Change Analysis - Dimensions

Week 3 - Change Analysis-Dimensions

Change management in a nut shell is basically broken up into six (6) different groups; Director, nurturer, caretaker, coach, interpreter, and navigator. All these make up the change management initiative which with all these different categories in place, it basically makes up what a good company does. The importance of having these images in place is off of the charts. I say this because it is basically invaluable to whatever type of organization you work for. The company I want to talk about in this assignment is my second job of being a manager at a bowling alley in Columbus Ohio called Sequoia Pro Bowl.

Sequoia Pro Bowl is a 32 lane bowling alley that has been in operation for over 50 years and has been family ran since it has opened. It has really shifted its images from being a mainly caretaker image to being more of a navigator image. I say this simply because of the changes in the last few months that have taken place. Sequoia has really relied heavily upon its owner making ALL of the decisions which is more of a dictatorship than anything else. The owner has basically shifted from doing everything to actually letting his managers (myself included) do what they do best which is actually listen to the customers and go off of what they say and make the place back to its original roots which is family oriented.

The main characters in this change are the managers which he hired to implement these changes. The thing about change is everyone has to be on board with these changes and actually want to make the same changes the owner wants to take which is to make it a more family friendly place and at the same time make some money at doing that. I say Sequoia has shifted from the caretaker image, which in my opinion is basically the owner running everything by internal and external forces, to the navigator image, which is letting the managers do what managers should do and that is putting them more focused on customers and bringing more customers in to the business.

Some of the changes that this brought on were shifting the owner from working 100+ hours a week at the bowling alley to only about 40 hours a week and letting the managers listen to the customers and then pitching the ideas to the owner and having the owner have an open mind of everything and then letting the managers implement these changes in their own ways. Sometimes this is a great thing, but sometimes it is a double edge sword and it could wind up biting the business in the rear. One example of this is our glow bowling. We have had great success with this but weren't getting the type of crowds that we wanted. We were only filling about half of the lanes on glow bowling nights which really isn't making the kinds of money that we should be pulling in for something like this. So what we did with the suggestion of one of the managers was to give group discounts. This ensures full lanes and save a few pennies