A630.1.4.RB - Board of Directors

Change is an unstoppable force, which in the twenty-first century, all of us will have to face with increasingly fragmented, rapidly changing, tumultuous conditions. It is important that you become aware of your orientation toward adapting to these conditions (Whetten, Cameron 2011). Brown (2011) illustrates change, as coming down upon us like an avalanche, and most people are utterly unprepared to cope with it. Change is occurring so rapidly that it is a moving target (Brown, 2011).  Effective implementation of change in organizations will require leadership to adapt to the conditions and accept personal responsibility for their actions under changing conditions (Whetten, Cameron 2011).

A great illustration of these concepts of change on how people handle different types of obstacles is the video presentation by Sally Kohl entitled, A Tale of Power & Vision (2007). The video depicts the struggles of a pessimists and pragmatists who seemed to be responsible for holding back or stopping changes within an organization and Power and Vision who encourage innovation and positive change. The video showed how a group of individuals working as a team could overcome adversity. According to Brown (2011), Change is a way of life in today’s organization, but organizations are also faced with maintaining a stable identity and operations in order to accomplish their primary goals.

However, change just for the sake of change is not necessarily effective; in fact, it may be dysfunctional (Brown, 2011). 

In my experience I have seem many changes take place in the military. A good example is the development and distribution of new uniforms to service members. You can only imaging the daunting task to ensure every person is under complete compliance of the order. The latest of these directives were the total overhaul of the Navy’s working uniform. This task was meet with not a lot of enthusiasm and many were reluctant. However, the military has a way of enforcing change, which allows leadership to come up with different ways of implementation. In my squadron, communication was the key to success; leadership was transparent to the change and communicated effectively down the chain of command. The way the leadership handle the situation gave creditability to the Navy. Ultimately, the dateline was meet and the objective was achieved. This example, showed how change can be administer across a large organization, and how much influence leadership has within a group.

In conclusion, we can see that change is going to happen into to keep up with the world development. It is up to leadership to encourage and strengthen their teams to be prepare to tackles the obstacles associated with change.

Reference:

Brown, D. R. (2011). An Experimental Approach to Organization Development (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Kohn, S. (uploaded 2007). Board of Directors: A Tale of Power and Vision. YouTube video. Retrieved Aug 14, 2015 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZVIWZGheXY 

Whetten, D. A., & Cameron, K. S. (2011). Developing Self-Awareness. In Developing Managment Skills Eighth ed., pp. 57-82). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education Inc.