Change leadership is getting people to want a change and drive it forward, through a clear vision and a real sense of urgency. That’s different from change management, which keeps a change under control with plans, tools and structures. John Kotter’s warning is that most organisations do plenty of the managing and very little of the leading.
Say you’re running a 60-person business, and you’ve announced a restructure on Monday. The plan’s solid. HR’s got the consultation timetable, the new reporting lines are drawn and the go-live date’s in the diary. By Tuesday lunchtime, half your team’s reading the new org chart with one question in mind. ‘What happens to me?’ Management got the plan right, but nobody’s led the change yet.
Leading change is where authentic leadership gets tested. People watch what you do long before they’ve read the plan.
Change leadership versus change management
Change management keeps a change under control, and change leadership puts an engine on it. That second phrase is close to Kotter’s own words. In Forbes in 2011, he described change management as “a set of basic tools or structures intended to keep any change effort under control”. Change leadership, he wrote, “concerns the driving forces, visions and processes that fuel large-scale transformation” (Forbes, 2011). He’s blunt about the balance in that piece, too. The world, he wrote, “doesn’t do much change leadership”. He also admitted that leading change “has the potential to get things a little bit out of control” (Forbes, 2011). Leading means accepting a bit of disruption, because a big change doesn’t happen without people feeling it.
Years earlier, in Harvard Business Review, Kotter had drawn the same line between management and leadership in general. “Management is about coping with complexity,” he wrote. “Leadership, by contrast, is about coping with change” (Harvard Business Review, 2001). Harvard Business School Online puts it more plainly. Change leadership, it says, helps organisations through transitional periods “by using the power of vision” (Harvard Business School Online, 2022).
So in practice, management asks how and when. Leadership asks why, and why now. You need both, and on a big change you’ll feel it fast if either one’s missing.
What Kotter learned from 100 companies trying to change
Kotter’s 1995 Harvard Business Review article, “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail”, came out of a decade of watching. He’d seen more than 100 companies try to remake themselves into better competitors, and a few of those efforts were very successful. A few were utter failures. Most fell “somewhere in between”, he wrote, with a tilt towards the lower end (Harvard Business Review, 1995).
Failed changes, he found, almost always stall in at least one of eight phases. HBR’s summary of the article lists them like this (Harvard Business Review, 2007):
- Generating a sense of urgency
- Establishing a powerful guiding coalition
- Developing a vision
- Communicating the vision clearly and often
- Removing obstacles
- Planning for and creating short-term wins
- Avoiding premature declarations of victory
- Embedding changes in the corporate culture
Have a look at that list again. By my count, six of the eight are leadership work. Only removing obstacles and planning the early wins lean on the management side, and even they’ll need a leader pushing.
So if your change plan is mostly timelines and training dates, you’ve covered the smaller part of Kotter’s list.
Where the 70% failure figure comes from
There’s no reliable evidence behind the claim that 70% of change programmes fail, according to a peer-reviewed study that went looking. You’ve probably seen the figure in board papers and slide decks. One version ran in Harvard Business Review in 2000. Michael Beer and Nitin Nohria wrote that “the brutal fact is that about 70% of all change initiatives fail” (Harvard Business Review, 2000). In 2011, Mark Hughes set out to trace where it came from. Writing in the peer-reviewed Journal of Change Management, he critically reviewed five published instances of the 70% figure. His conclusion was that there’s “no valid and reliable empirical evidence” to support it (Hughes, Journal of Change Management, 2011).
Kotter’s own 1995 picture was messier. Most efforts, he found, landed somewhere in the middle, nearer the bottom than the top. That’s a reason to lead better, and it doesn’t come with a neat percentage.
I’d stop quoting 70% altogether. It scares people, and it doesn’t tell them anything about your change. Before you start, write down what success looks like in numbers you’ll be able to check at 12 weeks, and measure that instead.
Leading through change, from a restructure to an AI rollout
Leading through change is mostly conversations. They’ve got to start before the plan goes out. Say you’re rolling out an AI tool across a 25-person customer service team. The management work is real: licences, data access, training dates and a cut-over plan. Leading it means answering the question each person’s really asking, which is whether this makes them more useful or less.
Start with why now, in plain words, before anyone sees a Gantt chart. Kotter put urgency first, and I’d keep it there. Then pick a small guiding group that includes the people your team already listens to, who aren’t always the most senior. And go after an early, visible win you can point to inside a few weeks, because seeing is believing. Then keep talking about it. Kotter’s phrase was communicating the vision “clearly and often”, and once at the launch event doesn’t count.
None of this works without trust. That’s why building trust as a leader has to come before the change rather than during it. It’s the same lesson as what AI pilots taught us in 2025: the tools were the easy part.
Not every change has a known answer, mind. Some need people to work out something nobody’s solved yet, and that’s adaptive leadership, which deserves its own piece.
How I lead change: the Pivot Formula
When I’m leading a change myself, I run it through the Pivot Formula, my system for organisational change. Nobody’s put it through a controlled trial, so weigh it as one practitioner’s method and judge it on whether it helps your change. My turnaround work has ranged from companies 90 to 120 days from bankruptcy to Honda, which needed to change shipping lanes on the fly through COVID.
It works in 12-week sprints. Two of its five levels matter most for leading change. In REFLECT, the job’s to measure and learn, so a setback gets studied instead of blamed. SCALE means expanding without breaking what’s already working, and that’s my answer to Kotter’s warning about declaring victory too early. At the centre there’s a WAR Room, usually six key decision makers with separate delivery teams under them. The six make the calls about what needs to move, and the teams run the plan. So Kotter’s split between leading and managing is built right into the structure, which is the part I’d copy first if you only copy one thing.
A ten-minute test for your change plan
It’ll take you about ten minutes to check the balance of your own plan. Try this before your next leadership meeting.
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List it. Write down every item on your change plan. Mark each one M if it keeps the change under control, like the budget, timeline and training. Give it an L if it makes people want the change, like the why now, the vision, the guiding group, the first win and how often you’ll talk about it.
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Count the Ls. If nearly everything’s an M, you’ve written a project plan. That’s useful, and it’s half the job.
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Write the why now in one sentence. Read it to someone who’s affected by the change. If they can’t say it back to you the next day, rewrite it.
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Date your first win. Pick something visible you can show inside 12 weeks. Put it in the diary with an owner’s name next to it.
How Colin helps
If you’re about to restructure, bring in a new system or roll out AI, I’d sort out the leadership side before you finalise the plan. I was CEO of MindGenius for Australia, New Zealand and Asia from 2013 to 2017, and most of my work now is keynotes and advisory work with leadership teams. When a team’s in the thick of a big change, the advisory side runs on the Pivot Formula and its WAR Room.
If you’d like to talk about a keynote or advisory work for your team or business, get in touch.
Related questions
What are examples of change leadership?
Explaining why a change matters before you’ve shown anyone the plan is change leadership. So is choosing a guiding group people trust. Going after a visible early win counts too, and so does staying with it after launch instead of declaring victory early. They’re all from the eight phases Kotter says failed changes stall in (Harvard Business Review, 1995).
How do you show change leadership at work?
It’s about owning the why as well as the task list. Talk about the change often, in your own words, and ask the people it affects what’s worrying them before you answer. In an interview, pick one time you got people to want a change. Then say what you did to make that happen.
Is Kotter’s model still worth using?
Yes, as a checklist of where changes stall. It’s built on watching more than 100 companies, so treat it as one experienced observer’s pattern rather than a law. Use it alongside measures of success you’ve set before you start.