logo
News and Views from
The Customer's Shoes
The Season for Change May 08
Helpful Quotations
on Change and Leadership
quotations
Download this free PowerPoint presentation on the subject of change and leadership. It contains the Eight Step Process as well as 61 slides of thought provoking and motivational quotations for use in the context of change management and leadership.

Dowload Kotter's Eight Phases
 on a single page.
pdf


 
Quick Links
Join Our Mailing List
Greetings!
We'll I'm back online again after some abscence from my monthly mailings.

It will take you no more than 20 seconds to scan the relevance of the email before you hit the delete button. If you are about to enter into a programme of culture change then you'll find this issue relevant. If you want to remain on my mailing list then do nothing but to opt out then please use the link at the bottom of the page to remove yourself from my newsletter mailing list permanently.

I've picked on this topic as it's a current theme with three clients I'm working with to improve their customer and employee experiences. One of the first things we needed the project sponsors to understand was how to avoid project failure....how to make the change stick.

In this article I explore the root causes of failure and how to avoid them based on work by John P. Kotter, a world-renowned expert on leadership and change management at Harvard Business School.
 

Eight Reasons Why Many Change Processes Don't Succeed

John Kotter, has been the premier voice on how the best organisations actually "do" change. He is the author of the recently released hit leadership fable, Our Iceberg is Melting...well worth a read. His other international bestseller Leading Change, which outlined an actionable, 8-step process for implementing successful transformations, became the change bible for managers around the world.

Kotter concluded there are eight reasons why many change processes do not succeed which I've summarised for you below:
  1. Allowing too much complexity.
  2. Failing to build a substantial coalition that will support the programme of change.
  3. Not understanding the need for a clear vision.
  4. Failing to clearly communicate the vision.
  5. Permitting roadblocks against the vision.
  6. Not planning for short term results and not realising them.
  7. Declaring victory too soon and failing to persist
  8. Failing to anchor the changes in daily life of the organisation.
Book cover

The 8-Step Process of Successful Change

To prevent making these mistakes, Kotter created the following Change Phases model. It also consists of eight steps:

Step 1. Establish a real sense of urgency. Teams and individuals need to realise the current situation and what's facing them. So help others see the need for change and the importance of acting immediately.

Step 2. Create a strong coalition for the cause. Make sure there is a powerful group guiding the change-one with leadership skills, a bias for getting things done, has credibility, communications ability, authority, and  sound analytical skills.

Step 3. Develop a clear vision. Clarify how the future will be different from the past, and how you can make that future a reality.This is your chance to "Shape Your Future".

Step 4. Share the vision with passion. Make sure as many others as possible understand and accept the vision and the strategy.

Step 5. Empower people to remove barriers that prevent progress. Clear as many barriers as possible so that those who want to make the vision a reality can do so.

Step 6. Look for and gain some short-term wins. Create some visible, unambiguous successes as soon as possible.

Step 7. Consolidate progress and keep moving forward. Press harder and faster after the first successes. Be relentless with instituting change after change until the vision becomes a reality.

Step 8. Anchor the change time and time again. Hold on to the new ways of behaving, and make sure they succeed, until they become a part of the very culture of the group.

Download this list as a PDF document.

Thanks for reading

Kind regards,

Mark Gregory