Leading a team through change or uncertainty works best when leaders follow a sequence rather than improvising: build urgency, assemble a coalition, set a vision, communicate it constantly, empower people to act, bank short-term wins, keep pushing, and institutionalize the new way of working. This is the logic behind Kotter's 8-step model, still one of the most widely used playbooks for organizational change.
What Is Kotter's 8-Step Change Model?
Harvard Business School professor John Kotter first laid out the model in "Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail" in the March-April 1995 Harvard Business Review and expanded it in his 1996 book Leading Change. A summary of that article published by Cornell University's HR division lays out the eight steps in order: establishing a sense of urgency, forming a powerful guiding coalition, creating a vision, communicating the vision, empowering others to act on the vision, planning for and creating short-term wins, consolidating improvements and producing still more change, and institutionalizing new approaches. Kotter, together with his firm, later evolved this linear sequence into the 8 Accelerators described in his 2014 book Accelerate and the firm's 2021 book CHANGE. The model works whether a team is gathered in a conference room or spread across a Zoom grid, because the steps govern how people process change, not where they sit.
| Step Name | What the Leader Does |
|---|---|
| Establishing a sense of urgency | Make the case for why waiting is riskier than acting |
| Forming a powerful guiding coalition | Recruit a credible, influential group to lead the effort |
| Creating a vision | Define what the future looks like after the change |
| Communicating the vision | Repeat the vision through every available channel |
| Empowering others to act on the vision | Clear structural and personal obstacles to progress |
| Planning for and creating short-term wins | Deliver visible, early proof the change is working |
| Consolidating improvements and producing still more change | Keep driving change instead of declaring victory early |
| Institutionalizing new approaches | Embed new behavior into systems, roles, and culture |
Why Do Change Efforts Fail Without a Structured Model?
Leaders often assume change will manage itself once a decision is announced. The data says otherwise. McKinsey research published in November 2025 puts it plainly: while the old mantra held that 70 percent of change programs fail, well-informed leaders are able to flip the odds to reach 70 to 80 percent success rates. What separates the two outcomes is how leaders run the change, and Kotter's model is one of the best-known frameworks for checking that work step by step.
The backdrop makes the stakes higher than ever. The same McKinsey article, citing a 2023 Harvard Business Review piece, reports that the average employee now experiences ten planned change programs a year, a fivefold increase from a decade ago, which means teams are rarely dealing with one change in isolation. At the same time, Gallup reports that global employee engagement sat at just 20 percent in 2025, and while global wellbeing improved for the first time in three years, increasing by one percentage point to 34 percent, that still leaves most employees far from thriving. Leading change on top of that baseline requires more structure, not less.
How Do You Apply Each Step When Leading Through Uncertainty?
Uncertainty changes the texture of each step, but not the order.
Urgency has to be framed around opportunity as well as risk, because fear alone breeds compliance rather than commitment. The guiding coalition should include skeptics, not just allies, since skeptics surface the objections a leader will eventually have to answer anyway. The vision needs to be simple enough to repeat from memory, because during uncertainty people reach for the clearest story available, and if leadership has not supplied one, rumor will. Communicating the vision cannot be a single memo or town hall. It has to repeat across every channel a team uses, whether that is a Zoom all-hands, a hallway conversation, or a written update, until the message feels redundant to the leader and only then is it landing with the team.
Empowering others to act during uncertain periods often means directly addressing a manager who is quietly undermining the change because they fear losing status, not just clearing a process obstacle on paper. Short-term wins matter more in uncertain conditions because they give people proof the change is survivable before they are asked to fully commit. Consolidating improvements and producing still more change means resisting the temptation to declare victory after the first win, since many change efforts stall exactly there. Finally, institutionalizing the new approaches means rewriting job descriptions, scorecards, and onboarding materials so the new way of working outlives the original announcement and the leader who made it.
- People ask the same question in different words at every meeting, a sign urgency has not been established
- Only one or two leaders are talking about the change, with no coalition visible beneath them
- Different managers describe the vision differently when asked, meaning it has not been simplified enough
- No visible win has been communicated since the change began, leaving people to assume it has stalled
- Old habits and documents have not been updated, so the former way of working is still technically on record
How Long Should a Change Effort Take?
There is no universal timeline, and any leader who promises one is setting up a credibility problem. What matters more than speed is sequence: a coalition formed before a vision is announced, a vision repeated before action is demanded, and a win banked before leaders ask a team to sustain momentum for the long haul. Teams meeting on Zoom may need more deliberate repetition of the vision since informal hallway reinforcement does not happen on its own, while in-person teams may need more explicit short-term wins since physical proximity makes stalled progress harder to hide. Either way, skipping a step to save time is one of the most common reasons transformations stall partway through.
FAQ
Is Kotter's model still relevant for leading remote or hybrid teams?
Yes. The sequence of steps addresses how people process change psychologically, which does not depend on whether a team is in a room or on a call. What changes is the mechanism: urgency and vision need to be repeated more deliberately across digital channels when a team is not physically co-located, since the informal reinforcement that happens in hallways has to be replaced with intentional, repeated communication.
What is the single biggest mistake leaders make with Kotter's model?
Treating it as a checklist to move through once rather than a discipline to revisit. Leaders commonly declare victory after the first short-term win, which is exactly the point at which momentum typically stalls, since the work of consolidating improvements and institutionalizing the change into roles, scorecards, and habits has not yet happened.
How does a guiding coalition differ from a leadership team?
A guiding coalition is built for credibility and influence across the organization, not for formal authority. It deliberately includes respected voices from outside the executive suite, including skeptics, because people who can surface objections early make the vision stronger before it is widely communicated.
Why do short-term wins matter so much during uncertainty?
Uncertainty erodes confidence faster than it erodes compliance. A visible, early win gives people proof the change is survivable and working before they are asked to commit fully, which converts cautious participation into genuine support.
Leading a team through uncertainty is rarely a skills problem. It is a sequencing problem, and sequencing is coachable. If you want a structured plan to apply Kotter's 8 steps to the change your team is facing right now, book a free consultation and we will map it out together. Book your free consultation
Disclaimer: This article is for general informational purposes and is not a substitute for individualized leadership or legal advice. Figures and quotes were captured on 2026-09-21 from Cornell University HR (hr.cornell.edu), the University of Colorado (cu.edu), Kotter (kotterinc.com), McKinsey & Company (mckinsey.com), and Gallup (gallup.com); readers should verify current figures directly with those sources, as change-management research is updated frequently.
References:
- Cornell University Division of Human Resources, "Kotter Model for Leading Change" (after John P. Kotter, "Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail," Harvard Business Review, March-April 1995), captured 2026-09-21
- University of Colorado, "Best Practices in Managing Change" (adapted from J. Kotter, Leading Change, Harvard Business Press, 1996), captured 2026-09-21
- Kotter, "The 8 Steps for Leading Change," kotterinc.com, captured 2026-09-21
- McKinsey & Company, "Change is changing: How to meet the challenge of radical reinvention," McKinsey Quarterly, November 19, 2025, captured 2026-09-21
- Gallup, "State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report," global data summary, captured 2026-09-21