Over the period one lesson that I learned is that change is imminent in every step of your career journey, it is not a rare event. As a leader you are responsible to sail your team to make your team successful in their change journey. Leadership during the change management process defines the success or failure of a team. You have to take the charge to lead and carefully drive a successful change instead of waiting for it to happen naturally. History is filled with names of the leaders who failed multiple times in sailing through the change and later blame the failure on the surroundings, their followers’ lack of motivation or incapability. This post is inspired from one of my favorite change management frameworks that is described by John P. Kotter in his book “Leading Change”. Once I was introduced to this framework, first I gave it a try on my very first change mission to transform an engineering team to agile culture. Results were amazing and very clear, since then it became my favorite framework in any change journey small or big. The eight stage process described by Kotter is captured in the diagram below. 

I like the simplicity and generic representation of the stages in this model. This simplicity makes it applicable in driving any scale of changes – a small few member team’s agile transformation to large organization level technology transformation to take private data center infrastructure from to public cloud. In this post I am briefly discussing the leadership aspects for driving the change; leaving the technical aspects for another future discussion.

Prepare – A successful change journey requires preparation that starts with establishing a sense of urgency. Sense of urgency is essential to get the needed co-operation and gain credibility for the proposed change. You also need to make sure that you are not a lonely traveler in your change journey. You need to form an influencer alliance group, whose members understand the current status-quo and are convinced of the need. This alliance is your partner in your journey and will be a catalyst. Once you are able to create a sense of urgency and form an influencer alliance for your journey, it is time to sit with your alliance partners to develop a vision and strategy. Vision and strategy document is the foundation of your change mission. This is also a guide where participants see their role and visualize the final picture.

Execute – Real power of a successful change journey is when most participants have a common understanding of direction and goals. You and your alliance need to reiterate the vision several times to make sure everyone receives the message. Even when everyone understands the vision but still the change mission has to overcome several layers of barriers. New skill training may be needed for team members, fixing the structure that is aligned with the goals, and confronting the resistance. Large changes take time, participants may feel exhausted. It is time to demonstrate visible, clear short term accomplishments to keep the motivation high and momentum going. 

Solidify – Once full momentum is going, time to go deep in dependencies that can pull away the changes. These could be cross-team inter-dependencies or even customers who are resistant to the change. Removing unnecessary dependencies is a must to have a long lasting change. Your job will not be done until new practices and actions are part of the culture shift across the board to make sure that these are new norms, not a temporary phenomenon. 

Change is hard, not everyone who participates in a change journey has the same pace and enthusiasm. As a leader, it is our responsibility to remove the roadblocks, clearly lay out the vision that participants in your change journey understand. Last thing to remember is that change is an ongoing process of life, once you finish your one change journey, the next one will be waiting for you.