Business Leadership 5: Implement Appropriate Change in Organizations

This continues our series on leadership roles and traits for your small-business

You will make changes in your organization to implement your vision. Your staff will accept the changes better when they share your vision. So, hopefully, you successfully help them obtain the same vision you created for the company. The clearer you and they see the vision, the better you will recognize the changes required to implement the vision. Today, we will review proven methods, outlined by John Kotter of Harvard, for implementing change in the organization.

Kotter’s Model for Making Change

John Kotter outlined eight steps to implementing change. Learn more by reading his books Our Iceberg is Melting and Leading Change. The text from Kotter’s web site:

1. Establish a sense of urgency: Examine market and competitive realities, and identify and discuss crises, potential crises, or major opportunities
2. Create a guiding coalition: Assemble a group with enough power to lead the change effort, and encourage the group to work as a team
3. Developing a change vision (sound familiar?): Create a vision to help direct the change effort, and develop strategies for achieving that vision
4. Communicating the vision for buy-in: Use every vehicle possible to communicate the new vision and strategies, and teach new behaviors by the example of the Guiding Coalition
5. Empowering Broad-based Action: Remove obstacles to change, change systems or structures that seriously undermine the vision, and encourage risk-taking and nontraditional ideas, activities, and actions
6. Generating short-term wins: Plan for visible performance improvements, create those improvements, recognize and reward employees involved in the improvements
7. Never Letting Up: Use increased credibility to change systems, structures, and policies that don't fit the vision, also hire, promote, and develop employees who can implement the vision, and finally reinvigorate the process with new projects, themes, and change agents
8. Incorporating changes into the culture: Articulate the connections between the new behaviors and organizational success, and develop the means to ensure leadership development and succession

Kotter’s 8-steps are not the only outline to change. VitalSmarts also outlined a change pattern.

Saturday we review VitalSmarts six steps that allow you to change anything