Building Kotter’s guiding team

• What do we mean by Building The Guiding Team?
• Why is it important?
• What is needed to build the team?
• What is good practice in creating the team?

Here red¹⁰ ‘s  Paul Gaskell explains Kotter’s second step of 8 in the widely used Kotter change model

Managing change using Kotter’s 8 steps

Step Two – Build The Guiding Team

This article is all about Kotter’s Step Two

This article is part of our series on Change Guru John Kotter’s tried and tested eight steps for Change Leadership.

Before you start this step two – have you done everything you can to put step one in place, which says “Stop…don’t do anything else until you’ve helped everyone stew in why we need to change, so that we increase the sense of urgency”.

Read about step one here.

Why do you need a “Guiding Team”?

Kotter specifically talks about the ineffectiveness of the ‘hero CEO’ as a way of pushing through change or trying to have low level task force drive the change.

In fact, large-scale changes may involve creating additional groups at lower levels in the organization to help drive action. In this case, Kotter talks about a guiding coalition of groups/teams, as 50 or more people are rarely a team…

Choosing The Leader for the “Guiding Team”

Building the “Guiding Team” starts with an individual who will become the leader of the guiding team.

Kotter says that this leader needs to really feel the urgency, have it oozing out of them, so that with their enthusiasm and commitment they pull in the first team members.

Choosing the team

In turn, there’s a combination of capabilities that the team will need:

• • Knowledge of what is happening outside the organization related to the change.
  • Credibility, connections, and stature within the organization.
  • Insight into how the organization operates.
  • Formal authority and the skills around planning and organization.
  • Strong leadership skills around vision, communication and motivation.

The team is created by pulling people in, and at times pushing people out of the team, where the momentum is being affected.

• Team members should feel excited to be part of the team and the change effort.
• Team should be diverse – representing key areas of the organization (in the context of the change), people with potentially different perspectives (e.g. Finance and Sales) and including those who are impacted.

Why is it so important?

Creating the right team with key players in key roles with the right sense of urgency is critical to the change effort.

If key players are not playing key roles, Kotter tells us that this usually means that urgency is too low and complacency, anger or fear are too high. If this is the case, the focus needs to be on this issue – and only this issue – before we think about the team and teamwork.

What is needed to build the team?

Once you have your guiding team, it’s important to invest in building trust, emotional commitment and developing teamwork.
Some key principles:

• Build trust – this isn’t always easy where people don’t have obvious connections. Model the right behaviors around trust and teamwork and encourage others to do the same – especially if you are the leader.
• Make the meetings work – Kotter highlights the importance of clear agenda and format to help minimize frustration and help the team pull together. Make them focused and be clear about next steps.
• Confront situations when they undermine the creation of the right group. Avoiding these difficult conversations will hurt momentum.

What is good practice when you build the team?

One thing is clear, trying to work around the most senior leader because they are perceived as not effective does not work.

Some narratives that Kotter shares to illustrate principles of what does work in Building the Guiding Team:

• Blues and the Greens – where senior leaders won’t discuss their differences that are preventing change from moving forward (in the story, a merger is stalling). Progress was only possible when the fragmented leadership team talked honestly about the strong feelings that underpinned their differences. The team was only able to coalesce once they worked through these issues together.
• General Mollo – where the leader of the team takes a risk and decides he needs to be extremely truthful to break down the barriers that were preventing progress (the task was to merge the armies of South Africa that had previously been enemies). This is the first step of their journey.

It’s worth saying at this point that there is some overlap between the steps – you might still be building urgency while creating the guiding team. Equally while developing the guiding team, it’s likely you’ll begin the process of building the vision (leading towards Step Three – Get the Vision Right).

Summary

Building the right guiding team is a critical in driving forward any large-scale change. It requires picking the right leader and team members who share the sense of urgency and can help move the change forward. If the team is not ready to take on the challenge, you should go back, deal with any issues and revisit Step One – Increase the Urgency.

if you are interested in finding out more about this approach to changes, please get in touch. Are you interested in reading about step three?