Guest Talk With Dr. Aamir Firoz on Change Management
On 12th august
2017, Dr. Aamir Firoz Shamsi was invited for Guest Speaking Session in
leadership class on the topic of Change
Management. Dr. Aamir Firoz Shamsi is a seasonal academician,
researcher, trainer and consultant. He has been working as associate Professor
in Institute of Business Management Karachi, Pakistan. He did his PhD in
Management Science from Hamdard University, Karachi. Before this he did MS from
SZABIST and earned gold Medal from Karachi University.
He started the conversation
with change management that it is the discipline that guides how we prepare,
equip and support individuals to successfully adopt change in order to drive
organizational success and outcomes. He added that bringing change in you is
easier than bringing change in others. For this, you need to be ruthless. Secondly,
as per human psychology, one seeks for rewards either intrinsic or extrinsic. So
associating rewards to bring possible outcomes can be a useful approach to
bring change.
Organizational change
management involves first identifying the groups and people who will need to
change as the result of the project, and in what ways they will need to change.
Organizational change management then involves creating a customized plan for
ensuring impacted employees receive the awareness, leadership, coaching, and
training they need in order to change successfully. Driving successful
individual transitions should be the central focus of the activities in
organizational change management.
He highlighted
the primary difference between an entrepreneur and intrapreneur is the former
refers to a person who starts his own business with a new idea or concept; the
latter represents an employee who promotes innovation within the limits of the
organization. He emphasized the importance of
generalization and specialization of a field. Being an MBA student, one should
not bind himself to the field of specialization. He advised to bring change in himself
according to demand of a particular situation.
Overcoming with resistance to
change is very important. Acquisition of an organization generally fails
because ruthless element is absent. People can resist and you may fail to
manage.
A good leader should have
ability to manage change. He give the example of Jack welch. Jack Welch used to
be a good leader from organization’s prospective. He tried to engage people
with their jobs. Also, from shareholders prospective, he was a successful
leader. He worked to make GE among 500 fortune companies. In contrast to it, he
was very strict person for his employees because he tried to influence people
and those who failed to do so were got fired. He also talked about De-
structuring and downsizing. In long run downsizing is bad approach while in
short run it can be a good approach. It depends upon situation.
The key to implement change
successfully is dividing a big change into series of small changes because
people ready to accept small changes as compared to a big change. In addition
to this, networking of such small changes is necessary so that it can give
impression of a single change.
Sustaining change is very
important and it should be associated with cultural changes. Culture is the
term we use to describe the way of being of a group of people who share a
common heritage or a common identity. Cultural transformation begins with the personal
transformation of the leaders. Organizations
don’t transform. People do. Societal leadership is about
welfare of society and transformation of people whereas Organizational
leadership is about profit maximization. A leader should focus on team
orientation rather than performance orientation to minimize performance gaps.
While being the part of this
dynamic world, one should be able to adapt according to environment. Instead of
starting new business, companies are more interested in existing businesses. He
quoted the example of IT Boom; in 1990, when a person asked to grant a loan
from Capital venture (an American Board) for the establishment of a new
business. They offered him more amount of money if he got ready to work on
existing projects of that time.
He ended the session by saying
that storytelling, open communication, sharing the vision and reward system,
these are tools to bring change in an organization. Employee participation
comes from sharing of vision among the company employees but interested and
capable people should be involved in such activity.
We all had a very interactivr and informative session with Dr Firoz who shared insights on Change Management. He talked about the process of change and how companies can tackle the retaliation from the subordinates during such process. He also highlighted how human psychology is involved in such process as change stems from brain. One important thing regarding change he explained was that unless and until management will not attach certain reward to employees behavior and if the don't value the reward change process might become problematic for the organization.
ReplyDeleteWe had an interactive speaker session with Dr. Aamir Firoz Shamsi who shared his insights on a very important topic of Change Management. According to him bringing change in your organization as well in the employees is not an easy task and always the leaders have to associate the rewards if they really want others to accept or adjust with the change. He also told us the important difference between intra and entrepreneur. According to him change is nothing but to manage well with the resistance and the human psychology plays an important role in bringing about the change.
ReplyDeleteIt was a very interactive session. We were told the importance of change and change management. Change is often difficult to accept by the employees so it is the job of the leader to know the psychology of the employees to help them understand and accept change.
ReplyDelete