Change Management Models – The Satir Change Model

Managing change in today’s organizations is not easy but doing it well is the new imperative. If companies want to survive and strive in today’s highly competitive environment, they have change quickly and yet successfully. Managing changes is now a core competency where organizations fall short in the race to adopt it. The increasing pace of change coupled with accelerating uncertainty.

Change is something that makes people upset and has the higher potential of failures, loss production or failing quality. On the other end, there is a positive side of change, where the effects of change are important to the survival of the organization. From the perspective of employees both definition and understanding is essence to successfully managing change. As mentioned before uncertainty, a fear of unknown or an expectation of loss make people resistant to change. To eliminate this discomfort we have to make sure that people perceive the change in the positive way and that they are well equipped to deal with the change they expect either though training programs or communication. People have to be aware of the impact of the change of them. To begin with, the change has to be defined to employees in detail and as early as possible. It is a leader responsibility to provide updates as things developed and become clearer. Management has to help people understand what is changing and why and recognize they reluctance. People would like to know answers for what the change will be and when it will happen and why it is happening. Maintaining channels of communication between employees and management will help employees to embrace to change when they become aware of what is coming and what it will mean to them. The employees will appreciate that and be more productive before and after the change. Implementing change poorly is worst than not implementing change at all because poor implementations contaminate people’s attitude toward change and creates problem in the future. Middle management has to be aware that change for change sake’s is a recipe for failure. Change should be pursued in the context of clear goals.

The Satir Change Model

The Satir Change model focuses not just on systems or technology but individual people. This model describes the major stages of a change, transition between stages, effects of each stage on feelings, thinking, performance and physiology. Stair Change Model also evaluate helpful and harmful intervention during each stage, making it a robust model which explains the success the number one service industry that uses technology to carter to customer needs.

Studying  Satir Change model, we will understand how individuals cope with unexpected or significant change as go through four stages: Late Status Quo, Chaos, Practice and Integration, and New Status Quo. We will notice how the performance changes as we move to the next stage in this model.

Satir Change Model

In the Late Status Quo we see only small fluctuations in performance from time to time. In this stage people feel comfortable, bored, frustrated or anxious. The foreign element, something that comes from outside of your world, that shatters the familiarity experienced in the late Status. It normally happens when the company reorganizes and puts employee in a new role. Than we have another stage, which is Chaos, it is unfamiliar territory, where the life in unpredictable and individuals’ typical behavior don’t work. People in this stage feel stressed, confused, afraid, hurt, and uncomfortable or have other strong yet not positive emotions. The performance usually drops. Employees can react to Chaos differently, some will be directing other people around and try to stay in control, some will be focusing on small part of problem totally ignoring the Chaos happening around them, and other will be doing everything to find information about what is going on. Some of this actions work some do not. People’s behaviors and performance are unpredictable, often varying from day to day or even from moment to moment. There is also a good thing about this stage, Chaos can be very creative time but experienced under urgency and stress. The Transforming Idea gives a new understanding of what to do. New ideas are created when being in Chaos. In Practice and Integration we try the new idea or behavior. People learn quickly even though make lots of mistakes but make progress. The performance improves, reaches higher level that before the Foreign Element.

The last step in this model is The New Status Quo the performance starts to level off as people manage new skills. The excellent results continue with less concentration and attention. People feel comfortable about how rapidly they learned new skills and gained confidence. With time, the New Status Quo becomes a Late Status Quo.

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