What Is Kotter’s 8-Step Change Model ?
John P. Kotter, a professor at Harvard Business School, introduced this eight-step change model in his book “Leading Change” in 1995. It is a popular framework for implementing organisational changes. It was devised after years of research on more than 100 organisations. Changes come as a result of new technologies, mergers, acquisitions, new strategies and cultural transformation.
The eight steps
Kotter outlines eight steps that companies should follow to successfully navigate the obstacles and implement significant transformation. By taking these steps, you can make sure that the organisation will be ready and dedicated to accepting the changes when the process is over. These are the eight steps:
Step 1: Create urgency
This process should start with creating a sense of urgency among both managers and employees. Everyone should understand that these changes is necessary for the company. Employees should be motivated by telling them what is happening in the marketplace. This helps them to prepare for the change and ensure they put full effort into this.
What to do:
- Identify the existing and potential threats that can affect the company. This helps to develop scenarios of what could happen in the future.
- Analyse the opportunities that can be tapped through effective interventions.
- Openly discuss with people to make them think about the issues and give them convincing reasons.
- To make your case stronger, enlist the assistance of clients, external stakeholders, and business professionals.
Step 2: Form a powerful coalition
It is important to convince people that change is necessary. Then you need to find change leaders in the organisation. You need to form a powerful coalition or team of powerful people. These people may have different job titles, status, expertise and political importance. This team then works together to implement change.
What to do:
- Identify the effective change leaders and key stakeholders in your organisation.
- Request these people to be involved and commit themselves to the entire process.
- Build a strong team with your change leaders and other people.
- Determine the coalition team’s weak points and make sure the group includes many powerful individuals from a range of cross-functional departments and positions inside the organisation.
Step 3: Create vision and strategies
The objective of this step is to create a clear vision to lead the change and to develop strategies to help the team achieve it. It shows a clear picture of what the organisation will look like in the future once the change is implemented. A right vision guides team actions and decisions. It helps to set realistic targets to measure success.
What to do:
- Align the vision with the central value of the organisation and the change initiative.
- Accept ideas from the employees to develop this vision.
- Ensure that the vision can be easily communicated and is easy to understand for everyone.
- Include data such as sales reports, forecasts, market research, etc.
- Ensure that the vision is easily explainable and can be explained in five minutes or less.
Step 4: Communicate the vision
The goal of this step is to get the rest of the organisation to embrace and support the change initiative by clearly conveying the strategies and the vision. The objective of this step is to persuade staff to support the change. You have to convince them to make sacrifices and that the advantages of the change would benefit both the company and themselves.
What to do:
- Keep communicating about the vision and strategies daily in the decision-making, problem-solving and actions.
- Address people’s questions, worries, problems and anxieties openly and honestly.
- Senior leadership should show the ideal behaviour that they expect from the employees.
Step 5: Removing barriers and obstacles
When you plan to initiate a change in the organisation, there are always some obstacles in the way of implementation such as insufficient processes, resistance from employees, disempowering managers, organisational policies and structures. The focus of this step is to remove such obstacles.
What to do:
- Identify the barriers within the organisation that are blocking the implementation of change. The change team should communicate with employees and stakeholders to identify problems.
- Ensure that processes, structures, policies, reward systems, etc. are aligned with the change vision.
- Reward people for endorsing change and supporting the process of change implementation.
- Provide employees with the required training, coaching and mentoring to enable them to perform at their highest level and overcome obstacles.
Step 6: Achieve short-term wins
Accomplishing complete change may take some time. To continue working on the process it is important to have some short-term wins. It encourages the employees and keeps the momentum going. A short-term win is an organisation improvement that can be implemented within a short period.
What to do:
- Identify short-term wins that are feasible. Early wins give a feeling of victory.
- Instead of focusing on a single long-term objective, set several short-term ones that are more manageable, less expensive and less likely to fail.
- Give recognition to those who have contributed in achieving the goals.
Step 7: Build on the change
Most of the change projects fail because a win is declared very early. The implementation of the change takes a long time. This step ensures that all teams work persistently to achieve the change vision. It also helps to measure the victory.
What to do:
- After each victory determine what went well and what went wrong to decide what has to be improved.
- Combine the benefits of the short-term wins and keep working to introduce more significant changes across the entire company.
- Identify and remove unwanted processes and inter-dependencies.
- Continue communicating the change vision and delivering benefits.
Step 8: Ensure the change lasts
This is the last step that focuses on nurturing a new work culture where change can last. Ensure that everything is in line with the new culture. This may include modifying organisational norms and values, procedures, reward schemes and other infrastructure components.
What to do:
- Discuss the new changes by focusing on the benefits it brings to the organisation.
- Identify and incorporate norms and values that reinforce the change.
- Consider these new norms and values when choosing and employing new candidates, elevating current staff members, etc.
- Develop new training and development programmes to help employees develop skills and capabilities relevant to the new changes.
- Processes within the organisation that do not fit the new culture should be improved or removed.
Advantages of Kotter’s model
This model is being adopted around the world in various industries. Kotter has reported more than 70 percent of major change projects using this model have been successful. These are some advantages:
- It is a simple, step-by-step model that makes the entire process of change easy to understand and simple to apply.
- For the process to be successful overall, the focus is on the acceptance and participation of the employees.
- The method of bringing change is not the main focus, but rather the preparation and development of acceptability for change.
Disadvantages of Kotter’s model
No plan is completely reliable, so this framework also has some loopholes. These are some disadvantages of this model:
- This is a step-by-step model so skipping even a single step can result in serious problems.
- This process takes a lot of time.
- Since it is largely top-down process, co-creation and involvement are discouraged.
- This can lead to employee anger and discontent if individual needs are not met to the fullest extent possible.
Change Principles Of Kotter’s Change Model
Four change principles are used in combination with this model to guide the human component of the change management strategy. These four change principles are:
- Leadership + Management: This principle focuses on bringing the leadership to help with the change initiative. This leadership team should be about vision, action, innovation and celebration.
- Mind + Heart: This principle focuses on the strategy that must be made to motivate each person so they can change their attitude about the new change you want to implement.
- Select Few + Diverse Many: Empower individuals to make them feel they are a part of the project. This principle states that if you encourage people well, you can discover new leaders.
- Have to + Want to: According to this idea from the Kotter change management model, people who want to help rather than just follow instructions would respond better and become stronger change champions.
Kotter’s 8-step change model helps organisations to manage and implement major changes effectively. Changes like mergers and acquisitions, new product launches and organisational restructuring. This process is repetitive and companies need to follow certain steps multiple times to achieve success. Employee involvement and effort are also necessary for the success of change management.
