Personal Narrative: My Participation With Leading Change

My participation with leading change began early in my career in 2006 as a Supervisor in a manufacturing department at Karl Storz in Charlton, Massachusetts. I have had the privilege to work with a diversity of teams with a multitude of different backgrounds. My tenure with the company has evolved since I began in 1998, from assembly to leadership in a short amount of time. I adapt and promote change in a positive manner, and have learned through experience that appreciating people brings value to the customer as well as for the team.

At Karl Storz, I have had the opportunity to be in a leadership position within different business units of the organization. As a supervisor, my responsibilities have been focused on continuous improvement.

The workshop was completed at the Karl Storz site for leadership. This is when I learned about the Toyota Production System. The philosophies of lean manufacturing are creating value for the customer when they want it at a faster pace with lower resources. “Lean manufacturing is a manufacturing strategy that is aimed to achieve a smooth production flow by eliminating waste and increasing the activity value” (Norani, 2014). Lean manufacturing takes a different approach with change management. Like Kotters theory he places sense of urgency first. I lean that is not always the case. In most cases in lean its putting the people first. “With Lean Change Management, we do have a loosely defined framework to design experiments. However, there is no overarching methodology for executing change. The key principle is to co-create change with the people affected, in whichever manner and sequence makes sense in context” (Atherton, 2017). There are many enablers that play a part for organizations to move forward with Lean. With economics and technology changing constantly, the need to change became more evident in our company. An important part of lean philosophy is the respect for people in the workplace. It is about developing our people's skills toward a principle-driven culture. Leaders are expected to lead their teams through the change with their input. “the respect for human system

It was through that communication I lead the teams not letting them forget the why we were doing this. Of course resistance is always attributed to larges changes due to people don’t want to change or move over. Part of communicating is listening to the people’s inputs, their fears or assumptions of the change. Rather than telling them no or ignoring it was better to have them involved. I would say “Instead of no we can’t do this, we must say we can do this if…”. This provides people the input and their ideas on the changes as the changes impacted them the most as they are doing the job. Although I had not learned about Change management at this time, there are significant similarities of the Toyota lean manufacturing philosophies with change management. As for both they are leading change at very high level. Change is not easy for some; with change negotiations are critical in these incidences when a disagreement is present. “At the evaluation stage, parties should first agree upon a set of norms, standards, or criteria they can use to choose among the ideas generated from the brainstorming session. Such standards will help you weigh possible packages that might lead to efficient outcomes that maximize value for everyone involved” (Staff, 2018). I found brainstorming with teams and