Applying Kotter's Eight Steps to CEO-Led Organizational Change

Introduction: Employee Responses to Change

A strong point in the data is that the respondents were quite frank and, if one can believe the data, honest about how they feel about change in their organization. Few people enjoy change, and most people are at least moderately frustrated by it. The very nature of change is that it is disruptive and pushes people to the point of discomfort and cognitive dissonance.

The first thing people think about when faced with change is how it will impact them directly. Following that very substantive consideration, people begin to think about how they will accomplish the changes they cannot avoid. An employee who voices opposition to the change but remains open to alternatives is not necessarily going to be oppositional throughout the entire change effort. For instance, as with the employee below, they may simply be at a particular level of concern that they need help to overcome and resolve:

"I spoke up against it to my superiors and discussed it with my other teachers to try to find an alternative that was more palatable."

Alternatively, if employees are at all in alignment with the change processes, they will begin to focus on how the changes will improve their situation, their team's effort, and the company's bottom line. For instance, an employee who says the following can be identified as a change agent:

Theoretical Frameworks for Understanding Change

"I went to the leadership people and offered to help in any way I could."

The topic of change has garnered a great deal of attention in the literature. A number of researchers and analysts are well known precisely because they have developed effective ways to bring about change within an organization with the least amount of disruption and the greatest degree of benefit. Rogers (2003) established a framework for examining how innovations spread throughout an organization and the roles that people assume in response to the diffusion of innovation. Similarly, Hall and Hord (2004) developed the Change-Based Adoption Model (C-BAM) after years of researching how educators and business people adapted to change. The C-BAM model articulates Stages of Concern and Levels of the Use of Innovation as guidelines for understanding and mitigating the responses that people have to change in their organizations and in their practice.

Kotter's Eight Steps for Change

The CEO certainly feels a sense of urgency regarding the sweeping change he wishes to make within the organization. It is not necessary for everyone to be on board in order to accomplish a major change — in fact, this is a highly unlikely scenario. That said, it is critical for leaders to be visibly supportive of a change initiative. The active voice and highly visible engagement of leaders conveys a sense of urgency to employees in itself. Kotter's rule of thumb is that successful change requires 75% of management to be supportive of the change initiative. Implementing change cannot occur too rapidly if it is to be successful — expecting too much or trying to do too much too fast will lead to discouragement and most likely failure of the initiative. To support the change effort, it is important to accomplish the following: create a sense of urgency, recruit powerful change leaders, build a vision and effectively communicate it, remove obstacles, create quick wins, and build on the momentum.

It is critical to form a powerful coalition, as a leader cannot bring about sweeping change alone. Change has to be both managed and led. Change agents at every level of an organization are important to the quality of the ultimate changes. Qualitative and quantitative data can be used to identify potential change agents, assuming the responses were not all acquired with a promise of anonymity.

Visions are an important aspect of change initiatives. It is up to the leaders of an organization to identify and articulate the vision for change. However, it is also very helpful for employees to be engaged in describing aspects of this vision. When people have a clear vision, the steps required to accomplish it — and the directives associated with those steps — all become part of a larger picture they can understand, one in which they also understand their own important roles.

It is not enough to create a vision; an organizational vision must be communicated to others. To compete in the busy fabric of all the day-to-day communications that take place in an organization, it is necessary to ensure the vision is heard frequently and that the messages powerfully convey its benefits. Daily reminders of the shared vision go a long way toward keeping it top of mind.

Facilitating a change effort requires the identification and removal of obstacles; otherwise, it may be difficult or impossible to make forward progress with implementation of the change vision. Structures, processes, and people who function as barriers to effective implementation require the attention of leaders and the change team. When obstacles are removed, an empowering dynamic is often experienced that can carry the organization forward to an impressive degree.

Creating short-term wins is important to combating the change-initiative fatigue that plagues people who have been working on change for some time. As with any large effort, creating smaller, manageable buckets of work and focus supports a more sustained effort and enables employees to be rewarded more frequently for their contributions.

Building the desired change requires maintaining the effort so that each phase or stage can serve as a platform or scaffolding for achieving the next. For leadership, this means planning for a sustained effort and sequencing charges to move forward in meaningful steps rather than all at once — an approach that overwhelms staff and quickly leads to burnout.

Any change effort is strengthened by anchoring the changes in the culture of the organization. The change must become as central to the organization as the vision was during the change effort itself. Organizational culture is a primary determinant of what is accomplished by employees and management, so it is important that the values supporting the vision be present in daily work.