Title: The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People
Change Their Organizations
Authors: Kotter, John P.; Cohen, Dan S.
Subjects: Organizational Change
Call Number: 658.406 K87H 2012
ISBN: 9781422187333
Number Of Pages: 188 P
Book Description:
The Heart
of Change is your guide to helping people think and feel differently in order
to meet your shared goals. According to bestselling author and renowned
leadership expert John Kotter and coauthor Dan Cohen, this focus on connecting
with people’s emotions is what will spark the behavior change and actions that
lead to success. Now freshly designed, The Heart of Change is the engaging and
essential complement to Kotter’s worldwide bestseller Leading Change.
Building
off of Kotter’s revolutionary eight-step process, this book vividly illustrates
low large-scale change can work. With real life stories of people in
organizations, the authors show how teams and individuals get motivated and
activated to overcome obstacles to change-and produce spectacular results.
Kotter and Cohen argue that change initiatives often fail because leaders rely
too exclusively on data and analysis to get buy-in from their teams instead of
creatively showing or doing something that appeals to their emotions and
inspires them to spring into action. They call this the see-feel-change
dynamic, and it is crucial for the success of any true organizational
transformation.
Refreshingly
clear and eminently practical, The Heart of Change is required reading for
anyone facing the challenges inherent in leading change. (from the inside of
the book cover)
My Notes (The
following comes from the contents of the book)
The eight
steps covered in the book are: Increase Urgency, Build the Guiding Team, Get
the Vision Right, Communicate for Buy-In, Empower Action, Create Short-Term
Wins, Don’t Let Up, and Make Change Stick.
-Increase
Urgency: Raising a feeling of urgency so that people start telling each other
“we must do something” about the problems and opportunities. Reducing the
complacency, fear, and anger that prevent change from starting. What works:
Showing others the need for change with a compelling object that they can
actually see, touch, and feel; showing people valid and dramatic evidence from
outside the organization that demonstrates that change is required; looking
constantly for cheap and easy ways to reduce complacency; never underestimating
how much complacency, fear, and anger exists, even in good organization.
-Building
the Guiding Team: Helping pull together the right group of people with the
right characteristics and sufficient power to drive the change effort. Helping
them to behave with trust and emotional commitment to one another. What works: Showing
enthusiasm and commitment to help draw the right people into the group; modeling
the trust and teamwork needed in the group; structuring meeting formats fro the
guiding team so as to minimize frustration and increase trust; putting your
energy into step 1 if you cannot take on the step 2 challenge and if the right
people will not.
-Get the
Vision Right: Facilitating the movement beyond traditional analytical and
financial plans and budgets. Creating the right compelling vision to direct the
effort Helping the guiding team develop bold strategies for making bold visions
a reality. What works: Trying to see-literally-possible futures; visions that
are so clear that they can be articulated in on minute or written up on one
page; visions that are moving-such as a commitment to serving people;
strategies that are bold enough to make bold visions a reality; paying careful
attention to the strategic question of how quickly to introduce change.
-Communicate
for Buy-In: Sending clear, credible, and heartfelt messages about the direction
of change. Establishing genuine gut-level buy-in that shows up in how people
act. Using words, deeds, and new technologies to unclog communication channels
and overcome confusion and distrust. What works: Keeping communication simple
and heartfelt, not complex and technocratic; doing your homework before communicating,
especially to understand what people are feeling; speaking to anxieties,
confusion, anger, and distrust; ridding communication channels of junk so that
important messages can go through; using new technologies to help people see
the vision.
-Empower
Action: Removing barriers that block those who have genuinely embraced the
vision and strategies. Taking away sufficient obstacles in their organizations
and in their hearts so that they behave differently. What works: Finding
individuals with change experience who can bolster people’s self-confidence
with we-won-you-can-too anecdotes; recognition and reward systems that inspire,
promote optimism, and build self-confidence; feedback that can help people make
better vision-related decisions; retooling disempowering managers by giving
them new jobs that clearly show the need for change.
-Create
Short-Term Wins: Generating sufficient wins fast enough to diffuse cynicism,
pessimism, and skepticism. Building momentum. Making sure successes are
visible, unambiguous, and speak to what people deeply care about. What works:
Early wins that come fast; wins that are as visible as possible to as many
people as possible; wins that penetrate emotional defenses by being
unambiguous; wins that are meaningful to others-the more deeply meaningful the
better; early wins that speak to powerful players whose support you need and do
not yet have; wins that can be achieved cheaply and easily, even if they seem
small compared with the grand vision.
-Don’t Let
Up: Helping people create wave after wave of change until the vision is a
reality. Not allowing urgency to sag. Not ducking the more difficult parts of
the transformation, especially the bigger emotional barriers. Eliminating
needless work s you don’t exhaust yourself along the way. What works:
Aggressively ridding yourself o work that wears you down-tasks that were
relevant in the past but not now, tasks that can be delegated; looking
constantly for ways to keep urgency up; using new situations opportunistically
to launch the next wave of change; as always-show’em, show’em, show’em.
-Make
Change Stick: Ensuring that people continue to act in new ways, despite the
pull of tradition, by rooting behavior in reshaped organizational culture.
Using the employee orientation process, the promotions process, and the power
of emotion to enhance new group norms and shared values. What works: Not
stopping at step 7-it isn’t over until the changes have roots; using new
employee orientation to compellingly show recruits what the organization really
cares about; using the promotions process to place people who act according to
the new norms into influential and visible positions; telling vivid stories
over and over about the new organization, what it does, and why it succeed;
making absolutely sure you have the continuity of behavior and result that help
a new culture grow.
Through the
book, the author reinforces the importance of the cycle of see->feel->
change. Allowing the people to see problems, solutions, and futures provokes
deeper emotions inviting people to feel, instead of thinking on the surface
level. When emotionally charged and involved, people are more acceptable to
change, willing to change and committed to the change.
Personally,
I like the following in the book:
-Setting direction must come first and being the key player
(p26)
-A powerful guiding group is composed with 1)the right
people, and 2) demonstration of teamwork. Right people means: 1) with the
appropriate skills, 2) leadership capacity, 3) organizational credibility, and
4) connections to handle a specific kind of organization change (p46)
-A good question: Was that not the right thing to do? If you
spend all your life calculating what is safest, is it a good life? (p52)
-No vision issue today is bigger than the question of
efficiency versus some combination of innovation and customer service (p70)
-The experience of changing a job can be powerful. False
pride and a feeling that all’s well can be blown away. The experience can be
life changing-from being stuck in the past to leaping into the future (p104)
-Seeing someone else’s survival makes you feel stronger
(p113)
-One of the most powerful forms of information is feedback
on our own actions (p114)
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