by Herb Stevenson
In 1990, John Kotter wrote, A Force for Change: How Leadership Differs from Management. In it he noted that “good management brought a degree of order and consistency to key dimensions like the quality and profitability of products. “Leadership... [however] ...does not produce consistency and order...; it produces movement.” (p. 4). These distinguishing features are the crux of every executive position and the work of OD consultants and executive coaches. Generally, the higher the individual moves up the organization, the greater the focus on leadership and the less on management.
Kotter elaborates by noting the narrow and short term focus of management processes. He indicates that management processes tend to involve three functions:
Juxtaposed to management, leadership leans towards a larger and broader perspective with a longer term that seeks to produce movement within the organization. Leadership seems, in Kotter’s terms, “to boil down to establishing where a group of people should go, getting them lined up in that direction and committed to movement, and then energizing them to overcome the inevitable obstacles they will encounter along the way.” (p. 5) He expands the concept to invoke a critical aspect of what is considered “good” or “effective” leadership, which often seems to get lost in the actual practice within organizations. Kotter notes that “we usually label leadership “good” or “effective” when it moves people to a place in which both they and those who depend upon them are genuinely better off, and when it does so without trampling on the rights of others. The function implicit in this belief is constructive or adaptive change.” (p. 5)
Kotter draws a distinction between managing and leading . In his view, “leadership within a complex organization achieves...[constructive or adaptive change]...through three subprocesses..:
In more recent times we have realized that executive effectiveness is a blend of managing and leading. In basic terms, it is more like having a perspective and capacity to function like a camera with a wide angle, zoom lens. In most day-to-day situations, the executive constantly shifts perspectives from wide angle, to narrow focus, from pinhead to 10,000 foot view. These constantly shifting perspectives are the interface between the executive’s capacity to examine the day-to-day data and “goings-on” within the organization and the multiple views to gain awareness of when to crawl in the weeds and when to admire the skyline view, all in the quest to keep the organization moving in the desired direction.
In 1996, Kotter published his continuing research findings on Leading Change1. Drawing on his findings from A Force for Change, Kotter seems to have focused on effective leadership and constructive (or adaptive) change to determine what motivates people to want to move to another place of being (and doing) in an organization, a place where everyone will be better off without “trampling on others along the way”. With this in mind, Kotter discovered that “good” or “effective” leadership and therefore successful transformational change involves a developmental interface between leadership and the organization that moves through the following eight steps:
As a road map, the eight steps seem a bit elusive as they describe what to do and not necessarily how to be as a leader even though Kotter moves back and forth between Leading change and transformational change as a process. In the next issue, we will pull from the Heart of Change and A Sense of Urgency to clarify how transformational change matches up with leadership development.
[1]1 The 8 Steps of Transforming Change was first published in Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail, Harvard Business Review, March-April, 1995, 59-67.
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