Many who are familiar with Dr. John Kotter’s 8-Step Process for Leading Change and the later terminology of 8 Accelerators may know that building a guiding coalition is predicated on the basis of having created a sense of urgency around a case for change.
Whether through having consciously created a sense of urgency, or by more organic means, there will be people in your organisation who view the change you want to create as a positive thing. When people are inspired by change, or by the need for the change, they will support it.
For forming a guiding coalition Kotter describes an expression-of-interest approach, and recommends selecting people based on their reasons for supporting the change, their credibility and having motivations that don't conflict with it. Another consideration is workload. Becoming a leader in a change project can be a very significant time draw.
Of Kotter's 8 steps or Accelerators, today we look at building a guiding coalition.
From the website https://www.kotterinc.com/methodology.
Regular readers of this blog will know how much leadership contributes to successful transformations. A guiding coalition is different to project sponsorship. Sponsorship is key to achieving support, clarity on the vision and mission, accountability, resources and so on. At Agencia Change, our experience has lead us to recommend having a single party be ultimately accountable for the nuts and bolts of getting change done. You can see more in The Power of a Single Sponsor: Driving Success in Project Management.
This is different to the concept of getting a team of people behind the change. Nothing in change management is achieved by individuals: change is all about people and how they work together to create and embed something entirely new. It's about teamwork. While the guiding coalition concept that Kotter discusses is perhaps more strategic in nature than many readers will encounter, the idea is entirely valid for a more narrowly defined scope.
Build a Guiding Coalition: Form a coalition of committed individuals from within the organisation to guide, coordinate, and communicate change efforts.
In the implementation of a new cloud-based system to manage customer feedback and ministerial correspondence for a complex government agency, I supported the change from old, disjointed technology to interagency collaboration on a SaaS platform across non-standard architecture.
Included in the change management effort was managing the needs of two separate user communities, each around 7,000 people, advocating for and supporting business representatives throughout the unfamiliar agile development process, and establishing two separate working groups in a highly complex technical, cultural and political environment.
Expressions of interest were sought, and each agency nominated two-three key representatives. There was a range of formal statuses in the leadership group, but it soon developed into junior and senior people working together. The group was initially polite but defensive of their patch. By setting the tone positively, interaction within the group was maintained on a professional basis and each group member understood the expectations on them to both guide the development of the solution, as well as to guide the acceptance and adoption of it in their own representative area. This meant working through conflicting requirements and coming up with compromises.
Throughout the considerations of a variety of customer needs, mixed organisational cultures, various intelligence needs in terms of output from the system, complex regulatory frameworks and varied user requirements; the group came to see the people with the best information taking the lead in key discussions, rather than the highest in the hierarchy.
Over time the group aligned on the vision for the change, and recognised cultural blockers and resistance that became jointly-owned problems. One such example was the reluctance of each sub-agency to relinquish control of its customer interactions to the parent agency in the form of a central, standardised process and system. The leadership team was instrumental in 'selling' the change into each of their agencies. They saw that rarely were their customers isolated to a single agency, and more commonly customers of one agency were customers across the group. This enabled them to see benefits of joining up the customer experience for both customer and agency alike. This logical step enabled forward momentum for the entire group and the end-goal was seen to outweigh the cost of parochial customer ownership.
The leadership group owned their individual projects and shared information and ownership across the program. There were times when this became tricky, especially around details of taxonomy that were thought to have been settled until case management was investigated more deeply in each agency. Agencies either had to develop a new, joint taxonomy or accept the taxonomy of a single agency as standard. In the end they resolved to compromise and develop a common taxonomy for case management and for joint-case resolution, while retaining their individual taxonomies in the lower orders of system functionality.
Conclusion on Kotter's Step: Build a Guiding Coalition
The only way the solution design, change management and implementation became possible on this program was through establishing a coalition of technical and business leads to help guide, understand, interpret and implement the change.
Although starting at somewhat of a distance from each other with stringent, individual requirements, the group developed into a team, hashing out joint priorities and joint decisions when required.
The leadership group members understood that by participating with the change program and leading the change in their agencies, that they had the chance to make a real difference to the organisation in a strategically important way.
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