Heart of Change

The Heart of Change: Communicate & Empower

Change happens. It cannot be avoided. For organizations, big or small, the way change is handled can be the factor that sets the successful organization aside from the organization that just ekes by or fails altogether. In the book “The Heart of Change,” the authors John P Kotter and Dan S. Cohen present an eight-step, practical approach that organizations of all sizes can utilize to adapt to change, in whatever form it may present itself.

The eight steps provided in the book are, in order:

1. Increase Urgency

2. Build a Guiding Team

3. Get the Vision Right

4. Communicate for the Buy-In

5. Empower Action

6. Create Short-Term Wins

7. Don’t Let up

8. Make Change Stick

(Kotter & Cohen, 2002).

This paper will look at two steps in the middle of the process, namely Communicate for the Buy-In and Empower Action, and analyze them in conjunction with key concepts from the material contained in Ivancevich, Konopaske, and Matteson’s, Organizational Behavior and Management text book.

In order to appreciate the concepts presented in the two focal steps, it is important to have a general, overall understanding of how all eight steps of the process work together to facilitate an organization’s successful adaptation to change. In the Heart of Change, the centricity of the process is “changing people’s behavior”, which is achieved by helping people envision the problems, solutions and progress associated with the change, which results in an emotional response that is supported by expressively motivated ideas that change behavior and reinforces the behavior that has changed (Kotter & Cohen, 2002, p. 11).

Step Four: Communicating the Buy-In

After successfully implementing steps one through three, during which the urgency has been established and accepted, a team is guiding the organization to act on the sense of urgency and the correct vision regarding the change has been defined, it is necessary to communicate the...