Leadership Plan in Consistency With the 3D

¶ … leadership plan in consistency with the 3D leadership model that was identified in the previous segment of this paper. The 3D model that was introduced was based on the scholarly work of Bill Reddin in which 3 dimensions of the proposed leadership model were given. These were task orientation, relationship orientation, and effectiveness of the leaders. We now discuss how this strategic plan gets implemented at various levels such as individual, traditional and virtual teams, department and so on and so forth.

The 3D Leadership level

Mahmood (2007)

Individual level

At the individual level, the 3D leadership model will provide tasks to team members at organization-wide level. The relationship factors will include interaction with team members and building rapport with team leader. The third dimension of this leadership model will include completing all the 'essential' category of tasks along with obtaining positive 'appraisal' from team leaders, the more that an individual scores on relationship and tasks scorecard, the more will he/she get the 'effectiveness' score of the job. The cumulative score will then be assessed at the individual level.

Traditional and virtual teams

At the level of traditional and virtual teams, the 3D leadership model will be enforced as a 'change agent'. This implies that the teams will no longer work as isolated project management teams but will work as 'integrated' and coherent work units employing cloud leadership skills. The business managers will be transformed into cloud leaders as has been described in the year 1 of the strategic plan. The 3 dimensions of the leadership model in this context will be:

Fig 2- 3D Leadership Model application of IT Strategic plan at team level

Z-Axis-

Effectiveness

No. Of tier one projects team based

X-Axis-

Relationship oriented

No. Of group assistance calls

Problem solving group assignments

Y-Axis-

Tasks (objectives)

No. Of projects participated in No. Of teams represented in Department and organization level

At the department and organization level, the 3D leadership model will be implemented through transforming the traditional departments into cloud units each providing relevant expertise to the organization as well as the customer. The task oriented dimension of this model will be the delivery of successful number of projects portfolios to the end customer. On the relationship dimension, at this level, the plan will be assessing the third party correspondence made in order to satisfy client's end customer. The third and the last dimension will be the sales leads that the organization obtains from third party customers. This will represent that both the tasks and the relationship management remained optimal and the model was effectively implemented.

Inter-organization level

At the inter-organization level, the model will only be implemented when the cloud-based services of the firm have been developed as service-based perspective rather than asset-based perspective. The company will make joint ventures at this level and the 3D leadership will be as follows. The task orientation will be the number of joint ventures that EMC Corporation accomplishes with other industry firms such as Cisco and Intel. The relationship orientation will be gauged from number of years of relationship developed with partner firm and the effectiveness will be gauged from financial worth of the relationship divided by number of years of joint venture.

Global

At the global level, the strategic plan will be implemented through 3D model and the main dimensions will be number of service models sold to client companies (task orientation), number of contracts sold to cloud-based service customers (relationship orientation), and the effectiveness dimension will be assessed through cost reduction of end customer using EMC's cloud service models. The 3D leadership model will be introduced and implemented incrementally as the strategic plan is of 5 years, thus the company IT executives will try to introduce the model leadership at global level only in the fifth year so that all other levels are successfully achieved and implemented before changes could be introduced at the global level.

Change management phase

For EMC Corporation, the proposed plan of strategic change will be transforming functional roles, processes, and the business model (Paton & McCalman, 2008). The changes will take place at all three levels, that is the functional, business, and corporate level. To make the process more suitable and consistent with company operations, activity sequencing will also be carried out at each level of employees that are at baseline level, middle level, and executive level.

Leadership support

The leadership support for the change process will be provided from the very start of this plan. The change executives have decided that despite being a vertical change for EMC, the style of leadership will be participative with often shifting the style to directive and transformational leadership. The departments, groups, and individual will be thoroughly communicated the need for change and leaders will be present for satisfying any queries during the first session of change process (Pearce & Sims Jr., 2002).

Acquisition and communication

During the acquisition process, that in EMC's case will be the phase when the corporation acquires the new leadership model at multilevel, the bulk of communication will be carried out through the bulletin board and the dedicated intranet of the firm developed before the change project was implemented. This will enable all the relevant employees, at both individual and team level, to communicate and disseminate information. The aspect of uncertainty management will also be vital during the first three years of the change process as the results will be largely unknown and the employees both as individual as well as teams will be performing new and difficult tasks. Achieving key synergies in change process, specifically during the acquisition phase is important (Schuler & Jackson, 2001).

Training and support

There are obvious reasons for the organizational employees to display cynicism when change in implemented. Researchers have observed that there are several factors that might hamper any change process. These include lack of information regarding change, and inherent pessimism that change will impact the financial performance of the firm (Schuler & Jackson, 2001). Since virtual teams have more malleable structures (Majchrzak, Rice, Malhotra, King & Ba, 2000), the information flow during the change process will be made readily available. EMC executive managers therefore will ensure that there is plenty of readily available information to the relevant stakeholders of change process.

Stakeholder involvement and process review

Changes in the external environment of the businesses require that internal changes be made in consistency with the external changes. For this, EMC Corporation's main stakeholders for change process will be drafted. In the context of 3D leadership change, the company will have employees as the main stakeholders who will be affected by the change process. The employees will be encouraged by naming themselves as stakeholders. These also include public, governments, shareholders, employees, and the customers. The process review stage will only come after the phase 1 one of the strategic plan is implemented. The process review will include the analysis of new job designs and their effectiveness in increasing the exposure of each employee to be in contact with more than one stakeholder during each year of service. The stakeholders with which EMC employees interacts may increase to three at a time.

Cultural issues