Walker Webcast: HBS Professor John Kotter on Leading Change with Head and Heart

The timing of James Kotter’s appearance on the Walker Webcast could hardly have been more auspicious, with the Harvard Business School professor emeritus and management consultant guesting two days after Walker & Dunlop announced its largest acquisition to date: the $696-million deal for Alliant Capital. CEO Willy Walker said he and his team would follow the principles outlined in the latest of Kotter’s 20-plus books, Change, as they integrate Alliant’s workforce and platform into the parent company. 

The inventor of the “8-Step Process for Leading Change” touts creating a sense of urgency as the first step toward implementing that process. However, Kotter noted on the Wednesday webcast that while such urgency is needed on a continuous basis, it’s not to be confused with constant activity.  

Too much of the day-to-day business activity amid the pandemic is being driven by stress and anxiety, creating what he called a “false urgency, which you don’t need.” Instead, the urgency an organization should be pushing for is focused on opportunity, rather than panic. 

Kotter cited an online presentation he viewed recently, which was accompanied by some 80 slides. As the presentation unfolded, Kotter took notes, grouping the slides’ themes into one of two columns: “survive” and “thrive,” i.e. finding new opportunities. When all was said and done, about 75 were listed in the “survive” column, compared to eight in the “thrive” column. 

Surviving and thriving aren’t mutually exclusive concepts, Kotter told Walker, his onetime Harvard Business School student. However, these two hard-wired mechanisms need to operate in equilibrium.  

Along similar lines, decision-making ought to involve both head and heart, and Kotter said the latter is often given short shrift, although the capacity for heart is within each of us. 

‘Sometimes it’s hidden under a few inches of steel,” he added. 

Leading change isn’t about controlling the entire process, Kotter said. Rather, it’s about empowerment, and mobilizing the team “to make extraordinary things happen.” 

It’s also broad-based: Kotter said the more widespread the buy-in across an organization, the more successful the implementation of that change will be, whether it’s introducing a new technology or integrating operations from an acquisition. 

“You need a social movement, not just a few people with a management program doling out information,” Kotter advised. 

Although Kotter International, which Kotter co-founded in 2008 and leads as chairman, does most of its work with private-sector clients, Kotter said the business world has much to learn from the public sector. He has recommended Nelson Mandela’s memoirs as the best autobiography or biography a business student could read, and his doctoral thesis was on the performance of 20 big-city mayors in the late 1960s. 

Preparing that thesis, Kotter recalled, entailed going to each city, interviewing people who knew and worked with each mayor and seeing the mayors themselves in action. The range of performance separating the best and worst of the 20, he said, “was not significant. It was galactic.” 

On-demand replays of the Sept. 1 webcast are available by clicking here and through Walker & Dunlop’s Driven by Insight podcast series.