. The same is true for general culture assessment. ...