Leadership Strategies for Change: Making Change Stick

My change initiative is progressing well. I have successfully gathered momentum for
my change initiative, built a guiding team, sold my vision to every member of the company
and secured their buy-in and empowered for action everyone with a role to play by
eliminating the various barriers in their paths. Together with the guiding team, I have also
successfully re-created and maintained the momentum by creating short-term and keeping
everyone engaged to the end. Now is the time to take measures to ensure that the change will
stick for the long run rather than fade away after some time. To make the change initiative
stick, the guiding team will take the following steps: not stopping at the seventh step,
promoting high levels of employee retention, using new employee orientation as an
opportunity to showcase what the company really stands for and cares about, taking
advantage of the promotion process, continually telling stories about the new venture, and
using successes to reinforce a new culture. Meanwhile, we will be careful to avoid the
following pitfalls: relying on one person to hold together the change effort and trying to
change culture as a pre-requisite for change.

What May Work for Making the Change Stick

Not Letting Up
In the sixth and seventh steps (short-term wins and not letting up), it was shown how,
after a few quick wins, people often become complacent (McMillan & Perron, 2013; Kotter
& Cohen, 2012). Meanwhile, because of the heavy work needed to register the initial
successes, people often grow weary. For these reasons, it was said that the guiding team
would take the following steps to build on the momentum created by the short-term gains:
explore ways to keep the urgency up; eliminate repetitive and exhausting work that is no

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longer necessary or relevant; take on increasingly difficult tasks and not declaring victory
prematurely. The guiding team will not stop at the previous two steps. Rather, the measures
outlined there will continue to be essential to ensuring that the change initiated sticks.
Promoting Employee Retention
Few things interrupt change efforts the way employee turnover does (Kotter, Chan
Kim, & Mauborgne, 2011). Whether an employee who is involved in a change effort leaves
voluntarily or is forced to leave, the effect on the change effort is often the same: disruption.
Employee departure in the course of a change effort is especially undesirable when one
considers the amount of time and effort that goes into persuading people to truly support a
change effort. Employee departure is likely to force the change champions back to the
drawing board to recruit a replacement who will be as enthusiastic about the change as the
employee who has just left. For these reasons, the guiding team will work with other internal
stakeholders like the HR department to ensure that staff who are passionately involved in the
change effort stay with the company.
Making use of the Employee Orientation Process
While employee retention may be the best strategy for ensuring continuity in a change
initiative (Kotter et al., 2011), it may not always be possible to retain an employee who is
determined to leave. Under these circumstances, the next best alternative available to the
guiding team may be the wise use of the new employee orientation process. This process will
offer the guiding team an opportunity to passionately showcase to new employees what the
company’s real estate brokerage division stands for and truly cares about. It can be hoped that
once new hires have that understanding, some of them may be impressed and become
committed advocates of the change process.

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Taking Advantage of the Promotion Process
Besides employee retention and the new employee orientation process, the promotion
process presents another opportunity the guiding team, working with the HR department,
could use creatively to foster and sustain the change effort. Here, the strategy would be a
simple one: identify staff who are most committed to the change process and reward them
with promotions whenever opportunities arise. The aim of the strategy is two-fold: to keep
such committed staff motivated and to encourage others to embrace the change also (Kotter et
al., 2011). However, because opportunities for promotion may be rare and few compared to
the sheer numbers of deserving staff, this strategy must be used cautiously, lest some staff are
left disgruntled and disengaged from the change initiative. A creative way to do it may be to
identify all deserving candidates and let them choose one of them to get the promotion
(Carroll, 2020).
Continually Telling Stories About the New Venture
In steps 6 and 7, it was noted how it would be important that the guiding team itself
does not become complacent and declare success prematurely. To this end, it was
recommended that our company routinely undertake benchmarking exercises whereby our
company’s real estate brokerage division will be continually evaluated against the best
brokerages in the region. This move, it was argued, will serve to keep the guiding team and
everyone else on their toes. Now it is suggested that alongside benchmarking, the guiding
team should make use of stories about the new venture itself to sustain interest in and
enthusiasm about it. Perhaps the guiding team could make it a habit to review and publicize,
at the end of each year, the successes of the new venture. But even with a focus on success,
sight must not be lost of the challenges that will need to be addressed to realize greater
success.

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Using Success to Reinforce a New Culture
Often, promoters of change believe that they must first create a conducive culture
before rolling out a change effort. This belief sounds logical and plausible: to ensure success,
one should first get rid of the obvious obstacles that may get in the path, including an
unfavorable organizational culture (Kotter et al., 2011). However, according to Kotter &
Cohen (2102), that line of thought is flawed. For them, a culture changes truly only after a
new way of doing things has been demonstrated to succeed over some time. Persuaded by
Kotter & Cohen’s rather controversial line of thought, the guiding team proposes to make the
change stick by first ensuring some consistent successes for the new venture before trying to
bring about a culture change.

What May Not Help in Making Change Stick

Besides the common tendency to push through a culture change before demonstrating
the viability of a proposed change, another mistake that change promoters often make is that
of making a change effort over-reliant on one person (Kotter & Cohen, 2012). Usually, this
will be someone up that hierarchy who is fired up about a change, but who did not care
enough to heed Kotter & Cohen’s advice to sell the vision, persuade for buy-in, build a
guiding team and empower the team and others in the organization for action. The guiding
team will be careful to avoid this pitfall of over-relying one person to bear the vision and
sustain the change. Indeed, this is the very reason a guiding team was put in place to steer the
proposed change effort.

Conclusion

To sum it up, this paper has described the measures the guiding team will take to
make the change initiative last: not stopping at the seventh step, promoting high levels of

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employee retention, using new employee orientation as an opportunity to showcase what the
company really stands for and cares about, taking advantage of the promotion process,
continually telling stories about the new venture, and using successes to reinforce a new
culture. Meanwhile, the team will be careful to avoid the following pitfalls: relying on one
person to hold together the change effort and trying to change culture as a pre-requisite for
change.

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References

Carroll, A. H. (2020). Leadership Strategies for Implementing Organizational Change.
Minneapolis: Walden University.
Kotter, J. P., & Cohen, D. S. (2012). The heart of change: Real-lfe stories of how people
change their organizations. Boston: Harvard Business Press.
Kotter, J. P., Chan Kim, W., & Mauborgne, R. A. (2011). HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Change
Management. Boston: Harvard Business Press.
McMillan, K., & Perron, A. (2013). Nurses Amidst Change: The Concept of Change Fatigue
Offers an Alternative Perspective on Organizational Change. Policy, Politics, &
Nursing Practice, Unpaginated.