Creating Change

1
Creating Change
Mark Hilliker, Portage County Community
Development Educator Jenny Erickson, Sauk County
Community Development Educator
Adapted from Kotter, 1996
2
What is change? What is transformation?

• Planning is about change
• Scale of Change
• Levels of Change
• Individual, Interpersonal, Organization or
  Community
• Measuring change

3
What is Organizational Change?

• Factors to consider?
• Leadership
• Culture
• People oriented
• Operations

4
Creating Change

• There is a sequence.
• Role of leadership in change.
• Who is John Kotter?

5
Kotters Eight Stage Process of Creating Major
Change

• Establishing a Sense of Urgency
• Examining reality
• Identifying and discussing crises, potential
  crises, or major opportunities

6
What leads to complacency?

• No highly visible crisis exists
• Focus on the wrong performance measures
• Low performance standards
• Kill the messenger culture
• Too much happy talk
• Denial
• Lack of performance feedback

7
Raise the Urgency Levels

• Be honest - Look at financial trends and feedback
  from unsatisfied clients.
• Set goals higher so they cant be reached doing
  business as usual.

8
Raise the Urgency Levels

• Insist that more people be held accountable for
  broader goals.
• Talk about future opportunities
• Eliminate signs of excess.

9
2. Creating the Guiding Coalition

• Putting together a NETWORK with enough power to
  lead the change
• Sound familiar.dysfunctional group

10
Creating Change

• When have you created change?
• How did you establish a sense of urgency?
• How did you react to complacency?

11
2. Creating the Guiding Coalition

• Position power Can the progress be blocked?
• Expertise Are the recommendations informed and
  intelligent?
• Credibility Will these ideas be taken
  seriously?
• Leadership Can the group make the changes
  happen?

12
2. Creating the Guiding Coalition

• Getting the network to work together like a team
• TRUST!
• A common goal

13
3.) Developing a Vision Strategy

• Creating a vision to help direct change
• Clarify direction for change
• Motivates others to take action in the right
  direction
• Helps coordinate the actions of different people

14
3.) Developing a Vision Strategy

• Characteristics of an effective vision
• Imaginable
• Desirable
• Feasible
• Focused
• Flexible
• Communicable

15
3.) Developing a Vision Strategy

• Not so good visions
• We stand for integrity, honesty and a clean
  environment.
• 15 increase in membership
• 800 pages of anything

16
3.) Developing a Vision Strategy

• Creating vision
• May start with a single person
• Need the groups involved feedback
• Involved analytical thinking and dreaming
• Can be messy
• Takes time
• Results in a direction and can be explained in 5
  minutes

17
3.) Vision Strategy

• Think about the community where you live.
• - Is there a vision for your community?
• - What will it look like in the future?
• - What steps are community members taking to
  reach the vision?

18

• Communicating the Change Vision
• Using every vehicle possible to constantly
  communicate the new/initial vision and strategies
• Having the guiding coalition role model the
  behavior expected of employees
• This is an art
• Development of the vision may result in a return
  to Step 1 to create urgency
• Iterative process

19

• Empowering Action
• Getting rid of obstacles
• Structures
• Skills
• Systems
• Supervision

20

• Generating Short-Term Wins
• Planning for visible improvements in performance,
  or wins
• Creating those wins
• Visibly recognizing and rewarding people who made
  the wins possible

21

• Building on Success
• Celebrate success, but dont lose the sense of
  urgency.
• Use your short term wins to build to bigger
  changes.

22

• Anchoring New Approaches in the Culture
• Creating better performance through customer- and
  productivity-oriented behavior, more and better
  leadership, and more effective management
• Articulating the connections between new
  behaviors and organizational success
• Developing means to ensure leadership development
  and succession

23
Managing Change

• Weve talked about how we might go about creating
  change.
• We need to talk about associated nuances of
  managing the change
• Well focus on those issues in our next session

24
Resources

• Kotter, John P. Leading Change. Boston,
  Massachusetts, Harvard Business School Press. 1996