Leading Change

Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail

John Kotter is a Leadership professor and expert at the Harvard Business School. He has made it his goal to study both success and failure in change initiatives in business. In the book, Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail, Kotter finds that the change process goes through a series of phases that usually require a considerable length of time. Kotter suggest that skipping steps creates only the illusion of speed but never produce satisfactory results. Also making critical mistakes in any of the phases can have a devastating impact. Kotter finds that most change efforts fail. In fact, he studied hundreds of companies that entered Total Quality Management programs, but about two-thirds fail because they do not know how to handle change. Kotter describes the eight errors that cause companies to fail in their change efforts. The first error is allowing too much complacency. The biggest mistake people make when trying to change organizations is to plunge ahead without establishing a high enough sense of urgency in fellow managers and employees. They overestimate how much they can force big changes on an organization. They underestimate how hard it is to drive people out of their comfort zones. Error two is failing to create a sufficiently powerful guiding coalition. In successful transformations, the leaders plus another five, fifteen, or fifty people with a commitment to improve performance pull together as a team. In the most successful cases, the coalition is always powerful. Error three is not understanding the power of vision. Urgency and a strong guiding team are necessary but insufficient conditions for major change. Vision plays a key role in producing useful change by helping to direct, align, and inspire actions on the part of a large number of people. Without an appropriate vision, a transformation effort can easily dissolve into a list of confusing, incompatible, and time-consuming projects...