Leading Change

Dennis Bolin, Health Plan Alliance

10/10/2016

You have probably heard the axiom, “Different isn’t always better, but better is always different.” My research on Google attributes it to the great thinker “anonymous.” But the maxim, no matter how true, doesn’t say anything about something else we know to be true: doing things better and different isn’t easy. Change takes effort.

On October 18, 2016, 15 Alliance member CEOs will participate in a workshop on Change Management led by Aleen Bayard of NuBrick.  

One of the articles the participants will discuss is “Leading Change” by John P. Kotter, first published in the Harvard Business Review in 1995. Even if you haven’t read the article it will sound familiar because it often comes up during Alliance meetings.

In the article, Kotter goes through eight steps that are essential to achieving change in an organization, whether enterprise-wide or in a small department. His perspective is that if you don’t go through each step – if you short-change or skip one – you end up only needing to go back and repeat it. To drive his point home he doesn’t talk about them as steps rather he lists them as “errors” if you don’t do them. They are: 

• Error 1:  Not establishing a great enough sense of urgency
• Error 2:  Not creating a powerful enough guiding coalition
• Error 3:  Lacking a vision
• Error 4:  Under communicating the vision by a factor of ten
• Error 5:  Not removing obstacles to the new vision
• Error 6:  Not systematically planning for and creating short-term wins
• Error 7:  Declaring victory too soon
• Error 8:  Not anchoring changes in the corporations culture 

A couple of comments on Error 2: not creating a powerful enough guiding coalition. This error is the one I hear about most often among attendees at Alliance events. Kotter talks about both the composition of the coalition and the role of leaders in driving the coalition. He points out that often the senior leadership team does not work all that successfully as a team leading change. That is why the Alliance preceded this workshop with one on team development last April. An anecdote was shared at a recent Alliance meeting about a CEO who stood in front of the plan’s leadership team and stated in strong terms that no initiative was more important than the one they were discussing. It got the attention of the team and changed the direction of the discussion.

I would not be surprised if every generation of leaders feels like they face unprecedented challenges and change. So I hesitate to say that what health plan leaders face today is more challenging than previous times. But certainly we are confronted with a confluence of challenges that tests seasoned leaders.  And as Kotter says at the end of his article, “…everything is made to sound a bit too simplistic. In reality, even successful change efforts are messy and full of surprises.”

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