MLDR 6905 Week 5 Stakeholder Case Example

To the Director Who Loses Most: A Stakeholder Case Addressed to the Rural Campus's Continuing Education Director, Stating Her Losses in Her Own Terms, Conceding One and Asking Her to Design Rural Service

Student Name

Walden University

MLDR 6905: Capstone: A Case for Leaders as Change Agents

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

To the Director Who Loses Most: A Stakeholder Case Addressed to the Rural Campus's Continuing Education Director, Stating Her Losses in Her Own Terms, Conceding One and Asking Her to Design Rural Service

What You Would Lose

Darlene, I am writing this case to you because, of everyone affected by consolidating continuing education registration, scheduling and billing, the Linden campus loses most, and you have said so clearly. I want to state that loss in your terms before anything else.

Under the proposal, your two clerks would move into the shared-services unit and report to its supervisor, not to you. Registration and billing would leave your office. The walk-in desk at Linden, which you built over eleven years and which rural learners know by name, would become a service point staffed by the unit rather than run by your office. You would no longer decide how quickly a Linden learner's registration is processed or how an employer in Linden County is invoiced. You told the dean in March that rural learners, many older or working shifts, rely on a person they know at a desk they can walk into, and that a central unit will treat your campus as an afterthought. Six years ago, that is what happened.

What You Would Keep

Program design would stay with you: which courses run at Linden, what they cover and who teaches them. So would your relationships with Linden County employers, including the hospital, the two manufacturers and the school district, which you hold and no one else at the college does. You would keep your say over local course offerings and the schedule of classes on your campus. The proposal does not move any of these, and the definitions in my position statement say so explicitly.

What You and Linden Learners Might Gain

The division's records show that the four campus offices together spent an estimated 3,900 hours last year processing registrations and reconciling payments, about 14 minutes per registration; these figures are illustrative until the finance comparison is complete. Linden's share was about 640 hours. If consolidation frees even a third of that, your office would have roughly 200 hours a year for what you have told me you never have time for: visiting employers in the county and building programs with them. Billing errors would also fall under one process; last year, three of the eleven employer invoice corrections from Linden involved the hospital, your largest contract.

What I Concede

One cost is real, and I will not argue it away. In the first term, learners who prefer walk-in help at Linden may wait longer, because the service point's staff will be learning a new process and some questions will need to go to the shared unit. The earlier attempt failed on exactly this point. I cannot promise it will not happen again; I can only propose ways to reduce it.

Three Commitments

Battilana and Casciaro (2013) reported that close ties between a change agent and likely opponents can bring those opponents around, with results that varied by type of change. I do not have a strong tie with you, and this case is not an attempt to create one artificially. It is an attempt to give you a real role. Three commitments follow, which I will ask the dean to put in writing.

First, the Linden service point will be staffed during the same hours your walk-in desk is open now, by one of your current clerks if she chooses to stay at Linden, for at least the first year. Second, the shared unit's service standards for Linden learners and employers, including how fast registrations are confirmed and how invoices are handled, will be written by a group that includes you, and the unit will report its performance against those standards to you each month. Third, should Linden's noncredit enrollment trail the other campuses by ten points or more over the first year, registration comes back to your office. That last commitment is the second falsifier in my position statement.

An Invitation

I am asking you to design the service rural learners will receive, not to approve a design made elsewhere. Meyerson (2001) describes people who push for change while remaining committed to the organization and its people; I am trying to be that, and I know that from your side this proposal looks like the Main campus again deciding for everyone. Oreg et al. (2011) found that participation in shaping a change was among the most consistent predictors of how people responded to it. If you join the design group, the walk-in experience at Linden will be shaped by the person who knows it best.

I would like to meet with you at Linden, at your convenience, before the dean discusses the proposal with the other directors.

References

Battilana, J., & Casciaro, T. (2013). Overcoming resistance to organizational change: Strong ties and affective cooptation. Management Science, 59(4), 819-836. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.1120.1583

Meyerson, D. E. (2001). Tempered radicals: How people use difference to inspire change at work. Harvard Business School Press.

Oreg, S., Vakola, M., & Armenakis, A. (2011). Change recipients' reactions to organizational change: A 60-year review of quantitative studies. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 47(4), 461-524. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886310396550