This scene is instigated by previous weeks of discontent and conflict on the team and in the community. The team is being affected by both external and internal forces. External forces such as changing demographics in the area and in their school, as well as social pressures have set the scene and created an overall clash within the two groups. Furthermore, internal forces like conflict and organizational culture are being disrupted and causing friction. At this scene, coach is trying to establish a sense of urgency by saying things like “if this continues you too will be destroyed.” Without changing something, the group will cease to exist at all. He is developing a vision and strategy for success that begins with small victories. First, they must learn to get along so they can be a team. Then they can move on to playing well together and reach their ultimate goal of winning.
If organizations are around long enough, they will certainly go through change at some point or another. I worked as the assistant to the Food and Beverage Department Manager at Sterling National Country Club a few summers ago, and that organization went through quite a bit of change. At one point, the country club completely overhauled the way we accounted for inventory and loaded the beer carts, which was a major source of revenue.
The old system was as follows:
· The four beer cart employees come in in the morning and stock their carts
· They sell food and beverages all day while recording how much they are selling
· They stock up when necessary, and sell and record as usual
· At the end of the day, they would give me their sheets of what they sold and I would enter it into the system
What we found is that there was no real way of knowing if those were the real amounts sold because they only took a physical inventory every two weeks or so, and to make it worse it seemed like we were losing money somewhere. So, with the manager we developed a system much different than the usual routine:
· Every morning, I supervised the employees load their carts with equal amounts of product while I recorded how much had been taken
· When they needed to restock, I supervised then as well and recorded the amounts of inventory taken
· At the end of the day, they totaled up how much product they had left and I subtracted that from the amount taken to get the amount used and a sales figure for the day
· The excess product was put back into inventory
This was obviously much more regimented a process and the employees thought it was a pain at first, even I felt like the bad guy at some points, but it was effective. Looking back when considering what I have learned in this class, the way the change was implemented is strikingly similar to Lewin’s Change Model:
1. Unfreezing – we had a meeting that showed where we were losing money and why the old system was risky and inefficient without being accusatory
2. Changing – we put in place the new system under direct supervision
3. Refreezing – we helped the employees integrate this behavior into their normal ways of doing things through direct supervision and recording inventory and sales while we also offered free lunch rewards for lunch for the top salesmen of the previous day
-Mike Daw
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