The two retail companies picked are Walmart and Costco whose 2017 Financial statement links are provided below: WALMART https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/ wmt/financials?query=income- statement COSTCO https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/ cost/financials?query=income- statement Both organizations are well known brands and position themselves well with their customer base. Walmart’s value proposition is “We save people money so they can live better”. On the other hand, Costco’s value proposition is “All-in-one convenience and everyday affordability”. Both retailers focus on cost saving for their customers. Looking at their financial statements and by analyzing them a few key areas are evident when comparing the two organization. Looking at the current ratio and quick ratio we can determine the short-term solvency of each organization. The current ratio can be determined by dividing the assets by the liabilities. Walmart’s current ratio sits at 0.86 while Costco’s sits at 0.99. The quick ratio is c
The leader of today needs to be a motivator, coach, mentor and people oriented with enough vision to combine its leadership style (goals) to the reality of the organization. Change must be something the leader is aware of, welcomes it and adapt and integrate these changes into his or her leadership styles. It is all about leading innovation and change and make it effective in the way you lead people and teams.
For this discussions reading there are defined four personality types being Commanding, Logical, Inspirational and Supportive. It is well known that leaders have one or a combination of these within their leadership style and execution. It starts with being aware which personality types you use and how you integrate them into your leadership styles. If these things are in your blind spots, then you lead blindfolded with low chance of success when changes arrive and needs to be handled (Allio, 2011; Reardon, Reardon, & Rowe, 1998).
Furthermore, there are five phases involved in radical change where radical change is often also disruptive change if it is not approach properly, hence the needed awareness of your personality types and integration of them in your leadership style(s). These phases are Planning, Enabling, Launching,Catalyzing and Maintaining. These phases and accompanied and needed behavior is analyzed in this blog post.
When leading successfully it is needed that the leader is both a visionary and motivator able to communicate the vision properly and constantly, making the people being led aware of needs to be done by creating a sense of urgency (Kotter, 1996). The leader must respond to change and have the courage to question tradition and old cultures and have an open mind to innovation where taking risks is not avoided. The leader must first of all be aware of the leadership style inventory and knows where he or she is located in that matrix. There are four overall personality types as mentioned before where the Commanding leader is mainly focused on fast and short-term progress and results, the Logical leader sets its attention on future goals and how to reach them, the Inspirational leader is all about visionary ideas and getting the people fired up around it and the Supportive leader is mainly trying to create an optimal team cohesion with shared goals and team agreement. Although leaders possess a combination of these styles, it is important that the leader is able to use combinations when needed to adapt to radical and often disruptive change (Reardon et al., 1998).
There are roughly five stages of radical change. I will describe them shortly, include my own approach to them after which I shall describe a situation of its use and if it was effective or not. When needed I use and describe the combination used to make it effective.
“Planning” – Although I am an Agile Coach where collaboration and communication goes before planning, planning needs to be done of course. This stage is about getting the people on board, creating a sense of urgency and making the planning acceptable for the people being led and give them the feeling that it is a share team effort. Although highly logical in nature, this is where the combination with the soft people oriented leadership styles is neefef to make the people motivated to apply to the planning being defined. In early days I made te mistake to create Big Upfront Plannings that were outdated the moment the project began. Furthermore, people were not involved and planning was the game of the few, which often led to failed projects in the waterfall period. The adaptive cycled iterative approach of Agile makes planning fun and open for change.
“Enabling” – When the plan is set, all the people needs to stay on board. In this phase it is important to keep motivating the people having doubt or reserves towards the plan. Stay logical but be inspirational and supportive when getting and keeping all the people on board and enable them to start hitting the plan with confidence. As an Agile Coach I’m constantly enabling the team and stakeholders to adapt to change through short iterations where disruptive change can be spread out over several sprints making them less disruptive when split into smaller pieces .
“Launching” – Mediate any resistance from your team, ensuring the group maintains a unified goal. At this point, logical and commanding styles of leadership do well.
When things get launched it is important to detect resistance and be ready to mitigate and coach members through this resistance towards acceptance and motivation. Although the logical and commanding elements seems to be the best fit in this stage, I as an Agile Coach very much like to use the events of Scrum (Dailies, review, retrospectives etc) to detect possible resistance on a daily basis and make the team react to it as a whole and in doing so making it a team effort to solve this resistance and increase team cohesion towards adhering to the planning and disruptive changes. It is my experience that this makes the team Agile and very resilient towards whatever disruption and radical change coming to them (Hyland, 2008).
“Catalyzing” – This is where the Agile Coach feels best when taking the people feel involved, valued, respected and integrated in its shared goals. The inspirational and supportive styles are the best fit in this stage and that’s also at the top of my Agile toolbox. Again, by keeping the sprint/iterations short the catalyzing by inspiration, supporting and coaching can be adjusted on short notice when needed before things get rotten and team wounds are beyond repair. Be aware that radical and disruptive change is like hitting possible sickness entering your body: it must be prepared to neutralize these threats and counteract them with processes that makes the team stronger and more agile (Schulkin, 2017).
“Maintaining” – Sometimes I find this the most difficult stage of all, where people, teams and organizations think everything is okay which makes them lazy and unprepared when shit hits the fan through radical and disruptive changes. I compare this with the army after securing a hot location for a long time. They get sloppy and over confident when not kept sharp by drills and constant training. That’s what needs to be done in my opinion in this stage, keep the people sharp, connected, motivated and inspired through logical, inspirational, supportive and transformational leadership style(s). The program needs to stay on track and always be prepared for disruptive change coming around some unexpected corners (Spitzer, 2014).
Although I personally use often other framework or stages to lead teams through radical and disruptive change, the above five stage for radical change can be used as a perfect umbrella under which my approaches and techniques as an Agile Coach can be added and connected making the whole endeavor of leading and preparing teams for radical change the more effective. I definitely will play with it in future assignments and am grateful this module added this to my Agile Coach toolbox (Ludeman & Erlandson, 2003; Reardon et al., 1998; Tang, 2019).
Sources used:
Allio, R. J. (2011). How corporate leaders can use the Positive Deviance approach to stimulate radical change. Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 39, pp. 32–35. https://doi.org/10.1108/
Hyland, P. (2008). Understanding resistance to change: Considering followers’ dispositions and leadership styles. PsycEXTRA Dataset. https://doi.org/10.1037/
Ludeman, K., & Erlandson, E. (2003). Radical Change, Radical Results: 7 Actions to Become the Force for Change in Your Organization. Dearborn Trade Publishing.
Reardon, K. K., Reardon, K. J., & Rowe, A. J. (1998). Leadership Styles for the Five Stages of Radical Change. Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.
Schulkin, J. (2017). Radical Change. Oxford Scholarship Online. https://doi.org/10.1093/
Spitzer, R. (2014). When Can Radical Change Be Too Radical. Nurse Leader, Vol. 12, p. 6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mnl.
Tang, K. N. (2019). Leadership Styles and Organizational Effectiveness. Leadership and Change Management, pp. 11–25. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-
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