Kotter Leadership Quotes

Management makes a system work. It helps you do what you know how to do. Leadership builds systems or transforms old ones.

Employees in large, older firms often have difficulty getting a transformation process started because of the lack of leadership coupled with arrogance, insularity, and bureaucracy.

Management is a set of processes that can keep a complicated system of people and technology running smoothly. The most important aspects of management include planning, budgeting, organizing, staffing, controlling, and problem solving. Leadership is a set of processes that creates organizations in the first place or adapts them to significantly changing circumstances. Leadership defines what the future should look like, aligns people with that vision, and inspires them to make it happen despite the obstacles

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Human beings are sometimes slaves to the ugly and weak sides of human nature,” he told employees. “However, if you set high goals for yourselves and every day continue to reflect on them, step by step you will be more focused and make yourself a better human being, becoming a happier person for it.

In successful transformations, the president, division general manager, or department head plus another five, fifteen, or fifty people with a commitment to improved performance pull together as a team. This group rarely includes all of the most senior people because some of them just won’t buy in, at least at first. But in the most successful cases, the coalition is always powerful—in terms of formal titles, information and expertise, reputations and relationships, and the capacity for leadership. Individuals alone, no matter how competent or charismatic, never have all the assets needed to overcome tradition and inertia except in very small organizations. Weak committees are usually even less effective.

Imagine the following. Three groups of ten individuals are in a park at lunchtime with a rainstorm threatening. In the first group, someone says: “Get up and follow me.” When he starts walking and only a few others join in, he yells to those still seated: “Up, I said, and now!” In the second group, someone says: “We’re going to have to move. Here’s the plan. Each of us stands up and marches in the direction of the apple tree. Please stay at least two feet away from other group members and do not run. Do not leave any personal belongings on the ground here and be sure to stop at the base of the tree. When we are all there . . .” In the third group, someone tells the others: “It’s going to rain in a few minutes. Why don’t we go over there and sit under that huge apple tree. We’ll stay dry, and we can have fresh apples for lunch.” I am sometimes amazed at how many people try to transform organizations using methods that look like the first two scenarios: authoritarian decree and micromanagement. Both approaches have been applied widely in enterprises over the last century, but mostly for maintaining existing systems, not transforming those systems into something better. When the goal is behavior change, unless the boss is extremely powerful, authoritarian decree often works poorly even in simple situations, like the apple tree case. Increasingly, in complex organizations, this approach doesn’t work at all. Without the power of kings and queens behind it, authoritarianism is unlikely to break through all the forces of resistance. People will ignore you or pretend to cooperate while doing everything possible to undermine your efforts. Micromanagement tries to get around this problem by specifying what employees should do in detail and then monitoring compliance. This tactic can break through some of the barriers to change, but in an increasingly unacceptable amount of time. Because the creation and communication of detailed plans is deadly slow, the change produced this way tends to be highly incremental. Only the approach used in the third scenario above has the potential to break through all the forces that support the status quo and to encourage the kind of dramatic shifts found in successful transformations. (See figure 5–1.) This approach is based on vision—a central component of all great leadership.

The problem is, of course, that the functions of leadership are not well understood. Leaders, according to John Kotter of the Harvard Business School, function quite differently from managers. Leaders are responsible to provide vision, raise up other leaders, and create useful change. Managers, however, maintain the present system and seek to enhance it. Sadly, most church leaders are, in reality, managers.

The simple insight that management is not leadership (chapter 2) is better understood today, but not nearly as well as is needed. Management makes a system work. It helps you do what you know how to do. Leadership builds systems or transforms old ones.

John Kotter, the noted Harvard professor and author on leadership, writes that the key difference between leaders and managers is that leaders focus on getting to the right questions, whereas managers focus on finding solutions to those questions.13 The focus on finding answers must not obscure the importance of asking the right questions. Successful leaders know that they cannot get the right answer without asking the right questions.

Most complex skills emerge over decades, which is why we increasingly talk about “lifelong learning.” Because we spend so many of our waking hours at work, most of our development takes place—or doesn’t take place—on the job. This simple fact has enormous implications. If our time at work encourages and helps us to develop leadership skills, we will eventually realize whatever potential we have. Conversely, if time at work does little or nothing to develop those skills, we will probably never live up to our potential.

Alice (backed up with the Professor’s relentless logic) convinced Louis to shake up the Leadership Council. He was reluctant to do anything that would show disrespect for birds who had worked hard for years to help and serve the colony. Making the moves while preserving the dignity of all was not easy.

Buddy was offered a number of more important jobs. He turned them all down, but helped the Leadership Council find other good candidates. His lack of ambition came to be seen as great humility. The birds loved him even more.

Grandfather Louis became the colony’s number one teacher. He was asked again and again by the younger birds to tell them the story of the First Great Change. He was initially reluctant, fearing that he would sound like an old-timer boasting about past successes—real or imagined. But eventually, he saw the importance of telling the chicks more about the specific steps the colony had taken, and were taking, to cope with change and the various acts of leadership by many that had helped the colony move forward. Although Louis never said so explicitly, he felt the most remarkable change of all was in how so many members of the colony had grown less afraid of change. The army of volunteers was now an irresistible force of change.

Pull Together the Guiding Team. Make sure there is a powerful group guiding the change—one with leadership skills, credibility, communications ability, authority, analytical skills, and a sense of urgency.

Create a New Culture. Hold on to the new ways of behaving, and make sure they succeed, until they become strong enough to replace old traditions. Better still, make all of these steps a central part of the way you live to help you adapt to an ever faster changing world. Consider: Are we putting those who have helped make change happen in leadership roles? Have the scouts been rewarded? How can we institutionalize change, like adding scouting to the school curriculum?

Question: Is there one takeaway you want readers to carry with them? JK: Yes. In these turbulent times, sufficient leadership, not just from the top couple of people, is very important, far too rare, and it does not have to be that way. It often starts with only one person not looking away or waiting for something to happen, but seizing opportunities to act where others see problems, fault or threat. Why couldn’t that one person be you, or anyone reading this interview right now?

Without cultural change, we are hopeless to change existing results.5 Of all changes, cultural change is the most difficult. It is essentially changing the collective DNA of an entire group of people. To understand how to change culture, it is helpful to know how change works in general. Changing Church Culture Change is extremely difficult. One of the most vivid and striking examples of this painful reality is the inability of heart patients to change even when confronted with grim reality. Roughly six hundred thousand people have a heart bypass each year in the United States. These patients are told they must change. They must change their eating habits, must exercise, and quit smoking and drinking. If they do not, they will die. The case for change is so compelling that they are literally told, “Change or die.”6 Yet despite the clear instructions and painful reality, 90 percent of the patients do not change. Within two years of hearing such brutal facts, they remain the same. Change is that challenging for people. For the vast majority of patients, death is chosen over change. Yet leadership is often about change, about moving a group of people to a new future. Perhaps the most recognized leadership book on leading an organization to change is John Kotter’s Leading Change. And when ministry leaders speak or write about leadership, they often look to the wisdom found in the book of Nehemiah, as it chronicles Nehemiah’s leadership in rebuilding the wall around Jerusalem. Nehemiah led wide-scale change. Nehemiah never read Kotter’s book, and he led well without it. The Lord well equipped Nehemiah for the task of leading God’s people. But it is fascinating to see how Nehemiah’s actions mirror much of what Kotter has observed in leaders who successfully lead change. With a leadership development culture in mind, here are the eight steps for leading change, according to Kotter, and how one can see them in Nehemiah’s leadership. 1. Establish a sense of urgency. Leaders must create dissatisfaction with an ineffective status quo. They must help others develop a sense of angst over the brokenness around them. Nehemiah heard a negative report from Jerusalem, and it crushed him to the point of weeping, fasting, and prayer (Neh. 1:3–4). Sadly, the horrible situation in Jerusalem had become the status quo. The disgrace did not bother the people in the same way that it frustrated Nehemiah. After he arrived in Jerusalem, he walked around and observed the destruction. Before he launched the vision of rebuilding the wall, Nehemiah pointed out to the people that they were in trouble and ruins. He started with urgency, not vision. Without urgency, plans for change do not work. If you assess your culture and find deviant behaviors that reveal some inaccurate theological beliefs, you must create urgency by pointing these out. If you assess your culture and find a lack of leadership development, a sense of urgency must be created. Leadership development is an urgent matter because the mission the Lord has given us is so great.

Culture, in John Kotter’s model, is not changed until the end of the change process. It is that challenging and that time consuming. As difficult as changing behavior is, changing church culture is even more difficult. We only need to return to Nehemiah to learn this painful reality. While he was able to lead the transforming of a wall, though he tried, he was unable to lead the transformation of the culture. A wall was constructed, but the culture was never transformed. After the wall was rebuilt and Ezra read the Law for the first time since the captivity in Babylon, the people responded to God in worship. In Nehemiah 9, they confessed their sins to the Lord. They admitted that their hearts turned from God, in part, because they forgot His great and gracious works for them on their behalf (v. 17). After their confession, they committed in a signed vow to be faithful to the Lord in a few very specific areas: they wouldn’t intermarry with others to preserve their Hebrew faith (10:30), they wouldn’t profane the Sabbath with merchandise (10:31), and they would give to the work of the temple (10:33). But the people were unable to live up to their commitments. When Nehemiah returned to Persia, as he promised, the people miserably violated each of their specific vows (Neh. 13). They were no longer valuing the work of the temple. The Levites, those who served in the temple, had to find another vocation because their needs weren’t met through the giving of God’s people. Work was occurring on the Sabbath again, and the people were intermarrying again, causing God’s people to not know the language of Judah. The people failed in every one of their vows. They couldn’t keep even one. There wasn’t one glimmer of hope, not one indication that they could be faithful to the Lord. Nehemiah begs God to remember him, and then the book ends. Just like that. The book ends with a painful picture of our inability to follow through on our bold commitments to the Lord. We’re left with the humbling realization that we can’t keep our vows. We’re utterly incapable, in our own merit, of delivering on our commitments. The abrupt and bitter ending is intentional. The written Word is shepherding us to our need for the living Word—for Jesus. What the people in the book of Nehemiah needed, and what we find in Christ, is a new covenant written on our hearts (Jer. 31:33). The ending of the book of Nehemiah is both humbling and hopeful for leaders in God’s Church. It is humbling because we understand how challenging it is to cultivate culture. It is hopeful because of Jesus. Because of God’s grace, because He replaces hearts of stone with hearts of flesh, we can have great hope for our church cultures. Who better to understand transformation than the people of God who have been transformed? Can anyone better than Christ-followers understand what it means to be changed? We are transformed people.