Concept Of Change And Leadership In Efu

CONCEPTS OF CHANGE AND LEADERSHIP IN EFU GENERAL INSURANCE LIMITED

INTRODUCTION

Presently EFU is the leading insurance group in Afro-Asia excluding Japan, providing a full range of insurance services. This includes life, health and general insurance. A pillar of EFU's strength lies in its close and long-term (over 50 years) relationship with its main reinsurer, Munich Re of Germany, largest reinsurance companies in the world.

HISTORY OF LEADERSHIP & CHANGE IN EFU

From 1988 to 1996, EFU was under leadership of Saif Kalani, chairman of EFU. Leadership approach of Mr. Kalani was much directive (Leader-centric), at that time there was no concept of Emergence approach; environment wasn’t complex at that time. And all the major decisions including finance, management, and marketing were taken by Mr. Kalani (top management). During this time, Company was normal success. He retired in 1996, and there comes the new chairman, Umair Memon, who was a retired army officer, who was having reputation of being so harsh. As was expected, he applied strict policies to workforce and fired couple of employees who he didn’t like. Internal environment changed as workforce lost trust from new leader. And external environment begins to change as new competitor came in market. Market share of EFU decline in just one year, as a result, new leader fired some more member of workforce. This created lack of trust between leader and follower. Situation was going from bad to worse, profit was declining as a result of reduced productivity of workers due to change. Companies suffered loss in year 1995. Mr memon resigned and Arsalan Ansari took the charge, and is still in charge. And company has become top among top now.

CHANGE OF LEADERSHIP

Mr. Arslan came in charge when EFU was in serious crisis. Their market share fall and company was in loss. Then there was need for change arises. Mr. Arsalan saw the need for change and quickly examined the market, competitors, and identified potential problems and major opportunities that can viewed as kotter’s 1st step of eight stage model “establishing a sense of urgency”. Mr Arslan perfectly established sense of urgency and then created a joining team by assembling a team of people with sufficient power to lead the change to achieve while continuing to work as a team. That can well be seen as kotter’s 2nd step of “create a guiding coalition”. At the same time provide strategies to direct change efforts while developing solid strategies for completion and simultaneously communicated that vision to the entire workforce. That’s the third and fourth step of kotter’s model, which goes side by side in this case. Teams were empowered by getting rid of obstacles, made necessary structural changes, and encouraged risk-taking to and generate new idea. This is kotter’s fifth step. As things were going smoothly, and market share rose due to better structure, workforce was provided necessary rewards for this. As market share increased, management produced more changes by hiring, promoting and developing change agents in organization. That was sixth and seventh step of kotter’s model. And finally anchored new approaches in the newly defined culture thereby creating more value for customer and workforce alike. This follows eighth step of kotter’s model. However, Higgs & Rowland argue that these predictable models don’t work when environment is complex. Kotter’s model worked in case of EFU because everything was going smoothly (though some steps go side by side), success of one step was continued by another.

Another reason for success of kotters steps were involvement and commitment of workforce. And that involvement and commitment was because of trust that new leadership build with workforce. And this trust was build because of leadership approach and leadership behavior that Mr. Arslan used. Now let’s discus Leadership approaches and behavior that was adapted by Mr arslan

CHANGE APPROACH

During the crisis time, EFU was using Directive approach, which was going well in period 1988 to 1994 when environment was not complex. As environment went complex, directive approach was a disaster. And soon after realizing this, EFU’s leader was using mix of Master and Emergence Approach, which not only made them able to stand but