I think it’s safe to say that most of us want to change at least one thing about ourselves or our job. Hopefully, this want for change is for the better! This weeks lesson was interesting because it gave us some insight into how change works. Albert Bandura (1986) developed a model of social learning that focuses on four steps: attendance, retention, reproduction, and motivation.
Attention is honing in on the behavior you want to take on. For example, if a company wants to increase its communication, a good start would be to identify where the breakdown is and look at examples of companies that have a good communication structure. This could be done by shadowing other companies, but once the desired communication skill has been observed, members of the company need to retain the new information. At its simplest, this is just remembering what the effective model looks like, how it works and how it affects the company at large. Some challenges to this is that if we don’t remember all the information, we may bring only part of the needed information back to our company.
But, let’s say that we bring the whole picture of this communication strategy back to our company. Now, we have to be motivated to replicate the behavior. This is where there leaders of the company need to have buy in from ALL employes. The leaders need to motivate others to try and come up with achievable goals and timelines. If this process fails, then it won’t matter how good the new strategy is, it will fail, because those that need to execute the plan aren’t willing to. After motivating the whole team, the company is ready to reproduce the new model that has been adapted from other companies/observation. It is important that this part not be rushed, because, again, if we don’t have the buy in, implementation will fail.
Work Cited
PSU World Campus, (2017) Social Learning https://psu.instructure.com/courses/1826457/modules/items/21654114
It is interesting because we all deal with change on an induvial level on a daily basis and can make decisions to change or modify our behavior pretty quickly. Whether it is changing our eating habits to become healthier or returning to school after a lengthy absence to make ourselves more marketable or to achieve a lifelong goal we have had.
When we talk about organizational change, it is not something that can just happen overnight. It is a lengthy and difficult process that takes time and patience. What I have realized and like you mentioned, is that a lot of companies do not take the time to get the buy in from employees. They try to force change on people that don’t quite understand why the change is needed. This causes confusion, anxiety, resistance, and unhappy people. If more leaders spent time, communicating the “why” piece and made a strong case for why the change was needed and how the change was going to be good for all, employees would feel more like they were part of the process and be more apt to embrace the change.
This is a great post that I feel directly relates to my post from this week. In my post, I talked about the NUMMI project, which was a joint venture between Toyota and GM, started in the mid-1980s. This experiment was meant to teach Toyota how to manufacture vehicles in the US while Toyota instilled the “Toyota Way” into the GM employees who worked at the plant. After learning how productive and effective the Toyota Way was, the GM employees were to travel from plant to plant and pass along what they learned so each plant would operate in the same manner as the NUMMI plant.
As these NUMMI ambassadors went along, they started to realize there was a great amount of push-back from each plant. It can be said that the employees of each plant lacked the motivation to change their ways in order to become more efficient. Since the ambassadors didn’t press the issue due to being so outnumbered, most of the plants never changed.
In the end, GM failed because of it and was a part of the financial crisis of 2008 bailout.
So while the learned behavior was there, the company lacked the motivation, as a whole, to implement a better process. Great post!