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A leader is most effective when people barely know he exists. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, his troops will feel they did it themselves. ~ Lao-tzu
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Imagine if new, agile, market savvy change happened that way.
There are many trends about change management that I imagine Dr. Kotter has seen in his long career. As I prepare for an Association of Change Management Practitioners conference next week, including editing new videos with change leaders, I wanted to share some of John Kotter’s materials here. Below is a bulleted, simplified excerpt, that highlights some common assumptions about how leaders approach change.
John Kotter, photo by Deb Nystrom, ACMP conferenceExcerpted from HBR:
Recently, an Irish Times reporter interviewed me on the changes currently taking place in Ireland’s finance industry (the nation’s financial regulator had just announced the $39.3 billion price tag of the Anglo Irish Bank bailout). Clearly, much is going to have to change in the banks and how the government deals with them.
But there’s a buy-in problem, as the reporter pointed out. “Why would subordinates trust management to develop a change vision in a situation like this, when management got the company into a mess?
…John Kotter: But let me address just one issue here.
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The conventional decide-execute model handles large changes very poorly.
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The reporter’s questions were based on an assumption that the way good decisions are made and implemented …
(1) top management analyze the situation or ask a consultant to;
(2) they create a plan and tell the troops to execute it, or… “sell” it, or at least aggressively communicate it to their troops;
(3) the troops take the direction and execute.
— it’s not close to how the best organizations handle change today.
The conventional decide-execute model handles large changes very poorly.
[Dr. Kotter] has written much about this (starting with a book called Leading Change), but for now let’s just say that success comes from a lot more people getting involved in the decision-making process, and not just by sticking them on a committee — I mean really engaging them so that they are interested and want to be involved.
If done right, better data is brought into a decision, and by engaging people you have already set things up to make buy-in easier.
When it comes to large-scale change in our increasingly diverse and fast-moving world, we need to engage people in the decision-making process, to get their buy-in and to get the job done well.
Take action on your change leader interests. Email me via DebNystrom@Reveln.com if you are interested in adaptive change and / or change leadership news and views
This work by Reveln Consulting is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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