LI410 Unit 7 Change Leadership Analysis Example

Robots on the Container Line and a Supervisor Who Dragged His Feet: A Unit 7 Change Leadership Analysis

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

LI410: Leadership in Practice

Unit 7 Change Leadership Analysis

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Kettle Run Recovery, its rollout, its crew and every figure are composite and illustrative; the models and sources cited are real.

The Rollout as It Happened

In January Kettle Run's county board approved two robotic picking arms for the container line, where sorters pull bottles and cans by hand, and a dashboard that would show each sorter's picks per hour on a screen above the platform. The plan cut four sorter positions from the container line once the robots reached their target rate.

Week 0. The plant manager announced the project by email to the four supervisors and the maintenance lead. Sorters, most of whom are agency workers, learned of it from the supervisors.

Weeks 1 and 2. The vendor installed the arms during weekend shutdowns. Supervisors and leads attended a two-day training on the dashboard.

Week 3. The dashboard went live on the first night the robots ran, showing every sorter's picks per hour, ranked, beside a target line.

Weeks 4 to 9. The robots missed their target rate for five weeks. Sorters on the container line worked around them, sometimes pulling items the arms were reaching for, and the dashboard showed presort sorters well below target every night.

I am describing these events as neutrally as I can, because my own part in them comes later and I do not want it to color the account.

Kotter's Eight Steps Against the Rollout

Kotter (1996) sets out an eight-step sequence for change, beginning with a shared reason to move and a group of people able to lead it, passing through a vision that is told often and widely, freedom for others to act on it and early visible gains, and ending with gains built on and made part of the culture. I have taken his steps in order and set each one beside what actually happened at Kettle Run:

Urgency. Absent for the crew. The board's reason, rising labor costs and a buyer's tighter purity standard, was never explained on the platform.

Guiding coalition. Partial. The plant manager and the vendor led; no supervisor or sorter was involved in the design.

Vision and strategy. Present in the board memo, absent on the floor.

Communicating the vision. One email, to supervisors only.

Empowering action. Weak. The dashboard's targets were set by the vendor, and nobody on the line could question them.

Short-term wins. Absent. The first visible result was a ranking with most of the crew below the line.

Consolidating and anchoring. Not yet reached when the delay began.

Kotter's book argues that skipping steps creates an illusion of speed. The rollout skipped the first, fourth and sixth steps almost entirely, and the five-week delay was the bill.

The pattern in that map is consistent. Every step that happened, the board's approval, the vendor's installation and the supervisors' training, happened above the platform. Every step that was skipped was one that would have reached the sorters themselves. That is not a sign of bad intent. The plant manager was managing a capital project with a vendor's timeline, and on that timeline the dashboard was a software feature, not a change in how forty people would be judged every night. But it meant that the first thing the crew learned about the project from the project itself was a ranking. Kotter's sixth step asks for an early win the people affected can see, and a ranked screen with most names below the line was close to the opposite: an early loss, visible to everyone, before the robots had picked a single bottle at the target rate.

My Part

The harsher half of this analysis concerns me. On the night before the dashboard went live, I told my container line sorters, in close to these words, "The screen is there to decide who goes when the robots work. Don't kill yourselves for it." I believed that, and part of it was true, since the plan did cut four positions. But I said it before anyone had seen a single night's numbers, and I said it to people who had no other source of information.

Bridges and Bridges (2016) treat the new situation itself and the slow psychological adjustment to it as two separate things, and they argue that the adjustment starts with a loss, something a person has to give up before anything new can take hold. What I was resisting was not the robots. It was the end of my judgment. Before the dashboard, I decided who worked which station and whether a sorter was doing well. After it, a screen ranked them, and the ranking was visible to the plant manager every morning. I treated my own loss as the crew's, and I gave them a reason to see the dashboard as a threat before they had any chance to see it as anything else.

I told the crew what the dashboard was for before I had admitted to myself what I was afraid it would take from me.

Oreg (2003) found that people differ in their dispositional resistance to change, including a reluctance to lose routines and an emotional reaction to imposed change. I recognize both in myself. That does not excuse the warning, but it explains why I gave it so quickly.

The Objection the Resistance Buried

My resistance also hid a real flaw. The dashboard used one target for every station, about 40 picks a minute. Presort sorters pull bulky items, such as large film bundles, hoses and textiles, that take far longer to grab and drop than a bottle on the container line. When I finally sat down with two weeks of dashboard data, presort sorters averaged about 30 percent below target on every shift, including the first shift, which had not resisted at all. The target was simply wrong for that station.

I had raised the target problem once, in the same conversation where I complained about the rankings, and the plant manager reasonably heard it as part of the complaint. Because I had resisted, my valid objection was easier to dismiss.

What I Would Do Differently, and Next Quarter

In the rollout's terms, I could have been part of the guiding coalition instead of a quiet opposition. I could have asked the plant manager to explain the board's reasons on the platform, asked for station-specific targets before go-live, and held my own concerns until I had a week of data.

Next quarter I will lead a change myself: moving the quality control station and changing which sorters work it. I will explain the reason on the platform before anything moves, involve two sorters in deciding the station layout, set a target only after a week of trial data, and name the first small win I expect, cleaner fiber bales in the mill's monthly report, so that the crew can see whether the change is working.

References

Bridges, W., & Bridges, S. (2016). Managing transitions: Making the most of change (4th ed.). Da Capo Lifelong Books.

Kotter, J. P. (1996). Leading change. Harvard Business School Press.

Oreg, S. (2003). Resistance to change: Developing an individual differences measure. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88(4), 680-693. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.88.4.680