Managing Change: 8 Steps to Success

Why Change?

From time-to-time in business, you will go through stages where “things aren’t working like the used to” or “things are slowing down”. When that happens, change is needed. It might sound like an easy task to change things, but in reality for a business it takes a lot of hard work from lots of people for it to work. So how do you go about it?

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” – Barack Obama

John Kotter’s 8-Step Process for Leading Change

For thirty years, research from professor and author Dr John Kotter has revealed that 70% of business change efforts fail because they are not implemented properly. Kotter’s 8-step method to business change has become one of the defacto standards in making sure businesses are adaptable to the ever-changing world to keep them successful.

Kotter’s 8 Steps

1. Create a sense of urgency 2. Create the ‘guiding coalition’ 3. Develop a change vision 4. Communicate the vision for buy-in 5. Empower broad-based action 6. Generate short-term wins 7. Don’t let up! 8. Make it stick

Create a sense of urgency People can sometimes get stuck too much into their comfort zones, lose their sense of ambition and the opportunities they can seize. Create goals for change that don’t just ‘make sense’ to your colleagues, but inspire them. Make sure people are making progress every single day to help change your business, that they understand what input their work is having, so they don’t feel like ‘busy fools’.

Develop a ‘change vision’

No one will buy into the changes they make unless they know how the future will be better from the past. Clarify how the changes you want to make will have positive effects on people moving forward. This motivates people and helps to create the ‘sense of urgency’ you need to implement change.

Create the ‘guiding coalition’

No person can single handedly make change happen. Build a group with enough power to lead change, who trust one another and have the expertise and credibility in their fields to ensure the changes you want to implement are carried through.

Communicate the vision for buy-in The more people who buy-in to your vision, the more chance you will successfully change. This doesn’t mean writing a single email to the company, but constant communication about how individual’s work is helping to achieve the change vision. Talk about what “we” are going to change and why “we” need to do it. Keep it simple, jargon-free and to the point.

Empower broad-based action Make sure that you take away any obstacles from letting people do their best work to help your business change. The more ‘extra’ stuff someone has to do before they produce the results you need, the longer and less likely the change will take place. These can be issues related to software you use or the tasks set by managers, as examples.

Generate short-term wins The more successes you can celebrate, the more of a drive people have to make the ultimate end-goal easier to achieve. ‘Real’ change can take a long time to be fully implemented, that’s why the smaller goals, relating to the overall change effort, that people achieve should be acknowledged.

Don’t let up! There will always be resistors to your efforts, even when you start making progress in changing things. That’s why you have to make sure to keep communicating the change vision, to celebrate the small successes and keep that sense of urgency alive.

Make it stick Change takes time, it takes even longer for that change to embed into the roots of your business. Find new ways to sustain the new culture you have worked hard to build. You will have to keep proving that new ways achieve better results than the old ways and reinforce this new way of thinking with every new employee you bring aboard.

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