Did you read "Leading Change" or not yet?!

Are you contributing to any transformation program!

Are you part of your organization's executive team!

Do you see that your Organization needs a shift and big change!

So how you plan/execute/move in your change journey, are you following a framework or a model to drive this change to happen? Leading Change is the answer if you are looking for a reference to be used.

Last year I read few books in the business area one of them was Leading Change by John Kotter, it was one of the best books I read in the business context especially because of its topic. Kotter tackled the vagueness and showstoppers in the change journey in his framework to be used as guidance for all stakeholders involved or leading change management programs.

Leading Change is classified as one of the 25 books "Most Influential Business Management Books" according to Times.com. Also, John Kotter is considered as a God Father for Change Management, his 8 steps framework is one of the best frameworks for that matter.

I am writing this article to shed the light on this model from a very high level and also I am adding here the best-quoted text from all chapters I collected during my reading.

Part 1 : Framework/Model Overview

Diagram from "https://www.groupex-solutions.com"

The framework tackled the change journey in three stages.

Stage 1: Defrost hardened status-quo (4 Steps)

Step 1: Establish a sense of urgency

Quote - "In an organization with 100 employees, at least two dozen must go far beyond the normal call of duty to produce a significant change. In a firm with 100,000 employees, the same might be required of 15,000 or more"

Quote - "If top management consists only of cautious managers, no one will push the urgency rate sufficiently high and major transformation will neven succeed"

Quote - "A good rule of thumb in a major change effort is: Never underestimate the magnitude of the forces that reinforce complacency and that help maintain status quo"

Quote - "Even though transformations start more easily with a natural financial crisis, given a choice, it's clearly smarter not to wait for one to happen. Better to create the problem yourself. Better still, if at all possible, help people see the opportunities or the crisis-like nature of the situation without inducing crippling losses"

Step 2: Create the guiding coalition

Quote - " Two types of individuals should be avoided at all costs when putting together a guiding coalition. The first have egos that fill up a room, leaving no space for anybody else. The second is what I call snakes, people who create enough mistrust to kill teamwork"

Quote - "Beyond trust, the element crucial to teamwork seems to be a common goal. Only when all the members of the guiding coalition deeply want to achieve the same objective does real teamwork become feasible"

Quote - "People who have spent their careers in a single department or division are often taught loyalty to their immediate group and trust of the motives of others even if they are in the same firm"

Step 3: Developing a vision and strategy

Quote - "Authoritarian decree and micromanagement. Both approaches have been applied widely in enterprises over the last century, but mostly for maintaining existing systems, not transforming those systems into something better"

Quote - "Vision refers to a picture of the future with some implicit or explicit commentary on why people should strive to create the future"

Quote - "With clarity of direction, the inability to make decisions can disappear"

Quote - "Without a vision, strategy making can be a much more contentious activity and budgeting can dissolve into a mindless exercise of taking last year's numbers and changing them 5 percent one way or the other"

Quote - "Vision should have these characteristics Imaginable, Desirable, Feasible, Focused, Flexible and Communicable"

Quote - "Remember: an ineffective vision may be worse than no vision at all"

Quote - "Developing a good vision is an exercise of both head and heart, it takes some time, it always involves a group of people, and it is tough to do well"

Step 4: Communicating the change vision

Quote - "The most carefully crafted messages rarely sink deeply into the recipient's consciousness after only one pronouncement. Our Minds are too cluttered, and any communication has to fight hundreds of other ideas for attention. In addition, a single airing won't address all the questions we have. As a result, effective information transferral almost always relies on repetition"

Quote - "Nothing undermines the communication of a change vision more than behavior on the part of key players that seems inconsistent with the vision"

Quote - "Because the communication of vision is often such a difficult activity, it can easily turn into a screeching, one-way broadcast in which user feedback is ignored and employees are inadvertently made to feel unimportant. In highly successful change efforts, this rarely happens, because communication always becomes a two-way endeavor"

Stage 2: Introduce new practices (3 Steps)

Step 5: Empower broad-based action

Quote - "Major internal transformation rarely happens unless many people assist. Yet employees generally won't help, or can't help, if they feel relatively powerless. Hence the relevance of empowerment"

Quote - "What are the biggest obstacles that often need to be attacked? Four can be particularly important: structures, skills, systems, and supervisors"

Quote - "Customer-focused visions often fail unless customer unfocussed organizational structures are modified"

Step 6: Generating short-term wins

Quote - "In small companies or small units of enterprises, the first results are often needed in half a year. In big organizations, some unambiguous wins are required by eighteen months. Regardless of size, this means that you're probably still not out of most of the early stages when step 6 has to produce something"

Quote - "In a way, the primary purpose of the first six steps of the transformation process is to build up sufficient momentum to blast through the dysfunctional granite walls found in so many organizations. When we ignore any of these steps, we put all our efforts at risk. In enterprises that have been around for decades, the granite walls can be thick. Sometimes, extremely thick"

Step 7: Consolidating gains and producing more change

Quote - "With sufficient leadership from above and lots of delegation of both management and leadership activities, twenty change projects can be run simultaneously. If either element is missing, those twenty projects will create chaos, and step 7 of a major transformation may collapse"

Stage 3: Ground the change in corporate culture. (1 Step)

Step 8: Anchoring new approaches in the culture

Quote - "Culture is not something that you manipulate easily. Attempts to grab it and twist it into a new shape never work because you can't grab it. Culture changes only after you have successfully altered people's actions after the new behavior produces some group benefit for a period of time and after people see the connections between the new actions and performance improvement. Thus, most cultural change happens in step 8, not step 1"

Quote - "A good rule of thumb: Whenever you hear of a major restructuring, reengineering, or strategic redirection in which step 1 is "changing the culture" you should be concerned that it might be going down the wrong path.

Quote - "Management deals mostly with the status quo and leadership deals mostly with change"

Further Reading for Change Management and Kotter

As mentioned in the beginning Kotter is the Godfather of change management topic in the business context, he wrote many other books for the same topic and using the same framework, below are some of them with brief descriptions for interested readers.

1. The Heart of Change - It is a complementary book to leading change full of stories for each step in the framework/model. Good to read it right after Leading Change.
2. Sense of Urgency - It is a book focusing on the first step in the framework/model which is Establish a Sense of Urgency.
3. Accelerate - Again another book for the same framework/model with the focus on a concept introduced by John Kotter called "Dual Operating System". The same concept is discussed in the below number 5 book.
4. Our Iceberg is Melting - is a Story-based book about doing well under the stress and uncertainty of rapid change. 
5. That's not how we do it here! - Story-based book for comparing the old-fashioned vs newly organizations structures and how they react to change.

Let me know if after reading this article, are you interested or motivated to read Leading Change or any of the above books?!