Get Familiar With the Kotter’s Eight-Step Plan
Kotter’s eight-step plan is a widely used process-focused change management framework. It was developed by Dr. John Kotter, a professor of leadership management at the Harvard Business School.
After spending a long time studying why transformations fail, he presented the eight stages of organizational change, first in an article and later in his book, Leading Change.
As a middle manager, you are not necessarily responsible for all the steps in this model, but we will quickly touch on all eight steps.
The first three phases create a climate for change in the company and are more likely to be carried out by top management.
As a middle manager, you are mainly active in phases 4-6, where the integration and empowerment of the entire organization takes place.
In phases 7 and 8, middle managers also contribute to sustainable implementation to ensure lasting changes.
Step 1: Create a Sense of Urgency
For change to be successful, employees must accept and support the change. Hence, establishing a sense of urgency is crucial to getting their buy-in by creating awareness that the upcoming change is vital for the company’s survival and future success.
If employees are too complacent, there’s hardly any interest in change. Something you often hear from them, especially in large companies, is: “Everything works fine, why should we change?”
Fears and conflicts are often to be expected during this phase. It’s important to actively involve employees in the change process—or even from the analysis stage—so that they have relevant information early enough and see there is a problem that needs to be worked on.
If people don’t feel a sense of urgency, the change project might die before it even starts.
Step 2: Build the Guiding Coalition
A strong leadership team needs to be put together that represents different levels of the entire organization with the common goal of tracking the success of the project.
This coalition should have sufficient credibility, authority, and the necessary technical and managerial skills, as well as the power to shape the change in a way that employees can trust and follow.
Step 3: Develop a Vision and a Strategy for Change
The leadership team must develop a motivational change vision, paint a picture of the future, define the expected outcomes of the change and provide a strategy for realizing the change.
It’s also essential for managers and change agents to be able to simply convey the vision of the change so that it’s easy for employees to understand and follow.
Step 4: Communicate the Change Vision
Communicate, communicate, communicate! Bring the vision to your employees to foster their enthusiasm, as well as to increase acceptance of the change project and its implementation.
For example, using a central document repository in the cloud makes it much faster to access documents, avoiding lengthy email exchanges and searching for the most recent version, since team members will be able to collaborate on the same document. A consequence for not changing could be that the workforce would not be able to work remotely, or no automatic backups of the local documents could be carried out.
There cannot be enough communication in change projects, so it’s best to continuously promote the vision on all available channels, such as town hall meetings, social media, internal events, etc. The more people believe in the vision, the more it spreads and becomes accepted.
Step 5: Empower Your Collaborators to Take Wide-Reaching Action
Remove obstacles and reduce barriers. Ensure that your internal structures, incentives, and systems are aligned with the vision and meet the new requirements resulting from the change.
Empower your employees to do everything to promote the implementation of the vision and nothing that may slow it down. This also includes the clarification of interfaces to other departments, process analyses, etc.
Step 6: Generate Short-Term Wins
Make sure they are recognized—communicate about achievements, and celebrate every time a goal is reached.
This motivates your people and keeps them engaged. They get a sense of how the change will affect them. Keep an eye out for critics and those who are resisting the change.
Step 7: Consolidate Successes and Produce More Change
Keep building momentum and consolidate successes. Short-term successes shouldn’t give the impression that the change is already complete;they should encourage everyone to achieve even more meaningful change goals.
Focus on continuous improvement by analyzing what went well and what needs further adjustment. If necessary, bring in new people to get some fresh perspective.
Step 8: Anchor New Approaches Into Company Culture
There must be a clear connection between the desired changes and the company’s success to anchor the change into company culture. In order for people to not revert to old habits, the change must become intertwined with the company’s DNA.
Communicate regularly about the new approaches, incorporate them into existing procedures, and explain the status quo to new employees and managers who join the organization.
Frequently share success stories and communicate transparently about why this change made so much sense.
Get Familiar With the McKinsey 7S Model
We finally arrive at the last, most complex framework that we cover in this course. The McKinsey 7S model was developed in the late 1970s by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, consultants from the McKinsey consulting firm (hence the name).
It’s probably the best known tool in strategic planning for identifying, evaluating, and implementing complicated organization-wide change. Common use cases are:
Examining the impact of future changes within your company
Determining how best to implement a new business strategy
Aligning departments and processes during a merger or acquisition
In order to understand an organization, the framework provides seven internal interconnected aspects to diagnose how the different parts of the business work together. These are strategy, structure, systems, skills, staff, style, and shared values.
As a middle manager, you won’t be involved in the assessment of all the elements of your company. Therefore, we’ll limit this chapter to an overview and some checklist questions you can ask to analyze your situation.
For successful change, all seven aspects need to be aligned. Unlike the Kotter model, the seven elements are not designed to be performed in a particular order, but are categorized into hard and soft factors.
Hard elements | Soft elements |
Strategy | Skills |
Structure | Staff |
Systems | Style |
| Shared values |
The hard elements are easily defined or identified and directly controlled by management. The soft elements, on the other hand, are more difficult to describe and less tangible, since they’re heavily influenced by culture and existing company values.
Let’s explore the elements one by one to understand your company’s current situation.
Strategy defines a company’s purpose, vision, and goals. It describes how to solve specific business problems, to create a competitive advantage and ensure long-term success.
What is our strategy?
How do we reach our goal or achieve our objectives?
How do we deal with competition?
Structure is how the company is organized. This includes decision-making processes, communication channels, and reporting lines.
How is the company/team divided?
How are activities coordinated in various departments?
How are teams and departments organized and managed?
Systems are the daily tasks and procedures that employees use to get their jobs done. It’s mainly about how work processes, workflows, and tools are coordinated.
What are your core systems for human resources, finance, document management, communication, etc.?
How are these systems monitored, evaluated, and tracked?
What rules and processes are teams using to comply with the systems?
Shared values are the core beliefs of your company that are held by the majority of employees and shape the typical behavior and culture of the organization.
What are your core company values?
What is your company’s culture?
How could you strengthen your values?
Style is, for instance, the culture or the leadership principles embraced by management, or behavioral patterns created by employees over a long period of time.
How are your departments and teams managed?
Is your management style effective?
Do employees work cooperatively or competitively?
Staff is the entire workforce and their competencies. An increase in performance is possible through motivation and upskilling.
What skills do your employees bring to the company?
Are there any skill gaps?
Do you need to hire anyone?
Skills refer to the employees’ particular know-how, their creative strength, and their abilities. Everyone contributes to the success of the company with their capabilities.
What are the strongest skills across the teams in your company?
What skills are not present and how vital are they?
How are you monitoring and assessing skills?
When gathering information, it’s best practice to start with shared values and check for consistency with structure, strategy, and systems. Then, review the hard elements and find out how they support each other.
Be aware that changing one element, like strategies, always affects the remaining elements, which in turn gives you the opportunity to take action there, too.
Let’s Recap!
When applying Kotter’s Eight-Step plan, all phases must be completed in the given order and none must be skipped.
Creating a sense of urgency is an often underestimated step in initiating successful change.
The McKinsey framework contains seven elements: strategy, structure, systems, skills, staff, style, and shared values.
Hard elements are controlled by management, while soft elements are influenced by culture and values.
Pretty overwhelming, but isn’t it amazing how different the individual change frameworks can be while still following similar approaches? In any case, enough theory for now. It’s time to put your knowledge into practice. In the next chapter, I’ll briefly share how I used a framework for change in my personal life, before getting you to apply one yourself.
