“Change isn’t easy.”

“Everyone hates change.”

Ever heard one of these expressions? I have. Given the common perception that change is a hard, dreaded process, one can surmise that creating lasting change has serious challenges and pitfalls. And this is true. However, you don’t have to be blind to where those pitfalls lie, and an organization can learn how to skillfully navigate around them.

This article reviews the eight common errors that cause organizations to fail at change initiatives, put forth by John Kotter in his landmark book Leading Change published by the Harvard Business School Press.

Companies need to engage in change initiatives all the time. Do any of these sound familiar? Employee turn-over is too high; sagging customer satisfaction is lowering revenue and increasing support costs; stakeholders are demanding that the company take meaningful strides toward environmental sustainability; employee engagement is low and absenteeism is high; data security is a new top priority. And the stakes are high. Failing at an attempt to change can leave employees with the impression that things can’t be changed—a position worse-off than where you started.

The question is, when it’s your turn to navigate a change initiative, how are you going to identify and avoid the pitfalls? Here are the eight errors organizations most commonly make, put forth by organizational change expert John Kotter.

1. Allowing too much complacency – Some leaders lack the patience to bring everyone else up to speed. Others underestimate the challenge in getting people out of their comfort zone. The bottom line is that people won’t change unless they believe they have to, so complacency with the status quo must be disrupted.
2. Failing to create a sufficiently powerful guiding coalition – Kotter points out that “individuals alone, no matter how competent or charismatic, never have all the assets needed to overcome tradition and inertia except in very small organizations.” It’s easy to underestimate the time and effort required to produce change, and by extension, the importance of a strong guiding coalition to see the effort through.
3. Underestimating the power of vision – Without a clear vision of where things are headed, leadership will have a difficult time focusing all teams in a unified direction. Kotter provides a useful rule of thumb: “Whenever you cannot describe the vision driving a change initiative in five minutes or less and get a reaction that signifies both understanding and interest, you are in for trouble.”
4. Undercommunicating the vision by a factor of 10 (or 100 or even 1,000) – Without consistently communicating the vision, inertia of the status quo wins; employees forget that change is a priority and revert to old behaviors. There are three patterns of ineffective communication, any one of which can undermine the whole change effort. 1) A change plan is created, but communicated only temporarily at the kick-off, with little day-to-day follow-up.  2) The head of the organization communicates the vision broadly, but most of the top management is silent. 3) Effective newsletters and speeches go out, but certain highly-visible individuals still behave antithetically to the vision. All of these establish a tone, “They don’t really mean it. And so I don’t have to either.”
5. Permitting obstacles to block the new vision – An obstacle can take many forms, such as a person, a belief, or an established system. Obstacles carry the inertia of the status quo, and consciously or unconsciously, they retard progress. Management must be ready to dislodge obstacles before an obstacle discourages other employees and destroys momentum toward the vision.
6. Failing to create short-term wins – Change and transformation take time. Unfortunately, human attention spans are short. By not securing or celebrating short-term wins, employees might forget about the change initiative altogether. Employees also are deprived of a sense of incremental progress toward the vision, which reduces motivation and enjoyment in fulfilling the vision.
7. Declaring victory too soon – Kotter warns that “new approaches are fragile and subject to regression.” Trying a new approach for a project or two doesn’t mean that the transformation has sunk into the culture throughout the organization. It’s not uncommon for a cultural shift to take three to ten years. An ironic twist is that change resistors can use the desire to declare victory as a way to re-assert the status quo. Beware the emotion “There! We’ve done it. Now let’s get back to regular life again.” The transformation isn’t complete until it is regular life.
8. Neglecting to anchor changes firmly in the corporate culture – There are two typical ways this failure manifests. The first is by failing to relate improvements in performance to new behaviors. The second is by failing to establish new performance criteria for management, both for promotions and for new hires. If management is not accountable to maintain the new vision, then—you guessed it—they won’t maintain the new vision.

You might ask, “Can I plan from the start to avoid these mistakes?” Absolutely! Leading Change is all about an eight-step framework for lasting transformation, which anticipates and avoids these eight challenges. It’s also what we help you do: create a plan for change; recognize the areas of difficulty, thereby preventing false-starts and failures; and work with management to break from inertia and ensure the most effective change initiative possible. I’ll dig into the proactive steps of how to develop an effective change plan in a later blog post.

READERS: Which of these errors have you seen in your real life? Have you witnessed an organization that skillfully prevented or corrected one of these issues? Tell us the story!