The Eight-Step Process of Creating Major Change
Step 1: Create a sense of urgency to provide people with a good reason for change. Talk about the market and competitive realities, potential crises and opportunities. Provide external evidence that change is necessary.
Step 2: Build a guiding team to lead the change effort. Identify the true change leaders at all levels of your organization, ensuring that you have a mix of people and skills. Encourage the group to work as a team and to lead by example.
Step 3: Get the vision right: Create a vision for change that elicits understanding and interest and develop strategies for achieving that vision. Keep the vision clear and concise, so that you can communicate it in five minutes.
Step 4: Communicate for buy-in: Keep communications about your vision and strategies simple and heartfelt. Your leaders must let the vision direct their own day-to-day actions.
Step 5: Empower employees at all levels to act on the vision. Remove entrenched obstacles, including people, structures and systems that undermine the vision. Clear the way for risk-taking and non-traditional ideas, activities and actions.
Step 6: Generate short-term wins, which are visible, unambiguous improvements that clearly relate to the change effort. Short-term wins validate the change effort and help build momentum. Recognize personnel involved in improvements.
Step 7: Don’t let up. Plan for bigger wins that reinforce change. Continue to focus on your shared purpose and on keeping urgency levels high. Recognize and reward personnel who are involved in improvements.
Step 8: Make the change permanent by anchoring it in your corporate culture. Articulate the connections between new behaviors and corporate success. Talk about progress and success stories. Recognize key members of your guiding coalition and create a plan to replace key leaders with successors who understand and support the change.
