Businesses need to change to keep being successful. It might sound like an easy task to change things, but in reality for a business it takes a lot of hard work from lots of people for it to work. So how do you go about it?

1. Managing Change: 8 Steps to Success

2. Why Change?
From time-to-time in business, you will go
through stages where “things aren’t working
like the used to” or “things are slowing
down”.
When that happens, change is needed. It
might sound like an easy task to change
things, but in reality for a business it takes a
lot of hard work from lots of people for it to
work. So how do you go about it?
“Changewillnotcome if
wewaitfor some other
person or some other
time.Weare theones
we'vebeenwaitingfor.
Weare thechangethat
weseek.”
–Barack Obama

3. John Kotter’s 8-Step Process for
Leading Change
For thirty years, research from professor
and author Dr John Kotter has revealed that
70% of business change efforts fail
because they are not implemented properly.
Kotter’s 8-step method to business change
has become one of the defacto standards in
making sure businesses are adaptable to
the ever-changing world to keep them
successful.

4. Kotter’s 8 Steps
1. Create a sense of urgency
2. Create the ‘guiding coalition’
3. Develop a change vision
4. Communicate the vision for buy-in
5. Empower broad-based action
6. Generate short-term wins
7. Don’t let up!
8. Make it stick

5. Create a sense of urgency
People can sometimes get stuck too much
into their comfort zones, lose their sense of
ambition and the opportunities they can
seize.
Create goals for change that don’t just
‘make sense’ to your colleagues, but
inspire them.
Make sure people are making progress
every single day to help change your
business, that they understand what input
their work is having, so they don’t feel like
‘busy fools’.

6. Develop a ‘change vision’
No one will buy into the changes
they make unless they know how
the future will be better from the
past.
Clarify how the changes you want
to make will have positive effects
on people moving forward.
This motivates people and helps
to create the ‘sense of urgency’
you need to implement change.

7. Create the ‘guiding coalition’
No person can single handedly
make change happen.
Build a group with enough
power to lead change, who
trust one another and have the
expertise and credibility in their
fields to ensure the changes
you want to implement are
carried through.

8. Communicate the vision for buy-in
The more people who buy-in to your vision,
the more chance you will successfully
change.
This doesn’t mean writing a single email to
the company, but constant communication
about how individual’s work is helping to
achieve the change vision.
Talk about what “we” are going to change
and why “we” need to do it. Keep it simple,
jargon-free and to the point.

9. Empower broad-based action
Make sure that you take away any obstacles
from letting people do their best work to help
your business change.
The more ‘extra’ stuff someone has to do
before they produce the results you need, the
longer and less likely the change will take
place.
These can be issues related to software you
use or the tasks set by managers, as
examples.

10. Generate short-term wins
The more successes you can
celebrate, the more of a drive people
have to make the ultimate end-goal
easier to achieve.
‘Real’ change can take a long time to
be fully implemented, that’s why the
smaller goals, relating to the overall
change effort, that people achieve
should be acknowledged.

11. Don’t let up!
There will always be
resistors to your efforts,
even when you start making
progress in changing things.
That’s why you have to
make sure to keep
communicating the change
vision, to celebrate the
small successes and keep
that sense of urgency alive.

12. Make it stick
Change takes time, it takes even longer
for that change to embed into the roots
of your business.
Find new ways to sustain the new
culture you have worked hard to build.
You will have to keep proving that new
ways achieve better results than the old
ways and reinforce this new way of
thinking with every new employee you
bring aboard.

13. A great business needs great people –
We recruit them
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