Your Mission ...
Ling He Company (LHC) is a telecom switching equipment manufacturer founded in 1975 and located near Changsha in the Hunan Province (southern China). LHC is a state-owned enterprise controlled by the Ministry of Information Industry, and a major supplier to the local telecoms industry.
As with most state-owned enterprises LHC has no board of directors but operates essentially according to the decisions of its General Manager, Mr An Cheng.
The formal organization of LHC includes departments for Finance, Human Resources & Administration, Research & Development, and Sales, plus three Production units. All have direct reporting lines to the General Manager.
In spite of quite respectable financial performance the Ministry of Information Industry recently decided to sell a 60% stake in LHC to SinoCom, China’s largest national telecoms operator and internationally considered as one of the country’s best managed enterprises. This move was to help introduce best management practices at LHC and to consolidate the national telecoms industry to better compete against future foreign entrants.
The management team at LHC was left intact following the change in ownership, in no small measure due to Mr An Cheng’s negotiating skills. However SinoCom insisted that the management structure should be simplified and LHC should start introducing best practices from its other operating units.
As a result the Deputy General Managers have become Heads of Department with full and sole responsibility for the performance of their assigned departments, reporting directly to the General Manager.
SinoCom also considers it essential that each of the senior managers sets and adopts both personal and departmental goals, and should start using the corporate Performance Management System (PMS) to monitor and report on progress towards the achievement of those goals.
But for LHC the introduction of such information system for enterprise-wide communication and reporting is a real innovation: it not only changes the way information is collected, shared and used across functional areas, but it also introduces transparancy and accountability at individual level. Thus far management at LHC continue to use their traditional paper-based management reporting, much to the dismay of
SinoCom.
SinoCom has temporarily reassigned you from its Jiangsu division to help the LHC management introduce the PMS. Specifically, all senior managers at LHC are to start reporting and commenting on their department’s performance through the PMS.
For a company like LHC, adopting principles of profitability and personal objectives, as well as starting to use electronic tools for information gathering and communication, involves a major cultural change in how people think, behave and work. As you will experience, this is often a slow and difficult process.
Your assignment has been limited to 6 months (120 workdays). During this time you will be able to:
> Gather information about the management team of the company
> Implement different change management initiatives
> Continuously monitor your progress in helping the 24 members of the management team to move through the phases of AWARENESS, INTEREST, TRIAL and finally ADOPTION of the Performance Management System.
In short your challenge is to get as many adopters as possible! This is how YOUR performance will he evaluated by SinoCom at the end of the 6 months.
Attention: Bao Jianping, the Communist Party-appointed external Controller, and Liu Bing, the GM's Personal Assistant, have no personal objectives related to the company’s performance and are not required to use the PMS. Hence the maximum number of adopters you can reach is 22.
Changing the way people think and behave in organisations is not a simple task and often requires a combination of different tactics to be used at the right time with the right people. This simulation will make it possible for you to experiment with the implementation of different change management tactics (or initiatives), but it will be your task to decide when and with whom to implement a given tactic.
First of all - before plunging into your first decision - we advise you to:
(1) Try to understand the context in which you are going to work. Remember that you have been sent from another division by Head Office. Initially you don’t know the people at LHC and they don't know you !
(2) Review the different initiatives/tactics you may use to change people’s attitudes !
(3) Develop a change strategy which will guide you through the project
(“top-down"; "bottom-up”; “impose it”; “selling”; etc.) and write it down !
If necessary you may at any point during the simulation review and adapt your strategy.
Good luck!