In today’s simulation we worked as a group on the Change Management Simulation: Power and Influence. In this simulation, we played one of two roles (i.e., CEO or Director of Product Innovation) at a sunglass manufacturing firm and faced the challenges associated with implementing an organization-wide environmental sustainability initiative. The largest takeaway I had from this simulation was that a different method may need to be taken for different members. You need to adapt to challenges, and adapt the leadership style. In the future, I will try to better approach my leadership style with each member of the group. 

Change management is a critical part of implementing a successful work experience. Your culture, process, tools and space all matter—and the process of helping people adopt and adapt to changes is an investment that will pay off in terms of both the work experience and organizational results. The most valuable lesson was that it is essential to start with smaller steps. First of all, you should make sure that almost everyone is in the same phase (know the values of the firm, some of the goals, etc), and only after this, you can start big changes. 

Through the simulation, my perceptions of power, influence and urgency changed. Before the simulation, I treated power and influence the same, if you have power, you have influence, or otherwise, if you have influence, you have power. While influence is often entangled with power, it is important to treat it separately. Power is the capacity to get others to act based on positional authority that is exercised over others. Influence is the ability to modify how a person develops, behaves, or thinks based on relationships and persuasion; often leading to respect. In the simulation, I learnt that changes made to people with no power can influence those with the power.

I think this simulation was similar to the Organizational Behavior Simulation: Judgement in Crisis. I made decisions that influenced the company as a whole. The difference was that my goal was to do the best for the customers during the first simulation, while during the second simulation I was trying to do the best for the employees. This simulation was also different, because previously, we were given options and we selected the one which we viewed as the most optimal, but in this simalitin we needed to identify which decision to make and when to make it, that’s why this simulation was so challenging for me.

Crisis management is identifying a threat to an organization and its stakeholders in order to respond effectively to the threat, it helps the managers to devise strategies to come out of uncertain conditions and also decide on the future course of action. Urgency can be either low or high, as we learnt from Change Management Simulation. Urgency does not require an immediate response and is not as harmful as a crisis.