Step 1: Create Urgency
For change to happen, it helps if the whole company really wants to do it. Develop a sense of urgency around the need for change. This may help you spark the initial motivation to get things moving.
Step 2: Form a Powerful Coalition
Convince people that the change is necessary. This often takes strong leadership and visible support from key people within your organization. Managing change isn’t easy/
Step 3: Create the 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.
Step 4: 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 company, 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. It’d also important to ‘walk the talk’. What you do is far more important – and believable – than what you say. Demonstrate the kind of behaviour that you want from others.
Step 5: 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 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.
Step 6: Create Short Term Wins
Nothing motivates more than success. Give your company a taste of victory early in the change process.
You want each smaller target to be achievable, with little room for failure. 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 analyze 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 7: Build on 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 the 10th success, you need to keep looking for improvements
Step 8: Anchor Changes in Corporate Culture
Finally, to make any change stick, it should become part of the core of your organization. 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.
- Esjae x
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