Well any change effort needs a very strong leadership. Kotter suggests the need to form a guiding coalition. You need a small number (in my head, small numbers only have one digit) of powerful individuals who can lead the way both behind the scenes and in public. Although effecting change leadership is not about the exercise of hierarchical power, my experience clearly indicates that the most senior person in the business units or whole business that is being changed must sit on this guiding coalition. If it’s not important enough for the head honcho to spend a significant amount of time on the subject then it’s certainly not important enough for somebody six steps down the hierarchy to commit their efforts. I feel very strongly about this, so strongly that I have vowed never to work on change in an organisation unless the most senior person is both active and visible in promoting the change. Without the active support of the head honcho you are constantly battling uphill.

So who else should be part of your guiding coalition? Basically, this group is about power and influence and those two things do not necessarily correspond with hierarchy. Having got the overall head of the business or business unit on the team, you definitely need the leaders of the particular business units that might be affected; you need the key players in any significant internal customers (I have seen far too many change efforts fail because the leaders of the change became over focused and forgot about the implications of the change on internal or external customers); you need the leader or facilitator of the change effort (their truth about what is happening is more likely to be accurate than the truth being reported by the other interested parties on the group) and finally, you need somebody independent, somebody who will be able to see the wood for the trees and to help keep you at a strategic level. I would even go so far as its suggest that this latter person chairs this guiding coalition.

Having formed the team, and it is a team, there is a need to understand and learn how to work effectively together in this environment. As I have said earlier, hierarchy is not important, indeed sometimes it is positively unhelpful if the senior player keeps insisting they are right. The value of hierarchy is for sending external signals, the reassuring the organisation that the bosses are behind this and satisfying external stakeholders about goals and progress. Work within the team needs to be on the basis of equals with each of the equals having a key influencing role in relation to the change.

My final recommendation is that this team is provided with professional facilitation. Leading change is not ‘business as usual’ and the processes associated with business as usual may well be inappropriate-after all those of the processes that led to the business to the point at which it needs to make significant change! So invest in a professional facilitator who can work with the individuals and the team to help stay objective where appropriate and subjective where appropriate, to support the individuals and the team when the going gets tough (and it will get tough sometime) and to help develop and deliver processes appropriate for this critical time in the organisation’s career.