Choosing Strategies for Change
Between 1979 and long before his 1996 best-seller Leading Change, Kotter and HBS colleague, Leonard Schlesinger, reflected upon strategies to bring about change in a company setting. Interestingly, Schlesinger went on to become a business executive, and in 2008 the President of the Boston area’s Babson College. The duo considered why resistance to change might be met, how to tackle it, and how to choose the appropriate strategy to do so.
Schlesinger and Kotter (Schlesinger, Schlesinger, Sathe, and Kotter 1992) acknowledged that change always generates and emotional reaction, despite the change’s size or importance. These emotional reactions manifest in different ways, either passively or aggressively. Be understanding why people resist change, one can better predict the impact of an announcement of change. The authors identified four common triggers for resistance: