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1-Page Summary of Leading Change
Overview
In Leading Change, Harvard professor John P. Kotter outlines a process to make any organization more efficient and successful.
Organizational change can be risky. If it’s done right, a business can thrive and become more successful; however, if it fails, the company could get stuck in an endless cycle of stagnation. Leadership is key to success when implementing organizational change. The author discusses common problems that arise during organizational changes (such as lack of vision or resistance from staff), and how to overcome them with creativity and leadership skills.
During the booming years of mid-twentieth century America, workers were trained to acquire and refine management skills. This is because they worked in hierarchical organizations that prized these skills. However, American workplaces have evolved away from hierarchy and structure. Although managerial skills still have an important role to play, leading an organization through important changes now requires a broader outlook and new skills. Visionary leaders are open to risk, bring bold ideas, plan ambitious goals over a long timeline, and cultivate qualities that all stakeholders should support if the project is going to be successful.
When change happens, there is a risk of failure. However, it also gives you the opportunity to reflect on leadership’s meaning and power. A methodical process can help you lead a successful transformation by following these steps:
Key Point 1: Establishing an appropriate level of urgency is critical to confronting outdated practices and driving change forward.
Change is difficult. It requires commitment, dedication and sacrifice. People tend to avoid pain and discomfort when change occurs. Therefore, a leader should build urgency into the organization by pointing out how change will benefit it in the long run. A leader should also state that action needs to be taken quickly even if doing so means addressing truths (that people don’t like) about the company culture or its employees’ behavior.
The enemy of change is complacency. Complacent people are unwilling to act, and managers enable complacency by giving too much positive feedback or showing hostility toward criticism. Crises can help shake off this complacent inertia; they force workers to confront the need for change. Managers can provoke crises in order to get their employees moving again. This might be a good thing because it helps workers move past their complacency and on to something better.
Strategies can be used to advance even the most complex projects. For example, infrastructure projects inherently pose risk and provoke doubts about funding. Fear of failure encourages caution and a slower approach. In a 2018 study in Policy Sciences, leaders successfully advanced infrastructure projects in Israel by identifying and communicating the urgency of present energy sources being unreliable.
Organizers of a natural gas hub on the coast of Israel met with a critical public and cautious government officials who threatened its future. They did this by presenting it as an urgent response to a pending crisis—that of diminishing external sources of energy. To mobilize support, organizers talked with stakeholders and aggressively fought back against criticism. They established urgency by repeatedly invoking a diminishing timeframe for action and connected the need for energy to national security interests.
Key Point 2: Creating a dedicated team with enough power to guide a project is necessary to ensure change gets off the ground and remains on pace.
It is a common myth that having a charismatic leader with vision and passion can solve all the problems of an organization. However, most transformations require more than one person to guide it through the process. A team should be formed to coordinate across multiple divisions so they can respond quickly when new criticism or issues arise.
