GM541 Unit 6 Middle Manager Sensemaking Reflection Example

When They First Heard, and From Whom: A Unit 6 Seminar Reflection on Three Transformations

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GM541: Organizational Transformation and Change Leadership

Unit 6 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The three organizations, the classmates and the writer's team are composite; the studies cited are real.

Three Transformations

Classmates described three changes. A regional electric utility replaced manual meter reading with smart meters over two years, offering all 85 meter readers other jobs in the company; most accepted. A family-owned print shop converted from flexographic presses to digital label presses, retraining its press operators and losing two of its eleven in the process. A state motor vehicle agency moved most transactions online and closed nine of its thirty-one field offices, reassigning staff to the remaining offices and a new call center.

My First Reading

I thought the utility was the cleanest of the three. The technology arrived on schedule, nobody was laid off and the readers who moved to other roles kept their pay. The print shop lost two experienced operators, and the motor vehicle agency closed offices in small towns and drew angry coverage in local papers. If I had been grading the changes by outcome, the utility would have come first.

The Instructor's Question

The instructor asked each presenter the same question: when did the people who supervised the affected workers first hear about the change, and from whom?

The answers reordered the cases. At the utility, the field supervisors who managed the meter readers learned that reading routes would end from a union newsletter, three weeks before the company's own announcement. For those three weeks, readers asked their supervisors questions the supervisors could not answer. Several supervisors told my classmate they felt humiliated, and two later left the company. Readers who accepted new jobs described the transition as "handled," but they also described not trusting their new supervisors for months.

At the print shop, the owner told the press foreman first, two months before telling the operators, and asked him to help plan the retraining. The two operators who left had been told directly why their roles were changing and had turned down the retraining.

At the motor vehicle agency, office managers were briefed in person by regional directors a week before the public announcement, given written answers to the questions staff were likely to ask and told which offices would close. The coverage was hostile, but inside the agency the managers could explain what was happening.

The change I ranked best on outcomes was the one where the people expected to explain it heard about it last, from a newsletter, and that cost showed up in trust rather than in the numbers.

The Research Behind the Question

The instructor then introduced Julia Balogun and Gerry Johnson's study of a utility restructuring, in which middle managers made sense of the change largely by talking with their peers, especially when senior managers were not available to explain it. The meanings middle managers built through those lateral conversations shaped how the change unfolded, often in ways senior managers did not intend (Balogun & Johnson, 2004). Karl Weick's account of sensemaking explains why: people construct meaning from the cues available to them, and when official explanations are missing, other cues fill the gap (Weick, 1995).

At my classmate's utility, the cue was a union newsletter, and the meaning supervisors built from it was that the company did not trust them. That meaning outlasted the change itself.

Where I Ended Up

I came in judging transformations by their visible outcomes: schedules met, jobs kept, offices closed or not. I left thinking that one of the most consequential parts of a change is invisible in those outcomes: whether the people in the middle, who must explain it, understood it before they were asked about it. By that standard, the print shop and the motor vehicle agency handled their changes better than the utility, despite harder results. John Kotter lists undercommunicating the vision among the common reasons transformations fail (Kotter, 1995), but the seminar convinced me that who hears first can matter more than how much anyone hears.

Bringing It Home

I lead the customer contact team at a commercial refrigeration service firm that is moving to sensor-driven service and uptime contracts. My team answers calls from store managers. If store managers start asking us why their technician has not visited this month, and we hear about the new model from them first, we will be in exactly the position of the utility's supervisors. I plan to ask the project sponsor for a briefing for my team leads before any customer communication goes out, with written answers to the questions store managers are most likely to ask.

The Question I Am Left With

How far down does this principle go? Briefing middle managers first makes sense, but in a large change there are many layers. I would like to know how organizations decide who must hear first without the sequence becoming so slow that the news leaks anyway.

References

Balogun, J., & Johnson, G. (2004). Organizational restructuring and middle manager sensemaking. Academy of Management Journal, 47(4), 523-549. https://doi.org/10.2307/20159600

Kotter, J. P. (1995). Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail. Harvard Business Review, 73(2), 59-67.

Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Sage.