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Leadership Studies,  Psychology,  Sociology

Avoid These Mistakes: How to Lead Sustainable Organizational Change

January 21, 2022 /

by Lorraine D. Ledger, M.S.

Successful organizational transformations do not happen by chance, but must be carefully planned, implemented, and sustained within the organization’s culture.

Business guru John Kotter, in his best selling book Leading Change, shares insights and advice gleaned from years of experience helping corporations successfully develop and implement transformative change initiatives in their organizations. In Leading Change, Kotter (2012) offers an eight-step business model for producing organizational change that stresses the importance of effective leadership.

Kotter warned that successful organizational transformations are not easy and do not happen by chance (p. 22), but must be carefully planned, implemented, and sustained. This is accomplished through leadership that communicates a clear vision and by driving employee behaviors to increase acceptance and engagement with the change process. Kotter’s discussion is not about small changes, like switching to a different coffee brand in the break room, but large-scale changes that require permanent behavioral shifts throughout the company.

The entire organizational culture—its people, systems, processes, goals, values, and power structures—must be understood, made ready, and thoroughly prepared before initiating change projects or they will fail. Workplace politics, competition for scarce resources, individual psychologies, and structural or procedural traditions all contribute to failure by creating logjams and delays that are difficult to overcome. 

In chapter one, Kotter details eight reasons that change initiatives fail, and in the second chapter he expounds on ways to avoid these mistakes and achieve sustainable organizational change. He reminds the reader of many things that sound like common sense, but oddly enough, many business and organizational leaders fail to practice. For instance, it is important to remember that change initiatives are always complex (p. 27) and take time to complete. Change requires involvement from everyone, and leaders must be patient.

In large organizations, many distinct functional areas and departments may be undergoing changes at the same time, but at different phases in the overall organizational change process. In cases where related or similar projects overlap across departments or functions, it is especially important that each of the eight steps be followed in sequence and completed for every individual change initiative. The temptation is, often, to skip steps in order to align the process for everyone. Kotter warns against succumbing to that temptation. Complexity requires clarity and solidarity from leadership at every level, including from the CEO, the guiding coalition of next-level leaders, and from line-management too. If there is misalignment of purpose or lack of leadership solidarity, at any level of the organization, the driving sense of urgency and employee motivation will fade and the initiative will fail.

Kotter recommended beginning the change initiative process by creating a sense of urgency to drive human behavior. You have to get people’s attention, he argues, before they will engage in the necessary behaviors that will drive transformation. In other words, organizational leaders must change their organization’s culture. Sometimes a sense of urgency happens naturally, as in the case of the remote work innovations brought about by the CoVid-19 pandemic. Other times, it may be necessary to artificially induce a little panic or enthusiasm for your cause. Some scholars have tested this approach with mixed results.

For example, in their case study of Newsgroup, a media company struggling through a series of innovation initiatives, Fredberg and Pregmark (2021) found that creating a sense of urgency, as Kotter suggests doing, did directly affect worker behavior, but not always in ways that drove the desired change. They wrote that “Arguably, creating a sense of urgency could have consequences that are counter-productive to the stimulation of creativity, learning, and open-mindedness” (p.10), and they questioned the wisdom of Kotter, Lewin, Beckhard and Harris, Connor, Taffinder and other “urgency construct motivation” theorists (p. 7). Their study found that driving employee behavior through urgency-prompts may actually undermine human performance by establishing the wrong motivation. Employees were ready to move, yes, but not in the right direction.

Attempts to create a sense of urgency to drive progress most often resulted in loss-prevention behavior from employees, rather than the desired promotion-focused behavior needed to drive the change (p. 3). Urgency-communications, they found, had caused employees to feel anxiety, and pushing them failed to spawn risk-taking and innovation, as hoped. They played it safer instead. Not what corporate leadership was hoping for.

Fredberg and Pregmark’s study sought to identify the conditions under which “urgency cues created a promotion focus in individuals and teams” and discovered that the most important factor was managerial cues, a factor Kotter identified among his list of obstacles to success (Kotter, 2012, pp. 28-33).

Psychological tendencies for individuals to resist change, often found at mid-management levels in all types of organizations, may be the cause of lack of innovation and comfort with change. Middle managers and their subordinates, motivated by a desire to preserve their jobs by displaying loyalty and job-related prudence, may inadvertently thwart change initiatives by taking protective measures against perceived external threats.

When individuals within the organization, however, are empowered to take risks and the real obstacles to innovation are removed, each member’s personal contribution will help speed the desired results. “Major change is usually not possible unless most employees are willing to help, often to the point of making short-term sacrifices. But people will not make sacrifices…unless they really believe that a transformation is possible” (p. 9).

The most important factor to the success or failure of any organizational change initiative is leadership.

John Kotter, 2012, p. 29

For a variety of reasons, people tend to resist change. Having the right kind of leader at the helm during change initiatives is crucial, because different leadership styles may either help or hinder the outcome. Leadership effectiveness “depends on the fit between the leader’s behavior and the characteristics of followers” (Northouse, 2019, p. 136).

Management is not leadership (Kotter, 2012, p. 29), and Kotter explains that managerial processes are antithetical to change, because they support stability and complacency (p. 31). Managers control, monitor, and produce short-term results. Leaders take the organization in a new direction and empower members to share leadership of the organization into a new future. 

Kotter’s Eight Step Process model seems to be designed for leading change in organizations where market conditions and concerns about profit margins prevail: business. But is Kotter’s model useful  other kinds of organizations, like schools, for instance?

Kotter argues that organizational change and plans for implementing change initiatives are always needed, in every type and size of organization, because constant shifts in the global marketplace have become the norm and businesses, especially, must continually reengineer themselves or risk becoming obsolete. It seems that the neatly-organized Industrial Age business model, that most Westerners are familiar with, no longer produces the best results. This new Information Age demands a more agile approach. In a round about way, Kotter is urging business to become more like schools. After all, what is the learning process if not a change process? So it stands to reason that what is needed in business is not merely a sustained culture of change, but a sustained culture of on-the-job learning where employee development must be made the top priority.

For Detailed Information on Corporate Initiatives That Prioritize Employee Growth, Visit These Helpful Articles at Sloan Management Review:

References

Fredberg, T., & Pregmark, J. E. (2021). Organizational transformation: Handling the double-edged sword of urgency. Long Range Planning, 102091. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lrp.2021.102091

Kotter, J. P. (2012). Leading change. Harvard Business Review Press.

Northouse, P. G. (2019). Leadership: Theory and practice (8th ed.). Sage Publishing.

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