Masterminding change in Walmart Stores Inc

Most often, change is driven by an array of forces including the improvement in technology, the need for project-based working, the desire to embrace new initiatives and the need to stay ahead of the competition. Regardless of the scale of the challenges brought about by a change in an organization, it is obvious for the people leading the change to feel intimidated and uneasy about the magnitude of the challenges associated with the change. Most organizational leaders fail to successfully “mastermind” change because of the lack of knowledge on how to go about delivering it. Fortunately, there are many theoretical approaches which postulate how corporate leaders should manage organizational change. One of the most popular approaches originates from a change management guru, John Kotter, who proposes an eight-step change model that can drive organizational change.

The employees continue to earn low wages in spite of the growing cost of living orchestrated by the global economic depression. Walmart is constantly being criticized for showing reluctance in responding appropriately to the changes in the retail environment. Some of the retailer’s competitors such as Amazon and Costco are outperforming Walmart because they are proactive in responding to the dynamics in the retail industry. The recent studies have continued to lay more emphasis on the need to embrace change in order to keep abreast with the ever dynamic global business landscape. Arguably, organizational change management and transformation are becoming the principal features of the business landscape in today’s corporate realm (Cameron & Green, 2015). The fifty step directs organizational leaders to remove obstacles that have the potential to impede change while the sixty step involves creating short-term wins to build momentum towards achieving the overall change.

The seventh step emphasizes the need to build on the change by focusing on continuous improvement while the last step urges the organizational leadership to anchor the changes in the corporate culture. Based on Kotter’s model, the eight-step change process can be applied to introduce or create the change necessary to address the current challenges facing Walmart. A sense of urgency can be created around the need to boost employee morale through fair pay, the need to strongly connect with customers and the need to improve customer services. This can be achieved through identifying the potential threats, developing scenarios, examining opportunities that can be exploited, opening candid discussions that will get people talking and seeking support from all stakeholders including the customers and industry people (Kotter, 2012).

In addition, the management should develop short-term objectives to be achieved as a project as project milestones to measure to the extent to which change is progressing within the organization. According to Kotter (2012), these project milestones are known as short-term wins, and the people involved in meeting these short targets should be rewarded appropriately. Moreover, Walmart’s organizational change can become real by building on the change which involves continuous improvement to ensure the change initiative does not fail prematurely. The success of the company’s change initiative will depend on the management’s ability to anchor the changes on Walmart’s corporate culture. How Mechanistic and Organic Structure Affect Change The success of any change in an organization depends on the kind of organizational structure adopted by that organization.