How to make your next digital transformation project successful
Harvard Business School Professor John Kotter is widely considered as the leading expert on managing organizational change.
He argues that lasting change is only possible if leaders consider how people accept, engage with, and maintain it.
Kotter’s 8 steps for leading change projects are:
1) Establish a sense of urgency
You probably realized this yourself: Important but not urgent projects get deprioritized.
That’s why skilled change leaders ensure that people understand it’s urgent.
An easy way to do it is by showing how a competitor already implemented the new technology and is getting ahead every day we don’t take action.
2) Create a guiding coalition
You’ll have people who support your initiative, and some will oppose it. That’s unavoidable.
First, you must understand who falls in which camp. Then, encourage your supporters to help you implement and advocate for the change.
It’s essential to do this early on in the project because convincing naysayers doesn’t happen overnight.
3) Develop a vision & strategy
As a change leader, you don’t want to be in a position where you have to micromanage every aspect.
Instead, allow your guiding coalition to help you figure out better ways to achieve your goal. To do that, give them a clear sense of direction by formulating a vision and strategy for the project.
A common mistake: a vision that’s too broad. “Becoming the market leader.” doesn’t cut it. Better: “Becoming the market leader by offering the best quality at a premium price.”
4) Communicate the change vision
It’s not enough to have a meeting with all employees and think you did your job.
People need repetition to make a message stick. Especially if it’s a bold one.
Communicate across different channels until you feel people may start to get sick of hearing your spiel. That’s when you know you are getting there.
5) Empower broad-based action
At this stage, people fully understand what you want to do, why it matters, and why it’s urgent. Now you need to make sure people can run with it. Ask if there are any roadblocks - budget, time, knowledge.
An excellent way to get people to open up: “On a scale of 1-10, how confident are you you can implement your task by time x?”
Then follow-up: “What would it take to get it to a 10?” If you ask yes or no questions, people always say everything is fine. Asking for a range gives them room to think about what is missing.
6) Plan for & generate short-term wins
If everything is going according to plan, now people are moving. They are working hard to make your vision become a reality.
But they’ll only do that for so long. To ensure they don’t run out of steam, make sure they have quick wins.
How can you do that as the project leader? Break it down into small, achievable sub-tasks. If possible, move the easier to achieve ones to the beginning of the roadmap. That way, people see their efforts make a difference and stay motivated.
7) Consolidate gains & produce more change
Once your teams generate several quick wins, bring everyone together and show what has already been achieved.
Look for “halo effects”, meaning whether breakthroughs achieved by one team help other teams achieve theirs.
Once you find them, double down to capitalize on synergies.
8) Anchor the new approaches in the culture
Congratulations, you achieved your objectives and successfully implemented a new process or technology to make your team’s life easier and help the company achieve its goals.
But your job isn’t done yet. Many change initiatives fail because people fall back into old patterns, and all the progress is lost. To prevent that, you must anchor the change.
Keep communicating the positive impact it has. When new leaders join, make sure they become champions of the initiative. Finally, consider including the change in the annual performance assessment process of every employee. P&G, for example, included “learning from outside experts” as one of the metrics every leader is evaluated on.
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