There are many theories on implemnting change effectively. Many originate with leadership and change management guru, John Kotter. A professor at Harvard Business School and world-renowned change expert, Kotter introduced his eight-step change process in his 1995 book, “Leading Change” with a follow-up work “Our Iceberg is Melting” in 2006.
Step One: Create Urgency
Building a sense of urgency is a necessary step to implementing change successfully. If you don’t find a way to make the change exciting, compelling and necessary, you may find the implementation phase a little more challenging than it should be. For change to happen, it’s crucial that the majority of the company really want it. Develop a sense of urgency around the need for change – people need to really understand and engage in the ‘Why’. This may help you spark the initial motivation to get things moving.
This isn’t simply a matter of showing people poor sales statistics or talking about increased competition. Open an honest and convincing dialogue about what’s happening in the marketplace and with your competition. If many people start talking about the change you propose, the urgency can build and feed on itself.
What you can do:
- Identify potential threats, and develop scenarios showing what could happen in the future.
- Examine opportunities that should be, or could be, exploited.
- Start honest discussions, and give dynamic and convincing reasons to get people talking and thinking.
- Request support from customers, outside stakeholders and industry people to strengthen your argument.
- Make it real for everyone in your teams….How will the change affect them, or more importantly what might happen for them if the organisation doesn’t change.
Step Two: Form a Powerful Coalition
Convince people that change is necessary. This often takes strong leadership and visible support from key people within your organization. Managing change isn’t enough – you have to lead it.
You can find effective change leaders throughout your organization – they don’t necessarily follow the traditional company hierarchy. To lead change, you need to bring together a coalition, or team, of influential people whose power comes from a variety of sources, including job title, status, expertise, and political importance.
In putting together a Guiding Coalition, the team as a whole should reflect:
Position Power: Enough key players on board so that those left out cannot block progress. This is really important – No senior buy-in at best or Senior Management sabotage at worst means that success isn’t likely!
Expertise: All relevant points of view should be represented so that informed intelligent decisions can be made.
Credibility: The group should be seen and respected by those in the organisation so that the group’s outputs will be taken seriously by other employees.
Leadership: The group should have enough proven leaders to be able to drive the change process.
Once formed, your “change coalition” needs to work as a team, continuing to build urgency and momentum around the need for change.
What you can do:
- Identify the true leaders in your organisation – not necessarily managers – People that are rising stars, are highly networked internally and always deliver.
- Ask for an emotional commitment from these key people – Are they behind YOU and CHANGE 100%?
- Work on team building within your change coalition.
- Check your team for weak areas, and ensure that you have a good mix of people from different departments and different levels within your company.
Step Three: Create a Vision for Change
When you first start thinking about change, there will probably be many great ideas and solutions floating around. Link these concepts to an overall vision that people can grasp easily and remember.
A clear vision can help everyone understand why you’re asking them to do something. When people see for themselves what you’re trying to achieve, then the directives they’re given tend to make more sense.
Effective change visions have six key characteristics:
Imaginable: They convey a clear picture of what the future will look like.
Desirable: They appeal to the long-term interest of employees, customers, shareholders and others who have a stake in the organisation.
Possible: They contain realistic and attainable goals.
Clear: They are clear enough to provide guidance in decision making.
Flexible: They allow individual initiative and alternative responses in light of changing conditions.
Understandable: They are easy to communicate and can be explained quickly.
What you can do:
- Determine the values that are central to the change.
- Develop a short summary (one or two sentences) that captures what you “see” as the future of your organization – Ideally short, emotive and memorable.
- Create a strategy and plan to execute that vision.
- Ensure that your change coalition can describe the vision in five minutes or less.
- Practice your “vision speech” often.
Step Four: Communicate the Vision
What you do with your vision after you create it will determine your success. Your message will probably have strong competition from other day-to-day communications within the organisation, so you need to communicate it frequently and powerfully, and embed it within everything that you do.
Don’t just call special meetings to communicate your vision. Instead, talk about it every chance you get. Use the vision daily to make decisions and solve problems. When you keep it fresh on everyone’s minds, they’ll remember it and respond to it.
It’s also important to “walk the talk.” What you do is far more important – and believable – than what you say. Demonstrate the kind of behavior that you want from others.
What you can do:
- Talk often about your change vision.
- Openly and honestly address people’s’ concerns and anxieties.
- Apply your vision to all aspects of operations – from training to performance reviews. Tie everything back to the vision.
- Lead by example.
Step Five: Remove Obstacles
If you follow these steps and reach this point in the change process, you’ve been talking about your vision and building buy-in from all levels of the organization. Hopefully, your staff wants to get busy and achieve the benefits that you’ve been promoting.
But is anyone resisting the change? And are there processes or structures that are getting in its way?
Put in place the structure for change, and continually check for barriers to it. Removing obstacles can empower the people you need to execute your vision, and it can help the change move forward.
What you can do:
- Identify, or hire, change leaders whose main roles are to deliver the change.
- Look at your organisational structure, job descriptions, and performance and compensation systems to ensure they’re in line with your vision.
- Recognise and reward people for making change happen.
- Identify people who are resisting the change, and help them see what’s needed.
- Take action to quickly remove barriers (human or otherwise).
Inchpebbles NOT Milestones
Step Six: Create Short-term Wins
Nothing motivates more than success. Give your organisation a taste of victory early in the change process. Within a short time frame (this could be a month or a year, depending on the type of change), you’ll want to have results that your people can see. Without this, critics and negative thinkers might hurt your progress.
Create short-term targets – not just one long-term goal. You want each smaller target to be achievable, with little room for failure. Your change team may have to work very hard to come up with these targets, but each “win” that you produce can further motivate the entire staff.
What you can do:
- Look for sure-fire projects that you can implement without help from any strong critics of the change.
- Don’t choose early targets that are expensive. You want to be able to justify the investment in each project.
- Thoroughly analyse the potential pros and cons of your targets. If you don’t succeed with an early goal, it can hurt your entire change initiative.
- Reward the people who help you meet the targets.
Step Seven: Build on the Change
Kotter argues that many change projects fail because victory is declared too early. Real change runs deep. Quick wins are only the beginning of what needs to be done to achieve long-term change.
Launching one new product using a new system is great. But if you can launch 10 products, that means the new system is working. To reach that 10th success, you need to keep looking for improvements.
Each success provides an opportunity to build on what went right and identify what you can improve.
What you can do:
- After every win, analyse what went right and what needs improving.
- Set goals to continue building on the momentum you’ve achieved.
- Drive for continuous improvement.
- Keep ideas fresh by bringing in new change agents and leaders for your change coalition.
Step Eight: Anchor the Changes in Corporate Culture
Finally, to make any change stick, it should become part of the core of your organisation. Your corporate culture often determines what gets done, so the values behind your vision must show in day-to-day work.
Make continuous efforts to ensure that the change is seen in every aspect of your organization. This will help give that change a solid place in your organization’s culture.
It’s also important that your company’s leaders continue to support the change. This includes existing staff and new leaders who are brought in. If you lose the support of these people, you might end up back where you started.
What you can do:
- Talk about progress every chance you get. Tell success stories about the change process, and repeat other stories that you hear.
- Include the change ideals and values when hiring and training new staff.
- Publicly recognise key members of your original change coalition, and make sure the rest of the staff – new and old – remembers their contributions.
- Create plans to replace key leaders of change as they move on. This will help ensure that their legacy is not lost or forgotten.
I would love to hear about your challenges and successes from implementing change in your organisation.