 Hi, my name is Dr. Marcy Stone and I just wanted to say welcome. We're going to be reviewing the practice case study number two for your course leading organizational change and just a little bit of an overview for the case study. So this case study reviewed Gen Mart retail stores. So they're a big box store with over a thousand stores in the United States and the first store opened in 1962. The size of the Gen Mart stores varies depending on the population and location. Some Gen Mart stores include only general merchandise, some have general merchandise and a grocery store and some are small neighborhood markets. Kathy is the chief executive officer of Gen Mart and she has worked for Gen Mart for about 10 years and she was promoted a few years ago into her current position. She spent the last few years gaining a deep understanding of her job and the company and has created goals that she would like to see Gen Mart complete in the future. Lately, Kathy has noticed areas in which Gen Mart has fallen behind their competition and she's aware that changes need to be made if Gen Mart is going to survive into the future. For the last year, Gen Mart has remained stagnant in sales. Although they have not had any growth over the last year, they have not declined in sales. Alright, so let's talk about the organizational changes that she believes Gen Mart needs. So Kathy spent the last six months researching the issues, speaking to experts in the field and watching Gen Mart's competition see what improvements that they've made to their stores and websites. She understands that changes will be expensive but also that the changes are necessary for any future growth. Kathy hired an outside change management expert to assist with the changes. And Kathy and the change management expert Paula have decided that the following changes are needed. So first is the current search engine optimization or SEO for the Gen Mart website. So she noticed that they weren't coming up higher in searches and she that that was going to be a problem. And then the second thing is she realized that they need to have a better digital and social media marketing plan for the Gen Mart website. And then third, she needed an updated supply chain system that is current with the way that supply chain is today as opposed to 10 years ago. And then Gen Mart's physical stores needed an updated floor plan for better traffic flow. As Kathy and her team began to implement changes to the website and the physical stores, communication with their 200,000 plus employees seemed to be their biggest struggle. Relaying information from the vice presidents down to the cashier level had become challenging. There was confusion at all levels and Kathy was working to better communicate at all levels. Kathy supervises an executive vice president, Kevin, who supervises four senior vice presidents, each of whom covers one of four territories in the United States. The vice presidents each have offices at their corporate office and each will assist Kathy in making the company wide changes. Kathy's leadership style is transformational and Kevin, the executive VP, he's new in his position and he has an autocratic leadership style. Kevin has been studying retail and grocery store failures to better understand the organizational changes and why they are needed. He believes that the company is on the right track with these changes and updates to the stores, the supply chain and the website. He now understands why several large retail stores have failed over the last decade and it was because of the failure to change with advancing technology and customer needs. Because Kathy and Kevin's leadership styles are so different, occasionally they disagree about store operations and how slow the organizational changes are taking place. Because Kevin is new to Genmar, Kathy has been patient while Kevin obtains a better understanding of the company and the needed changes. There's also an organizational change committee so Kathy decided that she could not coordinate the entire process of the organizational changes. She asked Kevin to organize a committee that he would oversee to ensure that the changes were being properly conducted. This committee will also utilize the outside experts from the change management company who are assisting with the process. This case study examines a few different leadership styles and there are several exam questions that refer to leadership styles. While there are numerous types of leadership styles and each one will lead differently, understanding the leadership styles and your own style will help you to be a better leader. So here are the two leadership styles that are covered in this case study. A good leader will recognize this and assist employees with the change process. Kathy is a transformational leader so these types of leaders are exceptionally good at change perhaps because they're comfortable with the change process and their positive attitude may be transmitted to all employees. They work to ensure that employees are comfortable with the change process and they seem to see the good in all employees which creates a better working relationship. Transformational leaders are very authentic, they're humble, they're able to listen to employees with their to their ideas with an open mind and respond without judging and they may be able to utilize these ideas in some way during the change process. They're also very good collaborators and this allows them to use ideas that may be from employees. The team as a whole other teams through or through research. In many ways they know how to bring people together to try to solve a problem or perhaps an issue that's preventing change from occurring. In this case study Kevin is an autocratic leadership style. Autocratic leaders can be very stern and this type of leader may not be as open to listening to employee ideas but they can be great in a crisis when decisions need to be made very quickly because they feel really comfortable making decisions on their own without others input. All right so now we're going to cover five questions from the case study. These are actual questions from your case study and we're going to talk about them how they apply to the course learning outcomes and what the answers are. So the first one is why is it important for Gen warrant to have a change management plan? Possible answers are the plan will help employees understand why change is needed. The plan will help leaders better understand their team and resistance to change. The plan assists leaders in understanding what they need to do to get the employees involved and the answer is C. So the plan assists leaders in understanding what they need to do to get the employees involved. So one of the things that we've talked about over and over again in this course is the fact that employees need to be aware not only of what the changes are but why the changes are necessary and in order if you do not get their buy-in then change just doesn't occur and so we've talked about that kind of over and over again and in this question it's really asking about that plan. So why do you need to have that plan to change and in this case it would be kind of it does assist them in what they need to do what needs to be done and then also how to get those employees involved. The course learning outcome for this one is determine the scale and scope of organizational change change initiatives. Okay and now we have question two. So when Gen Mark managers attempt to make organizational changes why is it important to focus on employees and encourage them? So potential answers are A. Employees decide if they want to change. B. If employees do not make the changes the attempt will fail and C. Employees enjoy change and training allows them to change and obviously the answer is B. So if they do not make the changes the attempt will fail. So this was a little bit like the last question. One of the things that comes up over and over in the course that you really of everything you get out of this course this is the one thing you really need to understand. Employees need to be thoroughly trained on the change process but then also you need to make sure that they understand why it's necessary. Employees for the most part do not enjoy change in the workplace they do not enjoy it and most of the time that comes from some experience. So a company has tried to make changes in the past they've made those changes and it didn't work very well it wasn't well organized and in our personal lives we enjoy change but at work it seems to be something that most employees will fear and they will immediately resist and as we've talked about if they're not if you don't have their buy-in they are the ones making the changes but if you don't have their buy-in it won't happen and so it's really important that you give them that extra attention especially at the beginning to explain here's what the changes are here's what we're going to need you to do and here's why we need to have these changes and a lot of times it occurs because you need to keep up with what's going on in the industry or what's going on in technology kind of forcing your company to change otherwise you won't survive and so that needs to be expressed to the employees to get their buy-in and then the course learning outcome for this one is interpret the reasons organizations fail at implementing change and mitigation strategies. Okay so question number three is why would it be important for Kathy to study other retail chain failures and how can it help her plan needed changes so the three potential answers are she may gain a better understanding of mistakes in general she could better understand the change process and resistance to change or see she may learn from other business retail business cases to help create a plan for success and in this case it is B so she could better understand the change process and resistance to change by studying and in the case study one of the things that we talked about was the fact that Kevin was doing quite a bit of research and looking at why companies fail now Kathy knew that because she had been putting together the plan had been looking at it for more than a year or more than six months to try to develop the change plan so and when we think about these failed other failed retail chains we think about things that we've talked about in the course already but blockbuster was a big retail chain failure they just refused to chain and and it was mostly technology I mean came along and they were much more technologically ready to stream and mail DVDs to people at the time and actually read recently that they're stopping that part of their business which I didn't even realize had continued but they were stopping it just because of a lack of needs and most people are streaming Netflix and then Borders Books is another example Sears is another example companies Sears an amazing one because they had been around for more than a hundred years they survived quite a few decades of changes extreme changes only to not be able to keep up with the technological changes of moving from a catalog to you know retail store and then to an online environment and then let's see so the course learning outcome for this one is analyze critical people skills to effectively lead others through change in a given organization all right question number four Jenmart has a few stores in Canada and Mexico each near the US border the culture of these stores is different from the stores in the US and for the most part another language is spoken in addition the stores also have a very different business strategy than most of the stores in the US are these issues important to consider during the organizational changes why or why not and then our possible three answers a is yes since the culture of the stores will be different it's important to take that into consideration B is yes operations in another country are always different because of the laws background and culture of the people and then C the answer is no essentially they are all close to the border so their culture and communication are essentially the same so and the obvious answer here is B so operations are always different because of the laws background and culture of the people and it's always important to take that into consideration especially during organizational change so if someone is sent to those stores to try to enact those changes and they really don't take into account that cultural change then change is not going to occur in those stores so it's really important that they understand exactly the laws of that country the background of that country the culture of the people the values those are all the things that they must take into consideration not only during organizational change but when opening a new store in those areas as well let's see course learning outcomes so differentiate long-range strategies to lead the organization to successful outcomes all right here is question five so Kathy has tried to ensure that the organizational changes are understood by employees and are made as efficiently as possible she has utilized several resources attempted to communicate better with all employees and ensured follow-up with all direct reports is this what she should be doing why or why not so possible answers are yes this is an example of facilitating positive change B this is an example of facilitating negative change or C no this is an example of neither positive nor negative change the obvious answer there is A it is an example of facilitating positive change these example there very much like her leadership style her transformational leadership style she wants to be as open as possible she doesn't want to hide anything from the employees she also wants to make sure that she's looking at her resources communicating better with all employees and then to do that follow-up which is needed with all of her direct reports so as she does these things and she's more open about what's going on in the organization employees are more likely to be open to that change and transformational leaders are great for that they really are very open to change they want to facilitate that change they're very positive about it very easy to follow in this she's in the perfect position to be able to enact that change now the one thing to consider in that too is Kevin who works directly for her has the exact opposite leadership styles so there's a little bit of a balance there in a sense between the two of them but with her and the lead she's able to kind of maintain that positive effect that she's trying to kind of facilitate that on the employee with the employee all right in conclusion so this was the case study two for your course we talked a little bit about leadership styles and the leadership styles in the course so transformational and also autocratic and then we went through five of your exam questions to kind of review those give you a little bit of an idea of why and what you're going to be looking at on the exam and then this is the conclusion so I just wanted to say thank you so I my name is Dr. Marcy Stone and this has been your case study two video review thank you