I was recently asked to speak at a conference about leading change, based on the well known Kotter model. The audience was a mix of Business Leaders and HR professionals from private, public and not-for-profit sectors – all trying to find the best ways to lead yet more change in their organisations. All of them agreed early in the day that leading change is not something you can hand over to other people (even a change specialist) and is a fundamental part of a leader or business owners role. They also agreed that there is so much change these days that it becomes harder and harder to get people to buy in, and we are in danger of being "changed out".

So, in that context, how do you go about creating a climate for change for your organisation? Here are some hints and tips to get you started, based on the Kotter model:

Create a Sense of Urgency

Change is often harder when you are not forced into it by external factors- those times when you are trying to be proactive and get ahead of the game. In that case, you have to be creative about how to get people to understand the need for change. You know it needs to happen, so why can’t everyone else see it?

First of all, don't just get everyone to panic. There are those who say just do something, anything, rather than stand still. But have you really got the energy and resources to spend running around like a headless chicken? Urgency means moving quickly with a sense of purpose – not making quick knee-jerk reactions. Be careful you don’t confuse the two.

If you have to, start a fire yourself. Sometimes you need to spark things yourself to get people to see the need for change – use surveys, customer feedback, future projections or whatever it takes to get people to buy into the fact that things need to change. Bring it to life, in a way that means something to staff, not just from a business perspective.

Build a powerful, guiding coalition

Putting aside any political jokes that exist about coalitions these days, this is about getting a group of people to champion and drive your change. Supposedly, in any change, 55% of people are tuned out, 26% are supportive and 19% are actively sabotaging. With statistics like that it’s little surprise you need some help.

Be careful to choose the right people though. We all tend to go to the bubbly, enthusiastic types to drive things through – and they can make a huge difference. But if that’s all your coalition, who will challenge the ideas, uncover the urban myths or be prepared to open your eyes to what’s really going on out there. It may be harder work initially to have some different types in your coalition, but it will pay off in the end.

Also make sure you consider all the areas which will be impacted by the change – it is often the people on the outer limits of a change who can really cause stumbling blocks.

Create a vision

If you want people to come on a journey willingly with you, it goes without saying they have to know about the destination. Bring it to life. Paint a picture. Get people feeling like they can imagine what it will feel like when you get there. But often that’s the easy bit. As a leader you also need to :

Tell people about the journey you'll have to go on to get there. If you paint such a great picture of the future and don't mention some of the issues you may face along the way, people will immediately start to feel despondent when things aren't great from the outset.

Give people a route map. Creating a vision is also about identifying tactics to get you there. If you want people to jump on board, the chances are they will want to understand roughly how they are going to get there. Not step by step, but some milestones and highlights along the way.

And finally, if I had one plea for anyone trying to start a change process it would be this - please put some metrics and measures of success in place. It’s amazing how many people and businesses got to a huge amount of effort and feel good about that – even if the business results haven’t changed at all. You are only going through change to change something tangible for your business. No wonder we suffer from change overload, when so many change programmes are only measured in terms of "have we done the activity" not "what impact has it had on our business". After all, without that, we may as well go back to doing the day job and save ourselves the effort.