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B
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Leading Change
Why Transformation Efforts Fail
by John P. Kotter
•
Included with this full-text

Harvard Business Review
article:
The Idea in Brief—the core idea
The Idea in Practice—putting the idea to work
1
Article Summary
2
Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail
A list of related materials, with annotations to guide further
exploration of the article’s ideas and applications
10
Further Reading
Leaders who successfully
transform businesses do eight

things right (and they do them
in the right order).
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B
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Leading Change

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The Idea in Brief The Idea in Practice
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Most major change initiatives—whether in-
tended to boost quality, improve culture, or
reverse a corporate death spiral—generate
only lukewarm results. Many fail miserably.
Why? Kotter maintains that too many
managers don’t realize transformation is a
process,
not an event. It advances through
stages that build on each other. And it
takes years. Pressured to accelerate the
process, managers skip stages. But short-
cuts never work.
Equally troubling, even highly capable
managers make critical mistakes—such as
declaring victory too soon. Result? Loss of
momentum, reversal of hard-won gains,
and devastation of the entire transforma-
tion effort.
By understanding the stages of change—
and the pitfalls unique to each stage—you
boost your chances of a successful transfor-
mation. The payoff? Your organization flexes
with tectonic shifts in competitors, markets,
and technologies—leaving rivals far behind.

To give your transformation effort the best chance of
succeeding, take the right actions at each
stage—and avoid common pitfalls.
Stage Actions Needed Pitfalls
Establish a
sense of
urgency
• Examine market and competitive reali-
ties for potential crises and untapped
opportunities.
• Convince at least 75% of your man-
agers that the status quo is more dan-
gerous than the unknown.
• Underestimating the difficulty of driving
people from their comfort zones
• Becoming paralyzed by risks
Form a pow-
erful guiding
coalition
• Assemble a group with shared commit-
ment and enough power to lead the
change effort.
• Encourage them to work as a team
outside the normal hierarchy.
• No prior experience in teamwork at the
top

• Relegating team leadership to an HR,
quality, or strategic-planning executive
rather than a senior line manager
Create a
vision
• Create a vision to direct the change effort.
• Develop strategies for realizing that vision.
• Presenting a vision that’s too complicat-
ed or vague to be communicated in five
minutes
Communicate
the vision
• Use every vehicle possible to commu-
nicate the new vision and strategies for
achieving it.
• Teach new behaviors by the example of
the guiding coalition.
• Undercommunicating the vision
• Behaving in ways antithetical to the
vision
Empower
others to act
on the vision
• Remove or alter systems or structures

undermining the vision.
• Encourage risk taking and nontradition-
al ideas, activities, and actions.
• Failing to remove powerful individuals
who resist the change effort
Plan for and
create short-
term wins
• Define and engineer visible perform-
ance improvements.
• Recognize and reward employees con-
tributing to those improvements.
• Leaving short-term successes up to
chance
• Failing to score successes early enough
(12-24 months into the change effort)
Consolidate
improve-
ments and
produce
more change
• Use increased credibility from early
wins to change systems, structures, and
policies undermining the vision.
• Hire, promote, and develop employees
who can implement the vision.

• Reinvigorate the change process with
new projects and change agents.
• Declaring victory too soon—with the
first performance improvement
• Allowing resistors to convince “troops”
that the war has been won
Institutionalize
new
approaches
• Articulate connections between new
behaviors and corporate success.
• Create leadership development and
succession plans consistent with the
new approach.
• Not creating new social norms and
shared values consistent with changes
• Promoting people into leadership posi-
tions who don’t personify the new
approach
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Leading Change
by John P. Kotter
harvard business review • january 2007 page 2
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Leaders who successfully transform businesses do eight things
right
(and they do them in the right order).
Editor’s Note:
Guiding change may be the ulti-
mate test of a leader—no business survives over
the long term if it can’t reinvent itself. But,
human nature being what it is, fundamental
change is often resisted mightily by the people it

most affects: those in the trenches of the busi-
ness. Thus, leading change is both absolutely es-
sential and incredibly difficult.
Perhaps nobody understands the anatomy
of organizational change better than retired
Harvard Business School professor John P.
Kotter. This article, originally published in the
spring of 1995, previewed Kotter’s 1996 book
Leading Change
. It outlines eight critical suc-
cess factors—from establishing a sense of ex-
traordinary urgency, to creating short-term
wins, to changing the culture (“the way we do
things around here”). It will feel familiar when
you read it, in part because Kotter’s vocabulary
has entered the lexicon and in part because it
contains the kind of home truths that we recog-
nize, immediately, as if we’d always known
them. A decade later, his work on leading
change remains definitive.
Over the past decade, I have watched more
than 100 companies try to remake themselves
into significantly better competitors. They
have included large organizations (Ford) and
small ones (Landmark Communications),
companies based in the United States (Gen-
eral Motors) and elsewhere (British Airways),
corporations that were on their knees (Eastern
Airlines), and companies that were earning

good money (Bristol-Myers Squibb). These ef-
forts have gone under many banners: total
quality management, reengineering, rightsiz-
ing, restructuring, cultural change, and turn-
around. But, in almost every case, the basic
goal has been the same: to make fundamental
changes in how business is conducted in order
to help cope with a new, more challenging
market environment.
A few of these corporate change efforts have
been very successful. A few have been utter
failures. Most fall somewhere in between, with
a distinct tilt toward the lower end of the scale.
The lessons that can be drawn are interesting
and will probably be relevant to even more or-
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ganizations in the increasingly competitive
business environment of the coming decade.
The most general lesson to be learned from
the more successful cases is that the change
process goes through a series of phases that, in
total, usually require a considerable length of
time. Skipping steps creates only the illusion of
speed and never produces a satisfying result. A
second very general lesson is that critical mis-
takes in any of the phases can have a devastat-
ing impact, slowing momentum and negating
hard-won gains. Perhaps because we have rela-
tively little experience in renewing organiza-
tions, even very capable people often make at
least one big error.

Error 1: Not Establishing a Great
Enough Sense of Urgency
Most successful change efforts begin when
some individuals or some groups start to look
hard at a company’s competitive situation,
market position, technological trends, and fi-
nancial performance. They focus on the po-
tential revenue drop when an important
patent expires, the five-year trend in declining
margins in a core business, or an emerging
market that everyone seems to be ignoring.
They then find ways to communicate this in-
formation broadly and dramatically, especially
with respect to crises, potential crises, or great
opportunities that are very timely. This first
step is essential because just getting a transfor-
mation program started requires the aggres-
sive cooperation of many individuals. Without
motivation, people won’t help, and the effort
goes nowhere.
Compared with other steps in the change
process, phase one can sound easy. It is not.
Well over 50% of the companies I have
watched fail in this first phase. What are the
reasons for that failure? Sometimes executives
underestimate how hard it can be to drive peo-
ple out of their comfort zones. Sometimes they
grossly overestimate how successful they have
already been in increasing urgency. Sometimes
they lack patience: “Enough with the prelimi-
naries; let’s get on with it.” In many cases, exec-
utives become paralyzed by the downside pos-

sibilities. They worry that employees with
seniority will become defensive, that morale
will drop, that events will spin out of control,
that short-term business results will be jeopar-
dized, that the stock will sink, and that they
will be blamed for creating a crisis.
A paralyzed senior management often comes
from having too many managers and not
enough leaders. Management’s mandate is to
minimize risk and to keep the current system
operating. Change, by definition, requires cre-
ating a new system, which in turn always de-
mands leadership. Phase one in a renewal
process typically goes nowhere until enough
real leaders are promoted or hired into senior-
level jobs.
Transformations often begin, and begin
well, when an organization has a new head
who is a good leader and who sees the need for
a major change. If the renewal target is the en-
tire company, the CEO is key. If change is
needed in a division, the division general man-
ager is key. When these individuals are not new
leaders, great leaders, or change champions,
phase one can be a huge challenge.
Bad business results are both a blessing and
a curse in the first phase. On the positive side,
losing money does catch people’s attention.
But it also gives less maneuvering room. With
good business results, the opposite is true: Con-
vincing people of the need for change is much
harder, but you have more resources to help
make changes.

But whether the starting point is good per-
formance or bad, in the more successful cases I
have witnessed, an individual or a group al-
ways facilitates a frank discussion of poten-
tially unpleasant facts about new competition,
shrinking margins, decreasing market share,
flat earnings, a lack of revenue growth, or
other relevant indices of a declining competi-
tive position. Because there seems to be an al-
most universal human tendency to shoot the
bearer of bad news, especially if the head of
the organization is not a change champion, ex-
ecutives in these companies often rely on out-
siders to bring unwanted information. Wall
Street analysts, customers, and consultants can
all be helpful in this regard. The purpose of all
this activity, in the words of one former CEO of
a large European company, is “to make the sta-
tus quo seem more dangerous than launching
into the unknown.”
In a few of the most successful cases, a group
has manufactured a crisis. One CEO deliber-
ately engineered the largest accounting loss in
the company’s history, creating huge pressures
from Wall Street in the process. One division
president commissioned first-ever customer
satisfaction surveys, knowing full well that the
Now retired,
John P. Kotter

was the
Konosuke Matsushita Professor of
Leadership at Harvard Business School
in Boston.
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results would be terrible. He then made these
findings public. On the surface, such moves can
look unduly risky. But there is also risk in play-
ing it too safe: When the urgency rate is not
pumped up enough, the transformation pro-
cess cannot succeed, and the long-term future
of the organization is put in jeopardy.
When is the urgency rate high enough?
From what I have seen, the answer is when
about 75% of a company’s management is hon-
estly convinced that business as usual is totally
unacceptable. Anything less can produce very
serious problems later on in the process.
Error 2: Not Creating a Powerful
Enough Guiding Coalition
Major renewal programs often start with just
one or two people. In cases of successful trans-
formation efforts, the leadership coalition
grows and grows over time. But whenever
some minimum mass is not achieved early in
the effort, nothing much worthwhile happens.

It is often said that major change is impos-
sible unless the head of the organization is an
active supporter. What I am talking about
goes far beyond that. In successful transfor-
mations, the chairman or president or divi-
sion general manager, plus another five or
15 or 50 people, come together and develop
a shared commitment to excellent perfor-
mance through renewal. In my experience,
this group never includes all of the company’s
most senior executives because some people
just won’t buy in, at least not at first. But in
the most successful cases, the coalition is
always pretty powerful—in terms of titles,
EIGHT STEPS TO TRANSFORMING
YOUR ORGANIZATION
Establishing a Sense of Urgency
• Examining market and competitive realities
• Identifying and discussing crises, potential crises, or major
opportunities
Forming a Powerful Guiding Coalition
• Assembling a group with enough power to lead the change
effort
• Encouraging the group to work together as a team
Creating a Vision
• Creating a vision to help direct the change effort
• Developing strategies for achieving that vision
Communicating the Vision

• Using every vehicle possible to communicate the new vision
and strategies
• Teaching new behaviors by the example of the guiding
coalition
Empowering Others to Act on the Vision
• Getting rid of obstacles to change
• Changing systems or structures that seriously undermine the
vision
• Encouraging risk taking and nontraditional ideas, activities,
and actions
Planning for and Creating Short-Term Wins
• Planning for visible performance improvements
• Creating those improvements
• Recognizing and rewarding employees involved in the
improvements
Consolidating Improvements and Producing Still More Change
• Using increased credibility to change systems, structures, and
policies that
don’t fit the vision
• Hiring, promoting, and developing employees who can
implement the vision
• Reinvigorating the process with new projects, themes, and
change agents
Institutionalizing New Approaches
• Articulating the connections between the new behaviors and
corporate

success
• Developing the means to ensure leadership development and
succession
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
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information and expertise, reputations, and
relationships.
In both small and large organizations, a suc-
cessful guiding team may consist of only three
to five people during the first year of a renewal
effort. But in big companies, the coalition
needs to grow to the 20 to 50 range before
much progress can be made in phase three and
beyond. Senior managers always form the
core of the group. But sometimes you find
board members, a representative from a key
customer, or even a powerful union leader.

Because the guiding coalition includes mem-
bers who are not part of senior management,
it tends to operate outside of the normal hier-
archy by definition. This can be awkward, but
it is clearly necessary. If the existing hierarchy
were working well, there would be no need for
a major transformation. But since the current
system is not working, reform generally de-
mands activity outside of formal boundaries,
expectations, and protocol.
A high sense of urgency within the manage-
rial ranks helps enormously in putting a guid-
ing coalition together. But more is usually re-
quired. Someone needs to get these people
together, help them develop a shared assess-
ment of their company’s problems and oppor-
tunities, and create a minimum level of trust
and communication. Off-site retreats, for two
or three days, are one popular vehicle for ac-
complishing this task. I have seen many groups
of five to 35 executives attend a series of these
retreats over a period of months.
Companies that fail in phase two usually un-
derestimate the difficulties of producing change
and thus the importance of a powerful guiding
coalition. Sometimes they have no history of
teamwork at the top and therefore undervalue
the importance of this type of coalition. Some-
times they expect the team to be led by a staff
executive from human resources, quality, or
strategic planning instead of a key line man-
ager. No matter how capable or dedicated the
staff head, groups without strong line leader-

ship never achieve the power that is required.
Efforts that don’t have a powerful enough
guiding coalition can make apparent progress
for a while. But, sooner or later, the opposition
gathers itself together and stops the change.
Error 3: Lacking a Vision
In every successful transformation effort that I
have seen, the guiding coalition develops a
picture of the future that is relatively easy to
communicate and appeals to customers, stock-
holders, and employees. A vision always goes
beyond the numbers that are typically found
in five-year plans. A vision says something that
helps clarify the direction in which an organi-
zation needs to move. Sometimes the first
draft comes mostly from a single individual. It
is usually a bit blurry, at least initially. But
after the coalition works at it for three or five
or even 12 months, something much better
emerges through their tough analytical think-
ing and a little dreaming. Eventually, a strat-
egy for achieving that vision is also developed.
In one midsize European company, the first
pass at a vision contained two-thirds of the
basic ideas that were in the final product. The
concept of global reach was in the initial ver-
sion from the beginning. So was the idea of be-
coming preeminent in certain businesses. But
one central idea in the final version—getting

out of low value-added activities—came only
after a series of discussions over a period of
several months.
Without a sensible vision, a transformation
effort can easily dissolve into a list of confus-
ing and incompatible projects that can take
the organization in the wrong direction or
nowhere at all. Without a sound vision, the
reengineering project in the accounting de-
partment, the new 360-degree performance
appraisal from the human resources depart-
ment, the plant’s quality program, the cul-
tural change project in the sales force will not
add up in a meaningful way.
In failed transformations, you often find
plenty of plans, directives, and programs but
no vision. In one case, a company gave out
four-inch-thick notebooks describing its change
effort. In mind-numbing detail, the books
spelled out procedures, goals, methods, and
deadlines. But nowhere was there a clear and
compelling statement of where all this was
leading. Not surprisingly, most of the employ-
ees with whom I talked were either confused
or alienated. The big, thick books did not rally
them together or inspire change. In fact, they
probably had just the opposite effect.
In a few of the less successful cases that I
have seen, management had a sense of direc-
tion, but it was too complicated or blurry to
be useful. Recently, I asked an executive in a
midsize company to describe his vision and re-
ceived in return a barely comprehensible 30-

If you can’t communicate
the vision to someone in
five minutes or less and
get a reaction that
signifies both
understanding and
interest, you are not
done.
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minute lecture. Buried in his answer were the
basic elements of a sound vision. But they were
buried—deeply.
A useful rule of thumb: If you can’t commu-
nicate the vision to someone in five minutes or
less and get a reaction that signifies both un-
derstanding and interest, you are not yet done
with this phase of the transformation process.
Error 4: Undercommunicating the
Vision by a Factor of Ten
I’ve seen three patterns with respect to com-
munication, all very common. In the first, a

group actually does develop a pretty good
transformation vision and then proceeds to
communicate it by holding a single meeting or
sending out a single communication. Having
used about 0.0001% of the yearly intracom-
pany communication, the group is startled
when few people seem to understand the new
approach. In the second pattern, the head of
the organization spends a considerable amount
of time making speeches to employee groups,
but most people still don’t get it (not surpris-
ing, since vision captures only 0.0005% of the
total yearly communication). In the third pat-
tern, much more effort goes into newsletters
and speeches, but some very visible senior ex-
ecutives still behave in ways that are antitheti-
cal to the vision. The net result is that cynicism
among the troops goes up, while belief in the
communication goes down.
Transformation is impossible unless hun-
dreds or thousands of people are willing to
help, often to the point of making short-term
sacrifices. Employees will not make sacrifices,
even if they are unhappy with the status quo,
unless they believe that useful change is possi-
ble. Without credible communication, and a
lot of it, the hearts and minds of the troops are
never captured.
This fourth phase is particularly challenging
if the short-term sacrifices include job losses.
Gaining understanding and support is tough
when downsizing is a part of the vision. For
this reason, successful visions usually include
new growth possibilities and the commitment

to treat fairly anyone who is laid off.
Executives who communicate well incorpo-
rate messages into their hour-by-hour activi-
ties. In a routine discussion about a business
problem, they talk about how proposed solu-
tions fit (or don’t fit) into the bigger picture. In
a regular performance appraisal, they talk
about how the employee’s behavior helps or
undermines the vision. In a review of a divi-
sion’s quarterly performance, they talk not
only about the numbers but also about how
the division’s executives are contributing to the
transformation. In a routine Q&A with em-
ployees at a company facility, they tie their an-
swers back to renewal goals.
In more successful transformation efforts,
executives use all existing communication
channels to broadcast the vision. They turn
boring, unread company newsletters into lively
articles about the vision. They take ritualistic,
tedious quarterly management meetings and
turn them into exciting discussions of the
transformation. They throw out much of the
company’s generic management education
and replace it with courses that focus on busi-
ness problems and the new vision. The guiding
principle is simple: Use every possible channel,
especially those that are being wasted on non-
essential information.
Perhaps even more important, most of the
executives I have known in successful cases of
major change learn to “walk the talk.” They

consciously attempt to become a living symbol
of the new corporate culture. This is often not
easy. A 60-year-old plant manager who has
spent precious little time over 40 years think-
ing about customers will not suddenly behave
in a customer-oriented way. But I have wit-
nessed just such a person change, and change a
great deal. In that case, a high level of urgency
helped. The fact that the man was a part of the
guiding coalition and the vision-creation team
also helped. So did all the communication,
which kept reminding him of the desired be-
havior, and all the feedback from his peers and
subordinates, which helped him see when he
was not engaging in that behavior.
Communication comes in both words and
deeds, and the latter are often the most power-
ful form. Nothing undermines change more
than behavior by important individuals that is
inconsistent with their words.
Error 5: Not Removing Obstacles to
the New Vision
Successful transformations begin to involve
large numbers of people as the process
progresses. Employees are emboldened to try
new approaches, to develop new ideas, and to
provide leadership. The only constraint is that
the actions fit within the broad parameters of

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the overall vision. The more people involved,
the better the outcome.
To some degree, a guiding coalition empow-
ers others to take action simply by successfully
communicating the new direction. But com-
munication is never sufficient by itself. Re-
newal also requires the removal of obstacles.
Too often, an employee understands the new
vision and wants to help make it happen, but
an elephant appears to be blocking the path.
In some cases, the elephant is in the person’s
head, and the challenge is to convince the indi-
vidual that no external obstacle exists. But in
most cases, the blockers are very real.
Sometimes the obstacle is the organizational
structure: Narrow job categories can seriously
undermine efforts to increase productivity
or make it very difficult even to think
about customers. Sometimes compensation
or performance-appraisal systems make peo-
ple choose between the new vision and their
own self-interest. Perhaps worst of all are bosses
who refuse to change and who make demands
that are inconsistent with the overall effort.
One company began its transformation pro-
cess with much publicity and actually made
good progress through the fourth phase. Then
the change effort ground to a halt because the
officer in charge of the company’s largest divi-
sion was allowed to undermine most of the
new initiatives. He paid lip service to the pro-
cess but did not change his behavior or encour-
age his managers to change. He did not reward

the unconventional ideas called for in the vi-
sion. He allowed human resource systems to
remain intact even when they were clearly in-
consistent with the new ideals. I think the of-
ficer’s motives were complex. To some degree,
he did not believe the company needed major
change. To some degree, he felt personally threat-
ened by all the change. To some degree, he was
afraid that he could not produce both change
and the expected operating profit. But despite
the fact that they backed the renewal effort,
the other officers did virtually nothing to stop
the one blocker. Again, the reasons were com-
plex. The company had no history of confront-
ing problems like this. Some people were afraid
of the officer. The CEO was concerned that he
might lose a talented executive. The net result
was disastrous. Lower-level managers concluded
that senior management had lied to them
about their commitment to renewal, cynicism
grew, and the whole effort collapsed.
In the first half of a transformation, no orga-
nization has the momentum, power, or time to
get rid of all obstacles. But the big ones must
be confronted and removed. If the blocker is a
person, it is important that he or she be
treated fairly and in a way that is consistent
with the new vision. Action is essential, both
to empower others and to maintain the credi-
bility of the change effort as a whole.
Error 6: Not Systematically Planning
for, and Creating, Short-Term Wins

Real transformation takes time, and a renewal
effort risks losing momentum if there are no
short-term goals to meet and celebrate. Most
people won’t go on the long march unless they
see compelling evidence in 12 to 24 months
that the journey is producing expected results.
Without short-term wins, too many people
give up or actively join the ranks of those peo-
ple who have been resisting change.
One to two years into a successful transfor-
mation effort, you find quality beginning to go
up on certain indices or the decline in net in-
come stopping. You find some successful new
product introductions or an upward shift in
market share. You find an impressive produc-
tivity improvement or a statistically higher cus-
tomer satisfaction rating. But whatever the
case, the win is unambiguous. The result is not
just a judgment call that can be discounted by
those opposing change.
Creating short-term wins is different from
hoping for short-term wins. The latter is pas-
sive, the former active. In a successful transfor-
mation, managers actively look for ways to ob-
tain clear performance improvements, establish
goals in the yearly planning system, achieve
the objectives, and reward the people involved
with recognition, promotions, and even money.
For example, the guiding coalition at a U.S.
manufacturing company produced a highly
visible and successful new product introduc-
tion about 20 months after the start of its re-
newal effort. The new product was selected

about six months into the effort because it met
multiple criteria: It could be designed and
launched in a relatively short period, it could
be handled by a small team of people who
were devoted to the new vision, it had upside
potential, and the new product-development
team could operate outside the established de-
partmental structure without practical prob-
lems. Little was left to chance, and the win
July 2016.
Leading Change
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OF
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boosted the credibility of the renewal process.
Managers often complain about being forced
to produce short-term wins, but I’ve found that
pressure can be a useful element in a change
effort. When it becomes clear to people that
major change will take a long time, urgency
levels can drop. Commitments to produce
short-term wins help keep the urgency level up
and force detailed analytical thinking that can
clarify or revise visions.
Error 7: Declaring Victory Too Soon
After a few years of hard work, managers may
be tempted to declare victory with the first
clear performance improvement. While cele-
brating a win is fine, declaring the war won
can be catastrophic. Until changes sink deeply
into a company’s culture, a process that can
take five to ten years, new approaches are frag-
ile and subject to regression.

In the recent past, I have watched a dozen
change efforts operate under the reengineer-
ing theme. In all but two cases, victory was de-
clared and the expensive consultants were paid
and thanked when the first major project was
completed after two to three years. Within two
more years, the useful changes that had been
introduced slowly disappeared. In two of the
ten cases, it’s hard to find any trace of the re-
engineering work today.
Over the past 20 years, I’ve seen the same
sort of thing happen to huge quality projects,
organizational development efforts, and more.
Typically, the problems start early in the pro-
cess: The urgency level is not intense enough,
the guiding coalition is not powerful enough,
and the vision is not clear enough. But it is the
premature victory celebration that kills mo-
mentum. And then the powerful forces associ-
ated with tradition take over.
Ironically, it is often a combination of change
initiators and change resistors that creates the
premature victory celebration. In their enthu-
siasm over a clear sign of progress, the initia-
tors go overboard. They are then joined by re-
sistors, who are quick to spot any opportunity
to stop change. After the celebration is over,
the resistors point to the victory as a sign that
the war has been won and the troops should
be sent home. Weary troops allow themselves
to be convinced that they won. Once home,
the foot soldiers are reluctant to climb back on
the ships. Soon thereafter, change comes to a

halt, and tradition creeps back in.
Instead of declaring victory, leaders of suc-
cessful efforts use the credibility afforded by
short-term wins to tackle even bigger prob-
lems. They go after systems and structures that
are not consistent with the transformation vi-
sion and have not been confronted before.
They pay great attention to who is promoted,
who is hired, and how people are developed.
They include new reengineering projects that
are even bigger in scope than the initial ones.
They understand that renewal efforts take not
months but years. In fact, in one of the most
successful transformations that I have ever
seen, we quantified the amount of change that
occurred each year over a seven-year period.
On a scale of one (low) to ten (high), year one
received a two, year two a four, year three a
three, year four a seven, year five an eight, year
six a four, and year seven a two. The peak came
in year five, fully 36 months after the first set
of visible wins.
Error 8: Not Anchoring Changes in
the Corporation’s Culture
In the final analysis, change sticks when it be-
comes “the way we do things around here,”
when it seeps into the bloodstream of the cor-
porate body. Until new behaviors are rooted in
social norms and shared values, they are sub-
ject to degradation as soon as the pressure for
change is removed.

Two factors are particularly important in in-
stitutionalizing change in corporate culture.
The first is a conscious attempt to show people
how the new approaches, behaviors, and atti-
tudes have helped improve performance.
When people are left on their own to make
the connections, they sometimes create very
inaccurate links. For example, because results
improved while charismatic Harry was boss,
the troops link his mostly idiosyncratic style
with those results instead of seeing how their
own improved customer service and productiv-
ity were instrumental. Helping people see the
right connections requires communication. In-
deed, one company was relentless, and it paid
off enormously. Time was spent at every major
management meeting to discuss why perfor-
mance was increasing. The company news-
paper ran article after article showing how
changes had boosted earnings.
The second factor is taking sufficient time
to make sure that the next generation of top
management really does personify the new
After a few years of hard
work, managers may be
tempted to declare
victory with the first
clear performance

improvement. While
celebrating a win is fine,
declaring the war won
can be catastrophic.
July 2016.
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approach. If the requirements for promotion
don’t change, renewal rarely lasts. One bad
succession decision at the top of an organiza-
tion can undermine a decade of hard work.
Poor succession decisions are possible when
boards of directors are not an integral part of
the renewal effort. In at least three instances I
have seen, the champion for change was the
retiring executive, and although his successor
was not a resistor, he was not a change cham-
pion. Because the boards did not understand
the transformations in any detail, they could
not see that their choices were not good fits.
The retiring executive in one case tried unsuc-
cessfully to talk his board into a less seasoned
candidate who better personified the transfor-
mation. In the other two cases, the CEOs did
not resist the boards’ choices, because they
felt the transformation could not be undone
by their successors. They were wrong. Within
two years, signs of renewal began to disap-
pear at both companies.
• • •

There are still more mistakes that people
make, but these eight are the big ones. I realize
that in a short article everything is made to
sound a bit too simplistic. In reality, even
successful change efforts are messy and full
of surprises. But just as a relatively simple vi-
sion is needed to guide people through a
major change, so a vision of the change pro-
cess can reduce the error rate. And fewer er-
rors can spell the difference between success
and failure.
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July 2016.
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Leading Change
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page 10
Further Reading
A R T I C L E S
Building Your Company’s Vision
by James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras
September–October 1996
Product no. 96501
Collins and Porras describe the glue that
holds a change effort together. Great compa-
nies have a clear sense of why they exist—
their core ideology—and where they want
to go—their envisioned future. The mecha-
nism for getting there is a BHAG (Big, Hairy,
Audacious Goal), which typically takes 10 to
30 years to accomplish. The company’s busi-

ness, strategies, and even its culture may
change, but its core ideology remains un-
changed. At every step in this long process,
the leader’s key task is to create alignment
with the vision of the company’s future, so
that regardless of the twists and turns in the
journey, the organizational commitment to
the goal remains strong.
Successful Change Programs Begin with
Results
by Robert H. Schaffer and Harvey A. Thomson
January–February 1992
Product no. 92108
Although a change initiative is a process, that
doesn’t mean process issues should be the
primary concern. Most corporate change
programs have a negligible impact on opera-
tional and financial performance because
management focuses on the activities, not
the results. By contrast, results-driven im-
provement programs seek to achieve spe-
cific, measurable improvements within a
few months.

B O O K S
The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of
How People Change Their Organizations
by John P. Kotter and Dan S. Cohen
Harvard Business School Press
2002
Product no. 2549
This book is organized around Kotter’s eight-
stage change process, and reveals the results
of his research in over 100 organizations in
the midst of large-scale change. Although
most organizations believe that change hap-
pens by making people think differently, the
authors say that the key lies more in making
them feel differently. They introduce a new
dynamic—“see-feel-change”—that sparks
and fuels action by showing people potent
reasons for change that charge their emo-
tions. The book offers tips and tools to you
apply to your own organization.
Leading Change
by John P. Kotter
Harvard Business School Press
1996
Product no. 7471

This book expands upon the article about why
transformation efforts fail. Kotter addresses
each of eight major stages of a change initia-
tive in sequence, highlighting the key activities
in each, and providing object lessons about
where companies often go astray.
July 2016.
=itemdetail&referral=4320&id=96501
mailto:[email protected]
HBR.ORG June 2012
reprinT r1206C
Spotlight on leaderShip

How Managers
Become Leaders
the seven seismic shifts of perspective and
responsibility by Michael D. Watkins
July 2016.
http://hbr.org
http://hbr.org/search/R1206C
artwork adam ekberg
Country Road, 2005
Ink-jet print
Spotlight
Spotlight on LeadershIp
July 2016.
Michael d. watkins
is a cofounder of Genesis
advisers, a leadership

development firm special-
izing in onboarding and
transition acceleration, and
a professor at IMd. he is the
author of The First 90 Days
and Your Next Move (both
from harvard Business
press).
How Managers
Become Leaders
the seven seismic shifts of
perspective and responsibility
by Michael D. Watkins
June 2012 harvard Business review 3
For artIcLe reprInts caLL 800-988-0886 or 617-783-7500, or
vIsIt hbr.org
July 2016.
http://hbr.org
H
arald (not his real name) is a high-
potential leader with 15 years of
experience at a leading European
chemical company. He started as
an assistant product manager in

the plastics unit and was quickly transferred to Hong
Kong to help set up the unit’s new Asian business
center. As sales there soared, he soon won a promo-
tion to sales manager. Three years later he returned to
Europe as the marketing and sales director for Europe,
the Middle East, and Africa, overseeing a group of 80
professionals. Continuing his string of successes, he
was promoted to vice president of marketing and
sales for the polyethy lene division, responsible for
several lines of products, related services, and a staff
of nearly 200.
All of Harald’s hard work culminated in his ap-
pointment as the head of the company’s plastic res-
ins unit, a business with more than 3,000 employees
worldwide. Quite intentionally, the company had as-
signed him to run a small but thriving business with
a strong team. The idea was to give him the opportu-
nity to move beyond managing sales and marketing,
get his arms around an entire business, learn what it
meant to head up a unit with the help of his more-
experienced team, and take his leadership skills to
the next level in a situation free from complicating
problems or crises. The setup seemed perfect, but a
few months into the new position, Harald was strug-
gling mightily.
Like Harald, many rising stars trip when they shift
from leading a function to leading an enterprise and
for the first time taking responsibility for a P&L and
oversight of executives across corporate functions. It
truly is different at the top. To find out how, I took an
in-depth look at this critical turning point, conduct-
ing an extensive series of interviews with more than

40 executives, including managers who had devel-
oped high-potential talent, senior HR professionals,
and individuals who had recently made the move to
enterprise leadership for the first time.
What I found is that to make the transition suc-
cessfully, executives must navigate a tricky set of
changes in their leadership focus and skills, which
I call the seven seismic shifts. They must learn to
move from specialist to generalist, analyst to inte-
grator, tactician to strategist, bricklayer to architect,
problem solver to agenda setter, warrior to diplomat,
and supporting cast member to lead role. Like so
many of his peers, Harald had trouble negotiating
most of these shifts. To see what makes them so dif-
ficult, let’s follow him through each of them, as he
confronts unnerving surprises, makes unwarranted
assumptions, encounters entirely new demands on
his time and imagination, makes decisions in igno-
rance, and learns from his mistakes.
Specialist to generalist
Harald’s immediate challenge was shifting from
leading a single function to overseeing the full set of
business functions. In his first couple of months, this
shift left him feeling disoriented and less confident
in his ability to make good judgments. And so he fell
SpecialiSt to
generaliSt
Understand the mental
models, tools, and terms
used in key business func-
tions and develop templates
for evaluating the leaders of
those functions.

analySt to
integrator
Integrate the collective
knowledge of cross-
functional teams and make
appropriate trade-offs to
solve complex organiza-
tional problems.
tactician
to StrategiSt
Shift fluidly between the
details and the larger
picture, perceive important
patterns in complex envi-
ronments, and anticipate
and influence the reactions
of key external players.
all the shifts a function head
must make when first be-
coming an enterprise leader
involve learning new skills
and cultivating new mind-
sets. here are the shifts
and what each requires
executives to do:
the Seven
Seismic
Shifts
H
4 harvard Business review June 2012

copyrIGht © 2012 harvard BusIness schooL puBLIshInG
corporatIon. aLL rIGhts reserved.
July 2016.
into a classic trap—overmanaging the function he
knew well and undermanaging the others. Fortu-
nately for Harald, this became crystal clear when his
vice president of HR gave him some blunt feedback
about his relationship with his sales and marketing
VP: “You are driving Claire crazy. You need to give
her some space.”
Harald’s tendency to stay in his functional
comfort zone is an understandable reaction to the
stresses of moving up to a much broader role. It
would be wonderful if newly appointed enterprise
leaders were world-class experts in all business func-
tions, but of course they never are. In some instances
they have gained experience by rotating through
various functions or working on cross-functional
projects, which certainly helps. (See the sidebar
“How to Develop Strong Enterprise Leaders.”) But
the reality is that the move to enterprise leadership
always requires executives who’ve been specialists

to quickly turn into generalists who know enough
about all the functions to run their businesses.
What is “enough”? Enterprise leaders must be
able to (1) make decisions that are good for the busi-
ness as a whole and (2) evaluate the talent on their
teams. To do both they need to recognize that busi-
ness functions are distinct managerial subcultures,
each with its own mental models and language. Ef-
fective leaders understand the different ways that
professionals in finance, marketing, operations, HR,
and R&D approach business problems, and the vari-
ous tools (discounted cash flow, customer segmenta-
tion, process flow, succession planning, stage gates,
and the like) that each discipline applies. Leaders
must be able to speak the language of all the func-
tions and translate for them when necessary. And
critically, leaders must know the right questions to
ask and the right metrics for evaluating and recruit-
ing people to manage areas in which they them-
selves are not experts.
The good news for Harald was that, in addition
to assigning him to a high-performing unit, his com-
pany had strong systems in place for evaluating and
developing talent in key functions. These included
well-crafted systems for performance reviews and
360-degree feedback, and for collecting input from
corporate functions. His heads of finance and HR,
for instance, while reporting directly to him, also
had dotted-line reporting relationships with their
respective corporate departments, which assisted
Harald with their evaluation and development. So
he had plenty of resources to help him understand
what “excellence” meant for each function.

idea in brief
bricklayer
to architect
Understand how to analyze
and design organizational
systems so that strategy,
structure, operating models,
and skill bases fit together
effectively and efficiently, and
harness this understanding to
make needed organizational
changes.
probleM Solver to
agenda Setter
Define the problems the
organization should focus on,
and spot issues that don’t fall
neatly into any one function
but are still important.
WaRRiOR
tO diplOmat
Proactively shape the
environment in which the
business operates by
influencing key external
constituencies, including
the government, NGOs,
the media, and investors.
SuppORtinG caSt
memBeR tO lead ROle
Exhibit the right behaviors as

a role model for the organiza-
tion and learn to communi-
cate with and inspire large
groups of people both directly
and, increasingly, indirectly.
the scope and complexity of
the job dramatically increase
in ways that can leave newly
minted unit heads feeling
overwhelmed and uncertain.
the skills that they’ve honed
in their previous roles—mas-
tery of their function, organiza-
tional know-how, the ability to
build and motivate a team—are
no longer enough. For the first
time, these executives must
transform themselves into gen-
eralists who understand all the
functions. they must learn to
hire, judge, and mediate with
a far wider variety of people.
they must confront a whole
new range of tough questions:
What are the big issues on
our corporate agenda? What
opportunities and threats does
the whole business face? how
can I ensure the success of the
entire organization?
at this critical turning point,
executives must undergo seven

seismic shifts—a tricky set of
changes in their leadership
focus that require them to
develop new skills and
conceptual frameworks.
Few leadership transitions are as challenging
as the move from running a function to running
an entire enterprise for the first time.
vIsIt hbr.org
July 2016.
http://hbr.org
By investing directly in creating standardized
evaluation schemes for each function, companies
can ensure that new enterprise leaders get the lay
of the land faster. But even if their firms don’t have
such systems, aspiring enterprise leaders can pre-
pare themselves by building relationships with col-
leagues in other functions, seeking to learn from
them (perhaps in exchange for insight into their
own functions) so that they can develop their own
templates.

analyst to integrator
The primary responsibility of functional leaders is
to recruit, develop, and manage people who focus
in analytical depth on specific business activities.
An enterprise leader’s job is to manage and integrate
the collective knowledge of those functional teams
to solve important organizational problems.
Harald found himself struggling with this shift
early on as he sought to address the many compet-
ing demands of the business. His sales and market-
ing VP, for example, wanted to aggressively go to
market with a new product, while his head of opera-
tions worried that production couldn’t be ramped up
quickly enough to meet the sales staff’s demand sce-
narios. Harald’s team expected him to balance the
needs of the supply side of the business (operations)
with those of its demand side (sales and marketing),
to know when to focus on the quarterly business
results (finance) and when to invest in the future
(R&D), to decide how much attention to devote to
execution and how much to innovation, and to make
many other such calls.
Once again, executives need general knowledge
of the various functions to resolve such competing
issues, but that isn’t enough. The skills required
have less to do with analysis and more to do with
understanding how to make trade-offs and explain
the rationale for those decisions. Here, too, previous
experience with cross-functional or new-product
development teams would stand newly minted
enterprise leaders in good stead, as would a previ-
ous apprenticeship as a chief of staff to a senior ex-
ecutive. But ultimately, as Harald found, there is no

substitute for actually making the calls and learning
from their outcome.
tactician to Strategist
In his early months, Harald threw himself into the
myriad details of the business. Being tactical was
seductive—the activities were so concrete and the
results so immediate. Consequently, he lost himself
in the day-to-day flow of attending meetings, making
decisions, and pushing projects forward.
The problem with this, of course, was that a core
part of Harald’s new role was to be strategist-in-chief
for the unit he now led. To do that, he had to let go
of many of the details and free his mind and his time
to focus on higher-level matters. More generally, he
needed to adopt a strategic mind-set.
How do tactically strong leaders learn to develop
such a mind-set? By cultivating three skills: level
shifting, pattern recognition, and mental simulation.
Level shifting is the ability to move fluidly among lev-
els of analysis—to know when to focus on the details,
when to focus on the big picture, and how the two
relate. Pattern recognition is the ability to discern
important causal relationships and other signifi-
cant patterns in a complex business and its environ-
ment—that is, to separate the signal from the noise.
Mental simulation is the ability to anticipate how
outside parties (competitors, regulators, the media,
key members of the public) will respond to what you
do, to predict their actions and reactions in order to
define the best course to take. In Harald’s first year,
for instance, an Asian competitor introduced a lower-
cost substitute for a key resin product his unit made.
Harald needed not only to consider the immediate

threat but also to think expansively about what the
competitor’s future intentions might be. Was the
Asian company going to use this low-end product
to forge strong customer relationships and progres-
sively offer a broader range of products? If so, what
options should Harald’s unit pursue? How would
the competitor respond to what Harald chose to do?
Those were not questions he had been responsible
for as head of marketing and sales. In the end, after
analyzing various courses of action with his senior
team, he chose to lower prices, forgoing some current There is
no substitute for actually making the calls and learning from
their outcome.T
July 2016.
profits in an effort to slow the loss of market share—
a move he did not live to regret.
Are strategic thinkers born or made? The answer
is both. There’s no doubt that strategic thinking, like
any other skill, can be improved with training. But
the ability to shift through different levels of analy-
sis, recognize patterns, and construct mental mod-
els requires some natural propensity. One of the

paradoxes of leadership development is that people
earn promotions to senior functional levels predomi-
nantly by being good at blocking and tackling, but
employees with strategic talent may struggle at lower
levels because they focus less on the details. Darwin-
ian forces can winnow strategic thinkers out of the
developmental pipeline too soon if companies don’t
adopt explicit policies to identify and to some degree
protect them in their early careers.
bricklayer to architect
Too often, senior executives dabble in the profession
of organizational design without a license—and end
up committing malpractice. They come into their
first enterprise-level role itching to make their mark
and then target elements of the organization that
seem relatively easy to change, like strategy or struc-
ture, without completely understanding the effect
their moves will have on the organization as a whole.
About four months into his new role, for example,
Harald concluded that he needed to restructure the
business to focus more on customers and less on
product lines. It was natural for him, as a former
head of sales and marketing, to think this way. In his
eyes it was obvious that the business was too rooted
in product development and operations and that its
structure was an outdated legacy of the way the unit
had been founded and grown. So he was surprised
when his restructuring proposal was met first with
stunned silence from his team and then with vocifer-
ous opposition. It rapidly became clear that the exist-
ing structure in this successful division was linked in
intricate and nonobvious ways to its key processes
and talent bases. To sell the company’s chemicals,

for instance, the salespeople needed to have deep
product knowledge and the ability to consult with
customers on applications. A shift to a customer-
focused approach would have required them to sell
a broader range of complex products and acquire
huge amounts of new expertise. So while a move to
a customer-focused structure had potential benefits,
certain trade-offs needed to be evaluated. Implemen-
tation would, for instance, require significant adjust-
ments to processes and substantial investments in
employee retraining. These changes demanded a
great deal of thought and analysis.
As leaders move up to the enterprise level, they
become responsible for designing and altering
the architecture of their organization—its strategy,
structure, processes, and skill bases. To be effec-
tive organizational architects, they need to think in
terms of systems. They must understand how the
key elements of the organization fit together and
not naively believe, as Harald once did, that they
can alter one element without thinking through the
implications for all the others. Harald learned this
the hard way because nothing in his experience as
a functional leader had afforded him the opportu-
nity to think about an organization as a system. Nor
did he have enough experience with large-scale or-
ganizational change to develop those insights from
observation.
early in their careers,
give potential
leaders…
Experience on cross-
functional projects
and then responsibility

for them
An international assignment
(if it’s a global business)
Exposure to a broad range
of business situations: start-
up, accelerated growth,
sustaining success, realign-
ment, turnaround, and
shutdown
when their leadership
promise becomes
evident, give high
potentials…
A position on a senior
management team
Experience with external
stakeholders (investors,
the media, key customers)
An assignment as chief of
staff for an experienced
enterprise leader
An appointment to lead an
acquisition integration or a
substantial restructuring
how to develop Strong enterprise leaders
Sometime just before
their first enterprise
promotion, send
rising stars…

To a substantial executive
program that addresses
such capabilities as orga-
nizational design, business
process improvement, and
transition management, and
allows them to build external
networks
Small, distinct, and thriving
Staffed with an experienced
and assertive team that they
can learn from
at the time of their
first enterprise-level
promotion, place new
enterprise leaders in
units that are…
vIsIt hbr.org
July 2016.
http://hbr.org

In this Harald was typical: Enterprise lead-
ers need to know the principles of organizational
change and change management, including the me-
chanics of organizational design, business process
improvement, and transition management. Yet few
rising executives get any formal training in these do-
mains, leaving most of them ill equipped to be the
architects of their organizations—or even to be edu-
cated consumers of the work of organizational devel-
opment professionals. Here Harald was once again
fortunate in having—and having the sense to rely
on—an experienced staff that offered him cogent ad-
vice about the many interdependencies he had not
originally considered. Not all new enterprise leaders
are that lucky, of course. But if their companies have
invested in sending them to executive education
programs that teach organizational change, they’ll
be better prepared for this shift.
how do I evaluate a
sales executive?
enterprise leaders need to evaluate the work of all their func-
tional executives, not just those in the same area they came
from. a simple template that systematically lists the most
important metrics to track for a particular function, as well as
which ones indicate trouble is brewing, will help new leaders
get up to speed. here is an example of a template for sales:
Vacancy rate by region
or district
Rate of internal promo-
tions and strength of
internal succession
pipeline

Number of regrettable
employee losses and
the reasons for them
Success in recruiting
and selection
Customer satisfaction
and retention rates
Evidence of under-
standing purchasing
patterns
Average amount of
salesperson interaction
with customers
Core Performance
Metrics
People
Management
Metrics Customer Metrics
Sales of key products
versus competitors’ key
products
Market share growth
in key products
Execution against
business plan
commitments

Regrettable losses of sales personnel
Flattening or declining sales
Lack of internal development for future sales
leaders
Internal promotions with poor results
Inability to communicate product advantages
and disadvantages
Poor assessment of the organization’s
strengths and weaknesses
Lack of time in the field or interactions with
customers
Lack of partnering skills with marketing and
other key functions
Warning Signs
problem Solver to agenda Setter
Many managers are promoted to senior levels on the
strength of their ability to fix problems. When they
become enterprise leaders, however, they must fo-
cus less on solving problems and more on defining
which problems the organization should be tackling.
To do that, Harald had to perceive the full range of
opportunities and threats facing his business, and fo-
cus the attention of his team on only the most impor-
tant ones. He also had to identify the “white spaces”—
issues that don’t fall neatly into any one function but
are still important to the business, such as diversity.

The number of concerns Harald now had to con-
sider was head-spinning. When he had run sales
and marketing, he had gained some appreciation for
how difficult it was for business heads to prioritize
all the issues thrown at them in any given day, week,
or month. Still, he was surprised by the scope and
July 2016.
complexity of some of the problems at this level. He
wasn’t sure how to allocate his time and immediately
felt overloaded. He knew he needed to delegate more,
but he wasn’t clear yet about which tasks and assign-
ments he could safely leave to others.
The skills he had honed as a functional leader—
mastery of sales and marketing tools and techniques,
organizational know-how, and even the ability to
mobilize talent and promote teamwork—were
not enough. To work out which problems his team
should focus on—that is, to set the agenda—he had to
learn to navigate a far more uncertain and ambiguous
environment than he was used to. He also needed to
learn to communicate priorities in ways his organiza-

tion could respond to. Given his sales and marketing
background, Harald struggled less with how to com-
municate his agenda. The challenge was figuring out
what that agenda was. To some degree he just had to
learn from experience, but here again he was aided
by the members of his team, who pressed him for
guidance on issues they knew he needed to consider.
He also could rely on the company’s annual planning
process, which provided a structure for defining key
goals for his unit.
warrior to diplomat
In his previous roles, Harald had focused primarily
on marshaling the troops to defeat the competition.
Now he found himself devoting a surprising amount
of time to influencing a host of external constituen-
cies, including regulators, the media, investors, and
NGOs. His support staff was bombarded with re-
quests for his time: Could he participate in industry
or government forums sponsored by the government
affairs department? Would he be willing to sit for an
interview with an editor from a leading business
publication? Could he meet with a key group of in-
stitutional investors? Some of these groups he was
familiar with; others not at all. But what was entirely
new to him was his responsibility not just to interact
with various stakeholders but also to proactively ad-
dress their concerns in ways that meshed with the
firm’s interests. Little of Harald’s previous experience
prepared him for the challenges of being a corporate
diplomat.
What do effective corporate diplomats do? They
use the tools of diplomacy—negotiation, persuasion,
conflict management, and alliance building—to

shape the external business environment to support
their strategic objectives. In the process they often
find themselves collaborating with people with
whom they compete aggressively in the market ev-
ery day.
To do this well, enterprise leaders need to em-
brace a new mind-set—to look for ways that interests
can or do align, understand how decisions are made
in different kinds of organizations, and develop
effective strategies for influencing others. They
must also understand how to recruit and manage
employees of a kind that they have probably never
supervised before: professionals in key supporting
functions such as government relations and corpo-
rate communications. And they must recognize that
these employees’ initiatives have longer horizons
than the ongoing business, with its focus on quar-
terly or even annual results, does. Initiatives like a
campaign to shape the development of government
regulation can take years to unfold. It took Harald
a while to understand this, as his staffers educated
him about how painstakingly they managed issues
over protracted periods of time and how they peri-
odically bemoaned the results when someone took
his eye off the ball.
Supporting cast Member
to lead role
Finally, becoming an enterprise leader means mov-
ing to center stage under the bright lights. The inten-
sity of the attention and the almost constant need
to keep up his guard caught Harald by surprise. He
was somewhat shocked to discover how much stock
people placed in what he said and did. Not long after

ou may be surprised by the intensity of
the attention at center stage and the almost
constant need to keep up your guard.YY
vIsIt hbr.org
July 2016.
http://hbr.org
ing way. Harald, already a strong communicator who
was used to selling ideas along with products, still
needed to adjust his thinking in this regard (though
perhaps less so than some of his counterparts). In his
previous job he had maintained a reasonable degree
of personal, albeit sometimes sporadic, contact with
most of his employees. Now that he was overseeing
3,000-plus people scattered around the globe, that
was simply impossible.
The implications of this became clear as he
worked with his team to craft the annual strategy.
When the time came to communicate it to the orga-
nization, he realized that he couldn’t simply go out
and sell it himself; he had to work more through his
direct reports and find other channels, such as video,
for spreading the word. And after touring most of

the unit’s facilities, Harald likewise worried that
he’d never really be able to figure out what was hap-
pening on the front lines. So rather than meet just
with leaders when he made site visits, he instituted
brown-bag lunches with small groups of frontline
employees and tuned in to online discussion groups
in which employees could comment on the company.
For the MoSt part, the seven shifts involve switch-
ing from left-brain, analytical thinking to right-brain
conceptual mind-sets. But that doesn’t mean enter-
prise leaders never spend time on tactics or on func-
tional concerns. It’s just that they spend far, far less
time on those responsibilities than they used to in
their previous roles. In fact, it’s often helpful for en-
terprise leaders to engage someone else—a chief of
staff, a chief operating officer, or a project manager—
to focus on execution, as a way to free up time for
their new role.
As for Harald, his story ended well. He was for-
tunate to be working for a company that believed
in leadership development and to have an experi-
enced team that was able—and willing—to give him
effective counsel. So despite the many bumps in the
road, the business continued to thrive, and Harald
eventually found his stride as an enterprise leader.
Three years later, armed with all this experience,
he was asked to take over a much larger, struggling
unit of the company and initiated a successful turn-
around. Reflecting back, he says, “The skills that got
you where you are may not be the requisite skills to
get you to where you need to go. This doesn’t dis-
count the accomplishments of your past, but they
will not be everything you need for the next leg of
the journey.” hbr reprint r1206c

he first took the job, for example, he met with his
vice president of R&D and mused about a new way of
packaging an existing product. Two weeks later a pre-
liminary feasibility report for it appeared on his desk.
In part, this shift is about having a much greater
impact as a role model. Managers at all levels are
role models to some degree. But at the enterprise
level, their influence is magnified, as everyone looks
to them for vision, inspiration, and cues about the
“right” behaviors and attitudes. For good or ill, the
personal styles and quirks of senior leaders are infec-
tious, whether they are observed directly by employ-
ees or indirectly transmitted from their reports to the
level below and on down through the organization.
This effect can’t really be avoided, but enterprise
leaders can make it less inadvertent by cultivating
more self-awareness and taking the time to develop
empathy with subordinates’ viewpoints. After all, it
wasn’t so long ago that they were the subordinates,
drawing these kinds of inferences from their own
bosses’ behavior.
Then there is the question of what it means, prac-
tically speaking, to lead large groups of people—how
to define a compelling vision and share it in an inspir-
“hi, I’m Jerry, the motivational speaker…so rah, rah, rah…let’s
get back to work.” ca
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July 2016.
http://hbr.org/search/R1206C

www.hbr.org
Discovering Your
Authentic Leadership
by Bill George, Peter Sims, Andrew N. McLean, and
Diana Mayer
We all have the capacity to
inspire and empower others.
But we must first be willing to
devote ourselves to our
personal growth and
development as leaders.
Reprint R0702H
July 2016.

http://www.hbr.org
=itemdetail&referral=4320&id=R0702H
Discovering Your
Authentic Leadership
by Bill George, Peter Sims, Andrew N. McLean, and
Diana Mayer
harvard business review • hbr.org • february 2007 page 1
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We all have the capacity to inspire and empower others. But we
must
first be willing to devote ourselves to our personal growth and
development as leaders.
During the past 50 years, leadership scholars
have conducted more than 1,000 studies in an
attempt to determine the definitive styles,
characteristics, or personality traits of great
leaders. None of these studies has produced a
clear profile of the ideal leader. Thank good-
ness. If scholars had produced a cookie-cutter
leadership style, individuals would be forever
trying to imitate it. They would make them-
selves into personae, not people, and others
would see through them immediately.
No one can be authentic by trying to imitate
someone else. You can learn from others’ expe-
riences, but there is no way you can be success-
ful when you are trying to be like them. People

trust you when you are genuine and authentic,
not a replica of someone else. Amgen CEO and
president Kevin Sharer, who gained priceless
experience working as Jack Welch’s assistant in
the 1980s, saw the downside of GE’s cult of per-
sonality in those days. “Everyone wanted to be
like Jack,” he explains. “Leadership has many
voices. You need to be who you are, not try to
emulate somebody else.”
Over the past five years, people have devel-
oped a deep distrust of leaders. It is increas-
ingly evident that we need a new kind of busi-
ness leader in the twenty-first century. In 2003,
Bill George’s book, Authentic Leadership: Redis-
covering the Secrets to Creating Lasting Value,
challenged a new generation to lead authenti-
cally. Authentic leaders demonstrate a passion
for their purpose, practice their values consis-
tently, and lead with their hearts as well as
their heads. They establish long-term, mean-
ingful relationships and have the self-discipline
to get results. They know who they are.
Many readers of Authentic Leadership, in-
cluding several CEOs, indicated that they had a
tremendous desire to become authentic lead-
ers and wanted to know how. As a result, our
research team set out to answer the question,
“How can people become and remain authen-
tic leaders?” We interviewed 125 leaders to
learn how they developed their leadership abil-
ities. These interviews constitute the largest in-
depth study of leadership development ever
undertaken. Our interviewees discussed openly

July 2016.
http://www.hbr.org
Discovering Your Authentic Leadership
and honestly how they realized their potential
and candidly shared their life stories, personal
struggles, failures, and triumphs.
The people we talked with ranged in age
from 23 to 93, with no fewer than 15 per de-
cade. They were chosen based on their reputa-
tions for authenticity and effectiveness as
leaders, as well as our personal knowledge
of them. We also solicited recommendations
from other leaders and academics. The result-
ing group includes women and men from a di-
verse array of racial, religious, and socioeco-
nomic backgrounds and nationalities. Half of
them are CEOs, and the other half comprises
a range of profit and nonprofit leaders, midca-
reer leaders, and young leaders just starting
on their journeys.

After interviewing these individuals, we be-
lieve we understand why more than 1,000 stud-
ies have not produced a profile of an ideal
leader. Analyzing 3,000 pages of transcripts,
our team was startled to see that these people
did not identify any universal characteristics,
traits, skills, or styles that led to their success.
Rather, their leadership emerged from their
life stories. Consciously and subconsciously,
they were constantly testing themselves through
real-world experiences and reframing their life
stories to understand who they were at their
core. In doing so, they discovered the purpose
of their leadership and learned that being au-
thentic made them more effective.
These findings are extremely encouraging:
You do not have to be born with specific char-
acteristics or traits of a leader. You do not have
to wait for a tap on the shoulder. You do not
have to be at the top of your organization. In-
stead, you can discover your potential right
now. As one of our interviewees, Young &
Rubicam chairman and CEO Ann Fudge, said,
“All of us have the spark of leadership in us,
whether it is in business, in government, or
as a nonprofit volunteer. The challenge is to
understand ourselves well enough to discover
where we can use our leadership gifts to
serve others.”
Discovering your authentic leadership re-
quires a commitment to developing yourself.
Like musicians and athletes, you must devote
yourself to a lifetime of realizing your poten-
tial. Most people Kroger CEO David Dillon has

seen become good leaders were self-taught.
Dillon said, “The advice I give to individuals in
our company is not to expect the company to
hand you a development plan. You need to
take responsibility for developing yourself.”
In the following pages, we draw upon les-
sons from our interviews to describe how peo-
ple become authentic leaders. First and most
important, they frame their life stories in ways
that allow them to see themselves not as pas-
sive observers of their lives but rather as indi-
viduals who can develop self-awareness from
their experiences. Authentic leaders act on
that awareness by practicing their values and
principles, sometimes at substantial risk to
themselves. They are careful to balance their
motivations so that they are driven by these
inner values as much as by a desire for external
rewards or recognition. Authentic leaders also
keep a strong support team around them, en-
suring that they live integrated, grounded lives.
Learning from Your Life Story
The journey to authentic leadership begins
with understanding the story of your life. Your
life story provides the context for your experi-
ences, and through it, you can find the inspira-
tion to make an impact in the world. As the
novelist John Barth once wrote, “The story of
your life is not your life. It is your story.” In
other words, it is your personal narrative that

matters, not the mere facts of your life. Your
life narrative is like a permanent recording
playing in your head. Over and over, you re-
play the events and personal interactions that
are important to your life, attempting to make
sense of them to find your place in the world.
While the life stories of authentic leaders
cover the full spectrum of experiences—
including the positive impact of parents, ath-
letic coaches, teachers, and mentors—many
leaders reported that their motivation came
from a difficult experience in their lives. They
described the transformative effects of the loss
of a job; personal illness; the untimely death of
a close friend or relative; and feelings of being
excluded, discriminated against, and rejected
by peers. Rather than seeing themselves as vic-
tims, though, authentic leaders used these for-
mative experiences to give meaning to their
lives. They reframed these events to rise above
their challenges and to discover their passion
to lead.
Let’s focus now on one leader in particular,
Novartis chairman and CEO Daniel Vasella,
whose life story was one of the most difficult of
all the people we interviewed. He emerged
Bill George
, the former chairman and
CEO of Medtronic, is a professor of
management practice at Harvard Busi-

ness School in Boston. Peter Sims es-
tablished “Leadership Perspectives,” a
class on leadership development at the
Stanford Graduate School of Business
in California. Andrew N. McLean is a
research associate at Harvard Business
School. Diana Mayer is a former Citi-
group executive in New York. This arti-
cle was adapted from True North:
Discover Your Authentic Leadership by
Bill George with Peter Sims (Jossey-
Bass, forthcoming in March 2007).
July 2016.
http://www.hbr.org
from extreme challenges in his youth to reach
the pinnacle of the global pharmaceutical in-
dustry, a trajectory that illustrates the trials
many leaders have to go through on their jour-
neys to authentic leadership.

Vasella was born in 1953 to a modest fam-
ily in Fribourg, Switzerland. His early years
were filled with medical problems that stoked
his passion to become a physician. His first
recollections were of a hospital where he was
admitted at age four when he suffered from
food poisoning. Falling ill with asthma at age
five, he was sent alone to the mountains of
eastern Switzerland for two summers. He
found the four-month separations from his
parents especially difficult because his care-
taker had an alcohol problem and was unre-
sponsive to his needs.
At age eight, Vasella had tuberculosis, fol-
lowed by meningitis, and was sent to a sanato-
rium for a year. Lonely and homesick, he suf-
fered a great deal that year, as his parents
rarely visited him. He still remembers the pain
and fear when the nurses held him down dur-
ing the lumbar punctures so that he would not
move. One day, a new physician arrived and
took time to explain each step of the proce-
dure. Vasella asked the doctor if he could hold
a nurse’s hand rather than being held down.
“The amazing thing is that this time the proce-
dure didn’t hurt,” Vasella recalls. “Afterward,
the doctor asked me, ‘How was that?’ I reached
up and gave him a big hug. These human ges-
tures of forgiveness, caring, and compassion
made a deep impression on me and on the
kind of person I wanted to become.”
Throughout his early years, Vasella’s life con-
tinued to be unsettled. When he was ten, his
18-year-old sister passed away after suffering

from cancer for two years. Three years later,
his father died in surgery. To support the fam-
ily, his mother went to work in a distant town
and came home only once every three weeks.
Left to himself, he and his friends held beer
parties and got into frequent fights. This lasted
for three years until he met his first girlfriend,
whose affection changed his life.
At 20, Vasella entered medical school, later
graduating with honors. During medical school,
he sought out psychotherapy so he could come
to terms with his early experiences and not feel
like a victim. Through analysis, he reframed
his life story and realized that he wanted to
help a wider range of people than he could as
an individual practitioner. Upon completion of
his residency, he applied to become chief phy-
sician at the University of Zurich; however, the
search committee considered him too young
for the position.
Disappointed but not surprised, Vasella de-
cided to use his abilities to increase his impact
on medicine. At that time, he had a growing
fascination with finance and business. He
talked with the head of the pharmaceutical di-
vision of Sandoz, who offered him the oppor-
tunity to join the company’s U.S. affiliate. In
his five years in the United States, Vasella flour-
ished in the stimulating environment, first as a
sales representative and later as a product
manager, and advanced rapidly through the
Sandoz marketing organization.

When Sandoz merged with Ciba-Geigy in
1996, Vasella was named CEO of the combined
companies, now called Novartis, despite his
young age and limited experience. Once in the
CEO’s role, Vasella blossomed as a leader. He
envisioned the opportunity to build a great
global health care company that could help
people through lifesaving new drugs, such as
Gleevec, which has proved to be highly effec-
tive for patients with chronic myeloid leuke-
mia. Drawing on the physician role models of
his youth, he built an entirely new Novartis
culture centered on compassion, competence,
and competition. These moves established No-
vartis as a giant in the industry and Vasella as a
compassionate leader.
Vasella’s experience is just one of dozens
provided by authentic leaders who traced their
inspiration directly from their life stories. Asked
what empowered them to lead, these leaders
consistently replied that they found their
strength through transformative experiences.
Those experiences enabled them to under-
stand the deeper purpose of their leadership.
Knowing Your Authentic Self
When the 75 members of Stanford Graduate
School of Business’s Advisory Council were
asked to recommend the most important ca-
pability for leaders to develop, their answer
was nearly unanimous: self-awareness. Yet many
leaders, especially those early in their careers,

are trying so hard to establish themselves in
the world that they leave little time for self-
exploration. They strive to achieve success in
tangible ways that are recognized in the ex-
ternal world—money, fame, power, status, or
Analyzing 3,000 pages of
transcripts, our team was
startled to see you do not
have to be born with
specific characteristics or
traits of a leader.
Leadership emerges from
your life story.
July 2016.
http://www.hbr.org

a rising stock price. Often their drive enables
them to be professionally successful for a while,
but they are unable to sustain that success. As
they age, they may find something is missing
in their lives and realize they are holding back
from being the person they want to be. Know-
ing their authentic selves requires the courage
and honesty to open up and examine their ex-
periences. As they do so, leaders become more
humane and willing to be vulnerable.
Of all the leaders we interviewed, David
Pottruck, former CEO of Charles Schwab, had
one of the most persistent journeys to self-
awareness. An all-league football player in
high school, Pottruck became MVP of his col-
lege team at the University of Pennsylvania.
After completing his MBA at Wharton and a
stint with Citigroup, he joined Charles Schwab
as head of marketing, moving from New York
to San Francisco. An extremely hard worker,
Pottruck could not understand why his new
colleagues resented the long hours he put in
and his aggressiveness in pushing for results. “I
thought my accomplishments would speak for
themselves,” he said. “It never occurred to me
that my level of energy would intimidate and
offend other people, because in my mind I was
trying to help the company.”
Pottruck was shocked when his boss told
him, “Dave, your colleagues do not trust you.”
As he recalled, “That feedback was like a dag-

ger to my heart. I was in denial, as I didn’t
see myself as others saw me. I became a light-
ning rod for friction, but I had no idea how self-
serving I looked to other people. Still, some-
where in my inner core the feedback resonated
as true.” Pottruck realized that he could not
succeed unless he identified and overcame his
blind spots.
Denial can be the greatest hurdle that lead-
ers face in becoming self-aware. They all have
egos that need to be stroked, insecurities that
need to be smoothed, fears that need to be al-
layed. Authentic leaders realize that they have
to be willing to listen to feedback—especially
the kind they don’t want to hear. It was only
after his second divorce that Pottruck finally
was able to acknowledge that he still had large
blind spots: “After my second marriage fell
apart, I thought I had a wife-selection prob-
lem.” Then he worked with a counselor who
delivered some hard truths: “The good news is
you do not have a wife-selection problem;
the bad news is you have a husband-behavior
problem.” Pottruck then made a determined
effort to change. As he described it, “I was like
a guy who has had three heart attacks and fi-
nally realizes he has to quit smoking and lose
some weight.”
These days Pottruck is happily remarried
and listens carefully when his wife offers con-
structive feedback. He acknowledges that he
falls back on his old habits at times, particu-
larly in high stress situations, but now he has

developed ways of coping with stress. “I have
had enough success in life to have that founda-
tion of self-respect, so I can take the criticism
and not deny it. I have finally learned to toler-
ate my failures and disappointments and not
beat myself up.”
Practicing Your Values and
Principles
The values that form the basis for authentic
leadership are derived from your beliefs and
convictions, but you will not know what your
true values are until they are tested under
pressure. It is relatively easy to list your values
and to live by them when things are going
well. When your success, your career, or even
your life hangs in the balance, you learn what
is most important, what you are prepared to
sacrifice, and what trade-offs you are willing
to make.
Leadership principles are values translated
into action. Having a solid base of values and
testing them under fire enables you to develop
the principles you will use in leading. For ex-
ample, a value such as “concern for others”
might be translated into a leadership principle
such as “create a work environment where
people are respected for their contributions,
provided job security, and allowed to fulfill
their potential.”
Consider Jon Huntsman, the founder and

chairman of Huntsman Corporation. His moral
values were deeply challenged when he worked
for the Nixon administration in 1972, shortly
before Watergate. After a brief stint in the U.S.
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare
(HEW), he took a job under H.R. Haldeman,
President Nixon’s powerful chief of staff. Hunts-
man said he found the experience of taking
orders from Haldeman “very mixed. I wasn’t
geared to take orders, irrespective of whether
they were ethically or morally right.” He ex-
plained, “We had a few clashes, as plenty of
things that Haldeman wanted to do were ques-
When the 75 members of
Stanford Graduate
School of Business’s
Advisory Council were
asked to recommend the
most important
capability for leaders to
develop, their answer
was nearly unanimous:
self-awareness.

July 2016.
http://www.hbr.org
tionable. An amoral atmosphere permeated
the White House.”
One day, Haldeman directed Huntsman to
help him entrap a California congressman who
had been opposing a White House initiative.
The congressman was part owner of a plant
that reportedly employed undocumented
workers. To gather information to embarrass
the congressman, Haldeman told Huntsman to
get the plant manager of a company Hunts-
man owned to place some undocumented
workers at the congressman’s plant in an un-
dercover operation.
“There are times when we react too quickly
and fail to realize immediately what is right
and wrong,” Huntsman recalled. “This was one
of those times when I didn’t think it through. I
knew instinctively it was wrong, but it took a
few minutes for the notion to percolate. After

15 minutes, my inner moral compass made it-
self noticed and enabled me to recognize this
wasn’t the right thing to do. Values that had ac-
companied me since childhood kicked in. Half-
way through my conversation with our plant
manager, I said to him, ‘Let’s not do this. I don’t
want to play this game. Forget that I called.’”
Huntsman told Haldeman that he would
not use his employees in this way. “Here I was
saying no to the second most powerful person
in the country. He didn’t appreciate responses
like that, as he viewed them as signs of disloy-
alty. I might as well have been saying farewell.
So be it. I left within the next six months.”
Balancing Your Extrinsic and
Intrinsic Motivations
Because authentic leaders need to sustain
high levels of motivation and keep their lives
in balance, it is critically important for them to
understand what drives them. There are two
types of motivations—extrinsic and intrinsic.
Although they are reluctant to admit it, many
leaders are propelled to achieve by measuring
their success against the outside world’s pa-
rameters. They enjoy the recognition and sta-
tus that come with promotions and financial
rewards. Intrinsic motivations, on the other
hand, are derived from their sense of the
meaning of their life. They are closely linked
to one’s life story and the way one frames it.

Examples include personal growth, helping
other people develop, taking on social causes,
and making a difference in the world. The key
is to find a balance between your desires for
external validation and the intrinsic motiva-
tions that provide fulfillment in your work.
Many interviewees advised aspiring lead-
ers to be wary of getting caught up in social,
peer, or parental expectations. Debra Dunn,
who has worked in Silicon Valley for decades
as a Hewlett-Packard executive, acknowledged
the constant pressures from external sources:
“The path of accumulating material posses-
sions is clearly laid out. You know how to
measure it. If you don’t pursue that path, peo-
ple wonder what is wrong with you. The only
way to avoid getting caught up in materialism
is to understand where you find happiness
and fulfillment.”
Moving away from the external validation
of personal achievement is not always easy.
Achievement-oriented leaders grow so accus-
tomed to successive accomplishments through-
out their early years that it takes courage to pur-
sue their intrinsic motivations. But at some
point, most leaders recognize that they need to
address more difficult questions in order to pur-
sue truly meaningful success. McKinsey’s Alice
Woodwark, who at 29 has already achieved no-
table success, reflected: “My version of achieve-
ment was pretty naive, born of things I learned
early in life about praise and being valued. But
if you’re just chasing the rabbit around the course,
you’re not running toward anything meaningful.”

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