January 26, 2015
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM, Reception Immediately Following
The Colloquium, 6th Floor, Ross Building, Stephen M. Ross School of Business
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Scott Sonenshein (www.ScottSonenshein.com) is an Associate Professor of Management at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University, where he teaches courses in change and leadership. His studies examine the resourceful actions of employees to advance organizational and social/ethical change. He has conducted research in settings ranging from fashion to food trucks, banks to booksellers, and entrepreneurs to environmentalists. This work illuminates the skill, agency, and motivation of individuals to contribute to change and the corresponding organizational practices that foster these outcomes. He currently serves as an Associate Editor at the Academy of Management Journal.
Session Description: Most change initiatives fail to meet their stated objectives. During good times, leaders frequently hesitate to foster organizational change, as the status quo appears sufficient. During bad times, organizations often lack critical resources needed for strategic renewal. In either case, employees often get caught at a crossroads: asked to continuously adapt but not provided sufficient resources to do so. Making matters worse, leaders often treat employees as resisters to change. This sparks a self-fulfilling prophecy that creates the very resistance leaders seek to avoid. By transforming employees from resisters to resources, leaders can facilitate more successful change by unlocking the value that employees can bring to a wide variety of change initiatives.
The Positive Links Speaker Series 2014-15 season features contributing authors of How To Be a Positive Leader: Small Actions, Big Impact.
Positive leaders are able to dramatically expand their people’s—and their own—capacity for excellence. And they accomplish this without enormous resources or huge heroic gestures. Leading scholars describe how this is being done at organizations such as Wells Fargo, Ford, Kelly Services, Burt’s Bees, Connecticut’s Griffin Hospital, the Michigan-based Zingerman’s Community of Businesses, and many others. Like the butterfly in Brazil whose flapping wings create a typhoon in Texas, you can create profound positive change in your organization through simple actions and attitude shifts. Please join us to learn how.
Free and open to the public.
The Center for Positive Organizations thanks Diane and Paul Jones (Ross School of Business MBA 1975), for their generous gift in support of the 2014-2015 Positive Links Speaker Series.