Leading Change: Kotter's 8 Step Process
“Management makes a system work. It helps you do what you know how to do. Leadership builds systems or transforms old ones.”
Few people actually enjoy change. Fewer enjoy leading it.
John P. Kotter determined to research change leaders from various industries and synthesize his findings into helpful rubrics for leaders of any organization to follow. Kotter is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School and cofounder of the leadership consulting organization Kotter International. In 1980, Kotter became the youngest professor to attain tenure and a full professorship at Harvard; he was thirty-three. Leading Change started as an article in the Harvard Business Review. It quickly became the magazine's number-one best-selling reprint. The following is a summary of his work and a critique from a change practitioner.
8 Challenges to Leading Change
Kotter's purpose in writing is to help leaders navigate organizational modification in the rapidly morphing twenty-first century. Kotter's premise is executive structures that succeeded in previous decades, if not centuries, are no longer effective solutions for navigating the current global economy's rapidly changing pace. Kotter suggests most organizations fail to effectively lead change initiatives due to complacency, lack of a guiding coalition, misplaced vision, poor communication, allowing change obstacles to linger, lack of short-term wins, declaring victory too soon, and neglecting culture. The inverse of these eight errors provides the roadmap for Kotter’s leading change philosophy.
8 Solutions to Leading Change
The eight-stage change process involves multiple sequential steps to lead organizational modification initiatives with deliberate action (23). First, Kotter suggests combating complacency within organizations by establishing a sense of urgency. People need to need change. Second, top executives identify and form a powerful guiding coalition of a diverse group with positional authority and influence over the organization. Third, the Harvard prodigy argues for developing a vision and strategy that directs and achieves objectives for change. The fourth involves communicating the change vision utilizing every possible medium available—multiple times over and over again. Fifth, the organization begins to empower broad-based action to demolish obstacles and encourage bold risk-taking aligned with the vision. Sixth, the organization needs to generate short-term wins to appease stakeholders and increase motivational momentum. Seventh, continue pushing by consolidating gains and producing more change. Eighth, lastly, and most crucial, Kotter argues for anchoring new approaches in the organization's culture.
Throughout his book, Kotter walks leaders through the eight-stage process with multiple real-world examples of leadership success and failure at implementing change. The running theme is communication. At every step in the process, communication plays a pivotal role in leading change. Without concise, clear, and memorable communication that is supported by positional and influential authority figures, organizational change is futile. Change demands hyper-focus on a clear trajectory.
A Practitioners Critique
Candidly the practitioner is me—so please take this for what it is worth.
Leading Change is a helpful leadership tool for navigating organizational change. The concepts are simple, communicated in non-academic language, and easy to implement. Each chapter is structured to help change leaders trek through that stage before moving on to the next step. A leadership team could efficiently use this resource as a template while filling in the specifics relevant to their organization. However, my primary critique of the book is the lack of personal experience from the author.
Kotter has undoubtedly identified excellent leadership principles for navigating change within an organization. Astutely, he articulates the rapidly accelerating environmental changes driven by technology within the twenty-first century that demand organizations adapt at unprecedented speeds. This type of change requires hyper-focused leaders. However, Kotter's principles seem almost absolute, as if there is no room for potential deviation or failure is inevitable if unadhered. This is the danger of a non-practicing leader providing leadership guidance. The danger of a student devoid of ever being a practitioner. Like a General commanding an army without ever being a soldier, Kotter comes armed with studies, coaching, and theory but little empathy from actual self-application. Leaders need to recognize this limitation as they engage with his work.
Recommendation
Kotter's Leading Change is an excellent, well-written book that could only be improved through joint authorship with a cohort of leading practitioners. The eight-stage process is a helpful template for leaders of all organizations to follow when considering significant restructuring or modification. Pastors and church leaders can benefit from Kotter's research and empirical knowledge. Still, they should do so with the understanding that leadership is rarely a transparent process but most often grey and mailable. Thus, all Christian change initiatives should be covered in significant supplication and seeking God's wisdom through his Word—leaders will make mistakes and need God's grace and their people's understanding.
Kotter, John. Leading Change. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2012.
