Mistake 1: Too complacent. This is the biggest mistake people make: managers and employees lack a sense of urgency when organizational change is striding forward. They overestimate people's acceptance of change and underestimate the efforts needed to promote it. Or they confuse the sense of urgency with anxiety: anxiety makes people more conformist and refuse to change.

Mistake 2: One tree is hard to raise. This kind of failure is usually due to underestimating the difficulty of change first, thus underestimating the importance of a strong leadership team. To lead change, we need to build an alliance and a team, not just one person or a few people.

Mistake 3: Lack of foresight. Vision can guide, unite and inspire most people in the process of change. However, many reform projects lack a clear vision, and it is impossible to explain clearly the direction and reasons for the company to implement changes in five minutes, and get people's understanding and interest.

Mistake 4: Improper communication. Even if there is a vision, communication is often insufficient. Either only communicate within a limited scope, or the management is inconsistent in words and deeds.

Mistake 5: The obstacles are not clear. Some key obstacles have not been removed, which has affected everyone's enthusiasm. These key obstacles may be unreasonable organizational structure or people in key positions.

Mistake 6: Success is too slow. Real change takes time, but if we can't set short-term goals and create short-term success to motivate everyone, then people may lose confidence in big change goals, give up or even resist change.

Mistake 7: Victory is too early. People often declare that the change has been completed when it has achieved initial results, so it won't be long before the change will stop, the old forces will make a comeback, and the change will be like it never happened.

Mistake 8: Not integrated into corporate culture. New behaviors have not penetrated into the blood of enterprises or departments. When the power of change is weakened and the pressure of change is reduced, the new standard of behavior will fall.

Lead change, not manage it.

One of the reasons for these mistakes is that there is only change management without leadership. Management is a series of processes to promote the smooth operation of complex personnel systems and technical systems, including planning and budgeting, organization and staffing, and controlling and solving problems. Leadership refers to a series of processes to create an organization and adapt it to the ever-changing environment, including determining the vision, conveying the vision and uniting employees to motivate and inspire people to realize the vision. 70%~90% of successful changes are attributed to successful leaders, and only 10%~30% is attributed to successful management.

Managing change is very important. Without strong management of the change process, change will get out of control. However, it is more important to lead the change. Only through leadership can enterprises break through the obstacles of inertia; Only through leadership can people significantly change their behavior; Only through leadership can change be integrated into corporate culture.

What Kurt didn't directly say is that the purpose of management is to maintain order, and to a great extent it is the natural enemy of change.

Eight important steps to lead change

In view of eight common mistakes in organizational change, Kurt designed eight important steps to lead the change.

Step 1: Enhance the sense of urgency. Even in troubled companies, management often lacks a sense of urgency. Kurt suggested some ways to enhance the sense of urgency, including creating a crisis and communicating with dissatisfied customers regularly. Real leaders will create virtual crises instead of waiting for real ones.

Step 2: Set up a leadership team. Great changes are difficult and need to be constantly promoted by powerful forces. To form a strong leadership team, we need to consider the following four factors: Are there enough people with high power to participate? Are there enough people with complementary abilities to participate? Are there enough people who are generally trusted by employees to attend? Are there enough leaders to attend?

Step 3: Establish a vision. Vision is a plan for the future, which can point out the direction, stimulate action and coordinate action. The vision needs to be imaginable, achievable, in line with the interests of major stakeholders, focused, flexible, easy to communicate, and can be explained clearly within five minutes.

Step 4: Communicate the vision. Only when the vision is understood and recognized by most people will its real power be released. When conveying the vision, we should try our best to be simple, use metaphors and examples, use various media and communicate repeatedly. At the same time, leaders should match words with deeds, explain what seems inconsistent and easy to misunderstand, listen more and communicate in two directions.

Step 5: authorize action. Kurt uses the word "authorization" in a broad sense, including clearing the main obstacles to realizing his vision in four aspects:

Change the organizational structure that undermines the vision;

:: Providing necessary training;

Change the management system that is inconsistent with the vision;

Faced with managers who hinder change.

Step 6: Create short-term effects. Great changes take a long time to produce short-term effects and have the following three characteristics:

Everyone can see it;

The result is affirmative;

Closely related to change.

Short-term results can strengthen efforts, provide small opportunities for relaxation and celebration, actually test whether the vision is correct, break the opposition to change, and win more and more support for change.

Interestingly, Kurt pointed out that there are several reasons for the lack of short-term victory planning, one of which is the lack of adequate management: "To a large extent, the realization of long-term goals requires leadership, while the short-term planning requires management."

Step 7: Consolidate the achievements and further promote the change. After creating short-term results, don't hold large-scale celebrations, giving people the feeling of great success. The leading team should strike while the iron is hot and use the credibility gained to promote more and greater change plans.

Step 8: Incorporate new methods into corporate culture. Kurt opposes the theory of change: the biggest obstacle to change is culture, so the first step of change is to change the corporate culture. Kurt observed that corporate culture is intangible and difficult to change. Only by changing behavior and creating benefits can we change culture. Let the evidence clearly show that the new method is more effective than the old method, and let the new method precipitate in the corporate culture.

The most effective way to change

The subtitle of Heart of Change, co-authored by Kurt and dan cohen, is "The True Story of How People Change Organizations", which tells 34 stories about organizational change. What they have in common is that witnessing brings about change. The first sentence at the beginning of this book is: "The message of this book is simple: in the process of changing people's behavior, witnessing the change of feelings is far more important than the change of thinking caused by analysis."

The story of "gloves"

Let's read one of the stories first.

There is something wrong with a company's procurement process. A manager wants to make the top management realize the seriousness of the problem and ask a summer intern to make a small survey on two contents: first, the purchase price of gloves in all factories; Second, how many gloves to buy. According to the survey, there are as many as 424 kinds of gloves purchased. Each factory has its own supplier, and the purchase price is different. For the same gloves, the purchase price of one factory is $5, and the purchase price of another factory may be as high as 17.

The intern collected samples of all 424 kinds of gloves and put a small label on them, which stated the price of gloves and the factory that used them. All the gloves were placed on the huge and expensive table in the conference room, and all the department presidents were invited to visit. Everyone was speechless. Later, these gloves were sent to various departments and factories for exhibition. The story of "gloves" has been discussed for a long time in this company.

This is also a story Kurt likes very much. One reason he likes it is that in this story, people much lower than the CEO played a key role in the change. I don't object to this, but I want to remind you that you should never underestimate the role of CEO in change. In this story, if the CEO is a dictatorial and autocratic manager and does not allow any challenges, if the CEO doesn't want to change the procurement process at all, I'm afraid no one dares to hold this glove exhibition. Even if someone dares to do it, there will never be another tour.

This story vividly illustrates the role of "witness" in change, which is also the main point Kurt wants to convey.

Witness-feel-change

In the process of change, the biggest challenge is to change people's behavior. Kurt pointed out that the most effective mode to change people's behavior is not "analysis-thinking-change", but "see-feel-change" trilogy.

Witness: Through some dramatic and eye-catching situations, try to use intuitive methods so that people can touch, feel or see, help people find problems and find solutions.

Feeling: after seeing the problem, people's emotions are affected. They began to respond from the bottom of their hearts, weakening the emotional factors that hinder change and strengthening the factors that support change.

Change: People's behaviors begin to change, and those behaviors after the change are further strengthened.

The model of "analysis-thinking-change" is not unimportant, but it has at least three limitations.

First, many times the problem is obvious, and not much data is needed.

Second, the analytical tool itself has limitations and needs strict premise to play its role.

Third, the analysis results are hard to impress people. It can change people's way of thinking, but rarely can it effectively change people's behavior.

Before The Heart of Change was published, Zhang Ruimin instinctively knew that "seeing-feeling-changing" was a powerful model. Therefore, in order to make employees really pay attention to quality problems, Zhang Ruimin chose to smash the refrigerator in public for everyone to "witness", instead of holding a meeting to talk about the importance of quality problems or simply sending a document about quality problems.

It should be pointed out that the core of Kurt's "witness-feeling-change" is actually not "witness" but "feeling". In other words, emotional shock can bring more changes. Therefore, the key is not witnessing, but emotional shock.

Besides witnessing, there are many other ways to bring emotional impact, one of which is telling stories. Although witnessing and telling stories overlap, there are still differences. Kurt later realized the importance of storytelling in leadership.

Reference book: Kurt's The Power of Change.

Dolma Liu's Second Leadership Book: Learning Leadership from Classics.