Team Leadership, Communication, and Organizational Change
What this domain tests
Building and leading service teams, structuring stakeholder communication, and moving an organisation through change so a new service or process actually sticks. Items place a leader in a team or rollout scenario and ask which style, structure or change step applies.
Core rules
- Tuckman stages: forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning - the leader's style must change with the stage; storming is normal, not failure.
- Situational leadership: telling, selling, participating, delegating, selected by the follower's competence and commitment for the task, not by the leader's preference.
- RACI: exactly one Accountable per activity, Responsible does the work, Consulted is engaged before, Informed is told after.
- Motivation: Herzberg's hygiene factors prevent dissatisfaction but only motivators (achievement, recognition, growth) drive it; McGregor's Theory X and Y frames assumptions about staff.
- Communication: map stakeholders on a power/interest grid; a communication plan states audience, message, channel, frequency and owner; use rich channels for complex or contentious messages.
- Change: Lewin's unfreeze–change–refreeze; Kotter's eight steps from urgency and coalition through vision, short-term wins and consolidation to anchoring in culture; ADKAR tracks individual readiness (awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, reinforcement).
Worked example
Rolling out a new ITSM tool: high-power/high-interest service owners are managed closely with weekly demos; high-power/low-interest executives receive a one-page benefit summary monthly; low-power/high-interest agents get hands-on training and a champions network. Kotter step 1 uses data as the burning platform (30% SLA breaches), step 6 delivers a visible quick win (incident backlog down 25% in a month), and step 8 anchors the change in job descriptions and team KPIs so the old spreadsheet process does not return.
Traps that cost marks
- Assigning two "A" letters in a RACI, or making a whole group accountable.
- Training only at go-live and skipping the unfreeze stage.
- Treating a single email as a communication plan.
- Mixing Kotter's eight steps with Lewin's three stages or ADKAR's five elements.
- Choosing a leadership style from habit rather than from follower readiness.
- Announcing a change without addressing the middle managers who must enforce it.