Management

Leading change with the Kotter method

New owners, a new property management system, a restructure, a new regulator requirement: change programmes fail on adoption far more often than on strategy. Two days on Kotter eight steps, applied to a change you are actually running rather than to a case study.

The words Change Management on a red band, surrounded by a word cloud of training and business terms, with a hand holding a pen

What you will be able to do

  • Understand the human mechanisms of change, and adapt your posture as a manager accordingly
  • Master the 8 steps of the Kotter method to steer a transformation project in a structured and effective way
  • Identify and lift individual and collective resistance using communication tools and transactional analysis
  • Mobilise key people around a shared vision and a coherent action plan
  • Anchor change durably in the culture of your team or organisation

Programme

  1. Opening and framing: where do you stand on change?

    • Cross-introductions and the change projects each participant brings
    • Your personal relationship to change: anchors, beliefs, posture
  2. The natural stages of change: why people resist

    • The main psychological phases of change (the change curve, behavioural models)
    • Identifying which stage each team member has reached
    • Practical tools: ownership, factual communication, transactional analysis
    • Role-play: adapting what you say to the other person's profile
    • Workshop: mapping your team in the face of change
  3. The Kotter method, the frame that structures everything

    • The 8 steps, from a felt sense of urgency to cultural anchoring
    • Why each step matters, and what happens when one is skipped
    • Concrete examples: reorganisations, relocations, service changes, customer transformation
  4. Workshops: your change plan in action

    • Working groups by project or by team, with canvases, step sheets and analysis grids
    • Creating urgency, forming the coalition, building the vision
    • Communicating, removing obstacles, creating quick wins, anchoring
    • Trainer feedback on every piece of work, and public-speaking tips built into the workshops
  5. Putting it into action and commitments

    • Sequencing the change over time and choosing progress indicators
    • The actions to launch the following week
    • Three concrete commitments per participant, and cross-presentation of the action plans

Why this training

Reorganisation, a change of ownership, a new system, a changing guest journey: change is constant. Transformation projects nevertheless stall far more often on adoption than on the strategy behind them.

Two days on Kotter eight steps, applied throughout to a change the participants are actually running.

What makes change land differently here

Two things recur in Seychellois organisations. Ownership changes hands more often than in larger markets, and each change arrives with its own standards and reporting lines. And the teams affected are small, long-serving and closely connected, which means informal communication outruns the official version every time.

Kotter urgency and coalition steps are where most of the two days goes for that reason: in a small organisation those are the steps that decide whether the change is carried or merely announced.

Questions about this training

Do we work on a real change or on a case study?

On a real one. Participants bring the change they are running and leave with the eight steps applied to it. A case study is easier to teach and produces nothing usable on the Monday.

Why Kotter rather than another model?

Because its eight steps are sequential and diagnosable: a stalled programme can usually be traced to a step that was skipped. That makes it a working tool rather than a description.

Is it suited to a small organisation?

Yes, and the steps get shorter rather than fewer. In an organisation of forty people the coalition is three people and the communication plan is a series of conversations, but skipping either still stalls the change.

Can a management team attend together?

That is the usual arrangement in-company, and the better one: the eight steps are hard to apply alone, and a team that has done the two days together has a shared vocabulary for the year that follows.

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