Spectrum Sunglass Company - Change Management Simulation

Introduction

As my role in the Change Management Simulation: Power and Influence was the CEO and founder of Spectrum Sunglass Company, I was considering the sustainability and innovation of the company. Since I want to differentiate my product on price and design from our competitors, I choose environmentally sustainability as the new strategy. I had aware that this would be a huge turning point for the whole company, so my goal in the simulation was prevail all my staffs to adopt the action.

Simulation Process

When I started the simulation, things did not go well. I first tried to inform some notification to the managers. However, since the initiative is big to the firm, no one actually respond to my notification. I simply underestimate how hard it can be to drive people out of their comfort zones (Kotter, J. 1995). Some notifications were just too gentle. But I still believe that getting a transformation program started requires the aggressive cooperation of many individuals. Without motivation, people won’t help, and the effort goes nowhere (Kotter, J. 1995). So I went to the consultant to get support on the initiative so that the managers would have fate in the initiative. The result was not very satisfying though. I did gain the consultant’s support, people were still showing no interest in the initiative. In order to be more motivation I tried to clarify organizational values to the managers so that they would understand how important it is for us all to work together.

I was frustrated when my first four moves did not do any good. However the conducting of private interviews was what made things went on to the rail. As quote, “Private conversations can reveal important information about the change target, such as who is in their social network and how the target feels about the proposed change initiative”. So conducting private interviews with people could help me recognize their social networks and thoughts on the initiative. And though the private interview it will force people to recognize the idea of the initiative since one cannot ignore an interview like ignoring an email. I chose Andrew Chen, Paul D'Arcy, Deborah Edge and Luke Filer to be my first four interviewers since they were the four senior managers in the company. This interview finally brought some good news to the initiative. Except for the four people I interviewed there were two more people who were also affected because of the social network. And it also showed that Andrew Chen, Paul D’Arcy and Luke Filer were resistant to the initiative. I will come back to this later.

After I interviewed all my managers I found out that although everyone contained a different thought on the initiative, there were some common points they were sharing. There were three people, which were Michelle Barth, Yao Li and Sam Puffer, who actually thought that if most of the others in the