Leading change
Life has been running at a speed of 150mph since the new semester has started. Guess, it’s time to a take a pause and reflect on the learnings. These past six weeks have been the most stressful in my entire tenure at Harvard. Life surely gets hardest as you get closer to the summit and this being my last semester towards graduation, the workload and stress both are at its peak!
A lot of great new learnings in both the courses that I’ve taken this semester. Just wish I had a little more time to enjoy all this rather than getting so stressed about it.
Anyways, so last weekend I was assigned this task of analyzing and criticizing a very well-known author’s book called Leading Change – Why transformation efforts fail? With other five assignments that were due on the same weekend, I had only six hours to work on this one. And in those six hours, I had to read this book multiple times and then analyze the readings and present a business rhetoric paper.
At first, it didn’t seem to be as difficult of a task as it was. As I’m already leading change in my day job, this topic is very close to my heart. So that ways, I was lucky to get one of my favorite topics as compared to other students who had to work on politics and history.
To give you a brief, this book is written by John P. Kotter who also happens to be a retired professor from MIT and Harvard Business School. Kotter is a credible authority on this subject. He is internationally known and widely regarded as the foremost speaker on the topics of Leadership and Change.
In this book, the author persuades its readers for making real changes in business organizations and having them stick. According to him, most of the change initiatives fail or produce low results because organizations treat these transformations efforts as an event and not a process. The purpose and the problem statement defined in this book is right on spot. It requires a concrete plan for any organizational transformation then whether the intention is to boost quality, improve culture or embrace change by adopting new tools and technologies. Kotter’s book provides a solid framework for understanding change and beginning the process of addressing change in any type of organization: large and small, private or public. He encourages you to make a commitment to leap into the future as well as help yourself and others develop leadership skills. Context here is ‘embracing change’ and ‘accelerating transformation’.
Kotter claims that by understanding the 8 stages of change— and the pitfalls unique to each stage—organizations can boost their chances of a successful transformation. He claims that by following the given 8 steps in the sequential order can help minimize the risk of failure. To support his claim, Kotter offers a tantalizing thesis of why organizations fail: (1) too much complacency, (2) lack of a powerful guiding coalition, (3) underestimating the power of vision, (4) under-communicating the vision, (5) permitting obstacles to block the vision, (6) failing to create short-term wins, (7) declaring victory too soon, (8) neglecting to anchor changes firmly in the culture. He offers a practical approach to an organized means of leading, not managing, change.
Kotter has made some very valid points in this book and his thesis still has relevance as the basics still remain the same although this book was written more than a decade ago. I like his writing style and he’s definitely very persuasive but somehow, I couldn’t relate to few examples that he has used to support his evidence. Today, we live in an agile world where we are following the iterative approach to accelerate and deliver value in every two weeks, whereas, Kotter has used examples of getting that work done in months.
As he has talked about only the 8 common mistakes that organizations make, the list is still extensive and one common mistake that came to my mind was that change initiatives are failing because organizations do not have a well-defined structure and job roles. Many organizations still have engineers leading the projects whereas the project experts are involved in other stuff that is no way related to their expertise. It is very important to understand the importance of each role-player. All these roles are equally important because of the differing perspectives they bring.
In my decades of work experience as a Project/Product Manager, I’ve seen tons of projects failing. In most of the times, project engineering aspect was carried out successfully, but the project management was executed poorly because the benefit of the project was not realized in an acceptable time frame. These organizations designated Project Engineers only to lead the projects and engineers can only bring technical expertise, however Project managers implement a project to achieve a business objective and are primarily concerned with the viability and success of a project from a business standpoint. The perspective and focus are very different.
You can find a Project Manager with technical knowledge but it’s very rare to find an engineer who is aligned with the business-side of the things. Moreover, Project Managers are trained to work with cross functional teams and deliver the project within a given timeframe. They have full-authority to kill the projects too if they don’t see the value coming out of the time and effort that is put in by the team. Another important goal for them is to make sure there’s not much of a scope-creep and out-of-scope items are also clearly defined in the project charter. It’s all about cost, time and scope and delivering value while staying aligned with the business goals. With iterative approach, we have very little control over the scope, but it is very important to deliver value with each release. In today’s competitive world, our time is very limited because if we're not able to bring out our product in the market faster, our competitor will gain benefit from this. And it’s also the responsibility of a Project Manager to make sure we are having the right resources assigned to the project. There’s no point of having six resources in a project that requires only three. After all, each resource adds up to your cost!
As I can’t share my actual paper online due to Harvard compliance policies, I would still like to share the feedback I received from my professor and two peers who reviewed my paper.
"I enjoyed how Menka intertwined the paper into her everyday life. Writing the paper in this way makes it seem more relevant and important as it shows that it is significant in our daily lives. "
"Overall, I think that Menka did a good job at bringing the reader through Kotter’s paper Leading Change. Her selected examples and quotes provided the evidence needed to explain her stance. I enjoyed reading her paper and felt her excitement within her writing."
It feels really nice to receive a feedback like that. I’m glad I was able to put my passion into action and it was clearly visible to the audience.
