Leading Change: Why Most Transformation Efforts Fail

By Mats Kallmyr | Kallmyr.com

Kotter (1995) put a number on something most experienced leaders already suspected: the majority of major change efforts fail to fully achieve their goals. Nearly three decades on, that figure is still widely cited, because the underlying causes he identified have not gone away. This article looks at where transformation efforts actually break down, and what transformational leadership specifically contributes to preventing it.

The Missing Sense of Urgency

Kotter’s (1996) first and, in his view, most commonly skipped step is establishing a genuine sense of urgency. Leaders under pressure to look calm often understate the case for change, which paradoxically makes the change harder to land. I saw this inside an e-commerce company migrating to a new platform: the initial communication was so reassuring, “nothing will really change for you”, that almost no one prepared, and the go-live was harder than it needed to be simply because urgency had never been allowed to build.

Resistance Is Rational, Not Irrational

Kotter and Schlesinger (1979) argued that resistance to change is usually a rational response to a real cost the change imposes on someone, whether that cost is workload, status, or simply the effort of relearning something familiar, not a character flaw to be managed away. Transactional leadership tends to respond to resistance with pressure. Transformational leadership responds by first understanding what the resistance is actually protecting, which is very often something legitimate.

What My Research Adds

My own MALIC research (Kallmyr, 2017) found that the presence of transformational leadership behaviours, particularly Inspirational Motivation and Individualized Consideration, was associated with meaningfully higher reported support for change, even when the change itself was objectively difficult. Leadership style did not remove the difficulty of change; it changed how people experienced going through it.

Reducing the Odds of Failure

• Name the real cost of the change to those affected, before someone else names it for you less charitably.
• Treat early resistance as information about a risk, not as an obstacle to push through.
• Build in visible short-term wins early, so people can see the change is working before it is fully finished.

References

• Kallmyr, M. (2017) Leading Innovation and Change: How Transactional and Transformational Leaders Influence Organisational Innovation and Change. MA dissertation. York St John University.
• Kotter, J.P. (1995) ‘Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail’, Harvard Business Review, 73(2), pp. 59-67.
• Kotter, J.P. (1996) Leading Change. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
• Kotter, J.P. and Schlesinger, L.A. (1979) ‘Choosing Strategies for Change’, Harvard Business Review, 57(2), pp. 106-114.

Mats Kallmyr is a senior leader and management consultant with a background spanning telecom, e-commerce, and public sector transformation. Read more at Kallmyr.com or connect via LinkedIn.