The practises and process of change management Essay

The practises and process of change management - Essay Example Due to ease of measurement and adjustment, more concentration is given to the hard side and the soft side is ignored as the impacts on the soft side are hard to measure and due to this difficulty, they are even hard to alter. It is clear that the most challenging part of change management is the soft side or the side that concerns people. Body A huge range of change management models and literature is available to help managers in dealing with changes and implementing changes successfully. Theoretical models have provided tremendous amount of insight about how managers can successfully implement change. But these models are not applicable to every situation and managers need to handle change according to their own situations. The models provided for change by several theorists have been created while keeping in mind that these models are applicable to the general population of the organizations. The first theory proposed regarding change was done by Kurt Lewin in which he stated that there are a number of factors that influence an individual’s perception to change and an individual might go through three stages in order to accept and implement change. According to Kurt Lewin’s theory, change does not occur suddenly; rather individuals and organization go through a process before they finally adopt change. According to him there are three stages that need to be travelled for organization’s to change. The first part of this three staged process is unfreezing in which the state of an organism of not being ready to accept changed is altered to being ready and enthusiastic to take the initial steps to accept change (MAILICK, 1998, p.15). The unfreezing stage is undoubtedly the most important of all stages because in this change an individual has to first be ready to change. To make an individual ready to accept change, the management of an organization has to take several necessary steps. These steps include, informing employees about the necess ity of changing and the current comfort boundary is no longer a viable option. The information about necessity to change will motivate individuals and the higher will be the amount of urgency to change, the higher the level of employee motivation towards change will increase (GILLEY, 2005, p.35). Once the management has been successful in unfreezing the people working within the organization, they next move towards solving the issue of how to continue with the change process. Kurt Lewin states that change is not a one time event; it continues to take place in the form of a process and thus has regarded the process of change as a transition (MAILICK, 1998, p.15). Transition here does not signal the changes that can be witnessed; rather these changes include those alterations that take place inside as a reaction of the proposed change. The second stage proposed by Kurt Lewin is the changing stage in which the actual change arises and the changes that are desirable take place. In this stage, the employees working within an organization shift from old ways of doing things to new ways of doing things. The problem with this stage is that it is the most complex stage of the entire change process as this stage gives rises to the fear of unknown within the people (SENGUPTA, 2006, p.3). This change step is even considered difficult as in