After viewing the Youtube video, A Tale of
Power and Vision, reflect on your organization or a past organization. In a
well-written post to your Reflection Blog, describe a situation from your
organizational life that was similar to the situation from the video. Access
the blog instructions by clicking on the blog icon. Describe the situation in
detail making sure to discuss how the organization was able to work through the
difficulties to enable real change to occur.
If you can't think of a similar situation,
then reflect on the different organizational agents from the video: pessimists,
pragmatists, visionaries, power players, and the crowd. Consider whether the
attitudes represented by each of these agents are necessary and healthy within
a normally functioning company. Try to think of both positive and negative
aspects of each agent.
The situation presented in the
video A Tale of Power and Vision (Kohn,
2007) depicts situations that many organizations face. The video highlights the reaction of people
in companies who are facing changes.
Some of the employees represent pessimism and pragmatism, while others
represent and supper the power of change by being the power and vision. I have been exposed to these situations in
several of my past experiences; some worked out for the best, while others
consistently resisted change and never really improved from that moment.
The first example that comes to
mind when thinking about situations depicted in the video is in reference to my
time at my previous employer, Fruit of the Loom. When I graduated college, I was hired on at
Fruit of the Loom at their headquarters in Bowling Green, KY. Prior to working there, my knowledge of this
company was indifferent, but I always assumed they were successful as they have
been around longer than most companies around today. Once I began working at Fruit, I quickly
realized that there was a lot of negativity and push back for changes that were
happening to the company. Ever since
they went into bankruptcy back in the early to mid 2000s, the company has been
working hard to recover, so change is inevitable. The specific area that I worked in was facing
a great deal of change. They had been
geographically moved to a new location, away from the other people they worked
with, and their previous team had been laid off, leaving many of the remaining
employees bitter.
Change, especially when a
company hits rock bottom, is inevitable.
In order for change to be success and work, people need to be prepared
for it. As Brown (2011) notes, organizations
are not static and function within the context of their influences. In the case for my previous employer, they
were shaving areas that seemed unnecessary to the growth and improvement of the
company and hoping to create a new vision by developing new teams of people
with various expertise. At the time,
this seemed like the only way to develop a successful turnaround, however, the
push-back from the employees and the pessimism of some ended up creating a
toxic work environment filled with negativity and lacking vision and
perspective.
In our class discussion this
week, we focused on the norms of companies and the methods of determining and
figuring out what those norms are. The
culture of an organization is crucial to understand when developing a plan for
change. Brown (2011) states that norms
are organized and shared ideas regarding what members should do and feel, how
this behavior should be regulated, and what sanctions should be applied when
behavior does not coincide with social expectations. These norms are broken down into two
different categories including pivotal norms, which are norms that are
essential to accomplishing the organization’s objectives and peripheral norms,
which are norms that support and contribute to the pivotal norms, but are not
essential to the organization’s objectives.
(Brown, 2011) These norms are critical to the success of organizational
change and culture. This can be easily
understood when looking at Fruit. The
problems that occurred when the changes started to take place were a direct
response to the lack of understanding of the different cultures within the
company. The ‘change-makers’ in the
company established a vision, but did not execute it properly because they
failed to communicate with and understand the culture of each area of the
company. With a company as big as Fruit,
it is important to recognize each area and determine the specific, unique needs
of that department. In the case of my
department, which happened to be the creative department, our cultural norms
and specific needs were overlooked, leaving a group of highly disgruntled,
pessimistic employees who gave constant push back to the upper management. While the department did not handle the
change well, the company did not handle the pessimism well either, creating an
environment that was not beneficial for anyone.
This is very similar to the video in that once a decision has been made,
people began to categorize themselves as agreeing with the changes or
disagreeing with the changes.
Overall, when I think about the
atmosphere at Fruit of the Loom, I think that all the ‘players’ within the company,
the pessimists, pragmatists, visionaries, and power players, all played an important
role in the continuous development of change.
Without the pessimists and pragmatists, valid points could be overlooked,
problems my go unnoticed, and naivety may take over. Having a healthy dose of both can help
establish a nice balance within a company if the change makers recognize and
understand the organizational culture and the norms of each section of the
company. If the pessimists and
pragmatist can effectively communicate their issues and the visionaries and
power players are willing to listen, an effective course of action can take
place leading to an eventual positive outcome.
Kohn (2007) stated at the end of the video that a better future is
possible if we build a community power and have a vision for what to do with
it. Developing a strong organizational
community through organizational culture and norms and having the visionaries
and power players to facilitate that change is key to a successful
implementation of change.
References
Brown, D. R. (2011). An
experiential approach to organization development (8th ed.).
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Kohn, S. (2007, November 5). A
tale of power and vision [Video file]. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZVIWZGheXY
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