- Not establishing a great enough sense of urgency
- Not creating a powerful enough guiding coalition
- Lacking a vision
- Undercommunicating the vision by a factor of 10
- Not removing obstacle to the new vision
- Not systematically planning for, and creating, short-term wins
- Declaring victory too soon
- Not anchoring changes in the corporations culture
As I read through this list, a few observations came to mind. First, I thought of change efforts that I have observed. I also noticed that the whole article is written from the perspective of someone at the top who has a lot of power, which led to a question: is it the general consensus among people who write about change that change generally does come from the top? Where does that leave those of us who don't see ourselves as bosses? So change efforts that I thought about as I read this article included a management change at a conference center where I worked in my early twenties, the process and Baylor that you described, and the most recent ousting of our president at Fort Hays State University. Two of these I observed from a rather low-power position in the whole process.
Let me say first that I am extremely cynical of change efforts that come from the top down and perhaps some of that is shaped by my experience working at this conference center. I was hired in guest services just about the time the new management was put in place. Because there were a couple of tiers of management between me and the top management, all of their vision was communicated through general meetings, my immediate supervisor was not on board, and I generally felt like the upper management was out of touch. What I noticed--or what seemed to be the case as months passed--was that they didn't really care about the employees working at the conference center at all. They fired the general manager who was over my supervisor. Then they fired my supervisor and replace her with a member of their management team. He then proceeded to interview all of us, and when I expressed (as I am apt to do) my reservations, he found a way to lay me off (that is, he transferred me to a different department and switched me from full time to part time--fully expecting me to quit). I didn't quit. My cousin ended up getting hired into the department that I was transferred from, and he told me that it was never a good working environment, even after they were given yet another supervisor. Anyway, that experience leads me to believe that change top-down processes do not value people nearly as much as Kotter implies that they do. That may work differently in higher education, I suppose. Conference centers get more of their value from their facilities than they do from their staff.
Anyway, we talked about the process at Baylor, and all that this article made me reflect on was that one can follow all the steps and even have a fairly successful change and still have collateral damage. Is change war? Is it possible that even when the outcomes are positive, one side or the other ends up getting sacrificed for the good of all? You said the change at Baylor stuck right? In the case of this conference center, they, in my opinion, re-invented the wheel, spruced a few things up here and there and after years of guerrilla warfare in human resources, came out with an almost completely new staff and a modestly more efficient system for running the center. The changes that seemed to make the most difference weren't the ones anyone had a problem with. People just didn't trust the new management, with good cause, as it turns out. The management could not find ways to use the staff that they had, so they just replaced most of them with "friends."
The university that I work for, Fort Hays State University (FHSU), got a new president about three years ago. She was following after a fairly successful president, an older white male who had really helped FHSU grow over about twenty years, following business principals. This new president was a woman and an immigrant from Cuba. When I first heard about her, I was really hopeful that she would be an advocate for our program here in China. She must know how it is to be forced to accommodate American centric ways of doing things (I thought). She did seem to have a great interest for the China program. She invited everyone to explain to her the situation here and elsewhere, and we gave her more feedback than she must have wanted. She started making changes, and for our part, the China faculty was excited and on board. However, her visits became less responsive. She would say things like, "I want solutions, not problems."
Her administration created a new position here in China but didn't pay much attention to our vision of what that position should be. Still, we started to learn more about this administrator, and after some time, he started to have some influence in our program (it takes a little while for anyone to really learn the ropes). Just about the time he was getting his feet under him, this new president started to work around him. She sent people to do business for her in China who had no official position. On the Kansas side of things, the environment became even more tense as she would lose her temper and say harsh things in meetings. Ultimately her downfall came in her inability to negotiate with the faculty at FHSU in Kansas. They shared their concerns with the Board of Regents in an open meeting, it was reported on in the local paper, the Board of Trustees asked for a 360 evaluation, and she resigned about a month later. After she resigned, the acting president, who also happens to be the FHSU CFO, eliminated the administration position in China and reinstated an administrator who has a long history with my program (she helped set up the partnership) but no recent involvement. He also eliminated a number of other positions that the new president created and pretty much all of the staff that she hired as been let go or resigned. The change movement stalled and the reins are now firmly in the hands of the traditionalists. We are still waiting to see who the new president will be, although we now have an interim president--a member of the Kansas Board of Regents.
So... where did this last president go wrong? I think maybe it was step two. It's hard to know all the details from the other side of the Pacific, but one great complaint that was leveled at Dr. Martin was cronyism. Apparently, she hired a lot of people outside the system and then tried to use them to create change, bypassing those who were there to work with her (like the administrator here in China)--interestingly much the same approach as the change leaders at the conference center. I really do think that FHSU needs change. I think that Dr. Martin could have made it work--at least in China, but she underestimated her need for buy-in on the other side and, really, she stopped trusting people.
Social Justice
I don't think that Kotter does a good enough job accounting for power differences in the change process though. What exactly is the role of valuing people in a change effort? Is it enough to identify valuable allies or potential blocks? What do change leaders miss because they are only willing to listen to those who share their vision or with whom they are forced to share power? What role does being part of an "in-group" have on how change comes about (both in creating coalitions and removing blocks)? Change seems to be a matter of closing ranks and building battalions. Is it possible to take a more open, inclusive approach or is that lack of trust just intrinsic to the process? Right now, those resistant people in higher education have to be accommodated, at least to some extent because of things like tenure and no-confidence votes, but will that always be true in higher education? In what environments is valuing people more or less important in regard to Kotter's steps? And in a more concrete sense, to what extent did Dr. Martin fail because she was an immigrant woman of color? Hopefully, I will gain insights to share in this area as I read more about this topic.
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