How To Manage Change During An Acquisition

There are many theories about how to manage change. Many come from change management guru, John Kotter, a professor at Harvard Business School. Kotter introduced his eight-step change process in his 1995 book,"Leading Change."

Step One: Create Urgency - 

Kotter suggests that for change to be successful, 75% of a company's management needs to "buy into" the change. So for change to happen there needs to be a shared a sense of urgency around the need for change.

And this will result from honest and open dialogue with your people about what's happening in your market and with your competition. If many people start talking about the change you propose, the urgency can build and feed on itself.

Step Two: Form a Powerful Coalition

To successfully persuade people that change is necessary takes strong leadership and the very visible support from key people within your organisation.

This isn't just about managing change - this has to be led and you have to be seen to lead it.

To lead change, you need to bring together a coalition, or team, of influential people whose power comes from a variety of sources, including job title, status, expertise, and political importance.

You can find effective change leaders at all levels within your organisation - they don't necessarily follow the traditional company hierarchy. It is important to get an emotional commitment from these key people as you build a team to support your change initiative.

Step Three: Create a Vision for Change

You need to create a clear coherent vision that people can grasp easily and remember and that can help everyone understand why you're asking them to do something.

When people have clarity about what you're trying to achieve, and why then you stand a greater chance of communicating with them

Step Four: Communicate the Vision

How effectively and consistently you share and communicate your vision will have a big influence on the success of your change initiative.

There will be resistance and competing messages from many other sources and influences within your organization so you need to communicate it frequently and powerfully, and embed it within everything that you do.

It's also extremely important to "walk the talk." What you do is far more credible than what you say. You have to demonstrate the kind of behaviour and attitudes that you want from your people.

Step Five: Remove Obstacles

There will be resistance to change. You need to identify it early and take steps to deal with it finding and resolving the root causes.

Put in place the structure for change, and continually check for barriers to it - especially with your organisational structure, job descriptions, and performance and compensation systems - it is vital that these are in line with your vision.

Step Six: Create Short-term Wins

Success breeds success - so early wins are very motivational and very important for morale and for overcoming resistance.

You can help achieve this by setting achievable and believable short-term targets.

This is very much in line with Ken Blanchard's ideas in "The One Minute Manager" of "catching them doing something right" [and praising them for it].

Step Seven: Build on the Change

Kotter argues that many change projects fail because victory is declared too early - he teaches that real and lasting change runs deep.

This is really all about building momentum and making continuous improvement an embedded part of your culture. In practice this means keeping things fresh with new ideas and regular review of what went right with each win identifying areas for improvement.

Step Eight: Anchor the Changes in Corporate Culture

Finally, to make any change stick, it should become part of the culture of your organisation as this is the biggest determinant of how people will behave.

It's also important that your company's leaders continue to support the change. This includes existing staff and new leaders who are brought in. If you lose the support of these people, you might end up back where you started.

In my opinion there are many aspects to Kotter's 8 principles of how to manage change that resonate with, and are totally consistent with, the holistic and wide view perspective of a program based approach to change management.

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