Change Management/Leadership
This distinguishes change management, the plan and structure, from change leadership, the human and emotional work of getting people to actually move, and insists you need both running at once.
Eight steps run left to right in one sequence - Kotter's structural spine for carrying a change from urgency through to habit.
Reach for this when…
- A change is 'on schedule' on the project plan but nobody has bought in.
- Leadership announced the change once and assumes that counts as done.
- Resistance is being read as stubbornness when it's actually loss.
How to run it
- Separate change management (structure) from change leadership (people).
- Use Kotter's eight steps as the structural spine.
- Map the human side: who loses what, and what needs to be grieved.
- Design communication that addresses both the technical and the human side.
- Find early adopters and build a guiding coalition.
- Make early wins visible before momentum fades.
A worked example
Situation. Salim Al-Balushi was merging two factory floors into one site for Muscat Textiles, a textile manufacturer in Muscat, Oman, and the plan looked clean on paper.
Applied. Workers weren't told why, and resisted. Salim went back to Kotter's first step, skipped the first time round, and built real urgency by showing the floor the export orders they were actually losing to competitors, then formed a coalition of floor supervisors before touching the schedule again.
Result. The merger finished with a fraction of the staff turnover the plant's previous change effort had cost it - people stayed and worked through it instead of walking out.
The catch
Kotter's steps read as linear and rarely run that way in practice - you'll cycle back to urgency and coalition-building more than once. And 'manage the human side' is easy to say, hard to do; it requires a leader willing to sit with people's anger and loss rather than route round it with another town hall.
Skipping step one - urgency - because it feels obvious to leadership is the most common way this fails.
Origin: John Kotter (structure); William Bridges (human transition side)