OML 6100 Module 4 Final Paper: Leading the Support Center Through a Platform Change Example

Leading From the Middle: A Team Lead's Use of Kotter's Eight Stages in a Platform Change

Student Name

M.S. in Management in Organizational Leadership, Thomas Edison State University

OML-6100: Organizational Management and Leadership I

Mentor Name

Month Day, Year

Leading From the Middle: A Team Lead's Use of Kotter's Eight Stages in a Platform Change

The Leadership Situation

In January the company decided to replace its fifteen-year-old phone and email support system with a cloud service platform that adds live chat for agents, a searchable knowledge base and automated routing. My team of nine was chosen as the pilot team, and I was asked to lead the change for the team over six months, with a go-live date in April. I had authority over my team's schedules, training and daily work, but not over the platform's design, the budget or the other three support teams.

This paper applies the course to that situation. It draws on the eight-stage model of leading change in Kotter (2012), on the treatment of leadership traits, team leadership and organizational culture in Lussier and Achua (2022), and on research. It is honest about what went wrong; the change succeeded on schedule, but not without a costly stumble.

Me as the Leader: What the Self-Assessments Predicted

My Module 1 self-assessments showed high conscientiousness and agreeableness, low surgency, a high need for affiliation and a low need for power. Those traits shaped the change in predictable ways. My conscientiousness produced a detailed training plan and a clean cutover. My low surgency and need for affiliation made me slow to raise problems with the project team and reluctant to press analysts who resisted. Judge et al. (2002) found extraversion the trait most consistently related to leadership effectiveness; in this change, the moments I needed it most were when I had to speak up in meetings above my level.

Kotter's Eight Stages Applied

Kotter (2012) argues that major change fails most often because leaders skip stages or declare victory too early, and he sets out eight stages: establishing a sense of urgency, creating the guiding coalition, developing a vision and strategy, communicating the change vision, empowering broad-based action, generating short-term wins, consolidating gains and producing more change, and anchoring new approaches in the culture. Appelbaum et al. (2012) reviewed research on the model and found support for many of its stages but little direct empirical testing of the model as a whole, and they noted that it fits planned, top-down change better than emergent change. I used it as a lens, not a recipe, and adapted it to leading from the middle.

Urgency and the Coalition

Kotter stresses that complacency defeats more changes than resistance does. My team was not complacent; it was frustrated. So urgency came easily: I shared agents' complaints and our handling time trend, and most analysts wanted a better system. The harder task was the coalition. In Kotter's account a major change needs more than one leader, and the coalition guiding it should bring position power, expertise, credibility and leadership. As a team lead I lacked position power, so I built a coalition with credibility instead. I asked Dana and Luis, the most respected analysts from each of the two teams merged last year, to join me. Their partnership did something I had not planned: it gave the two former teams a shared project, and the divide described in my Module 2 paper began to close.

Vision and Communication

Kotter emphasizes a vision that can be communicated in five minutes and a strategy for achieving it. Our vision, "Agents get answers in one contact," was short and tied to the problem everyone felt. But the strategy belonged to the project team, which chose the platform's features. My role was to translate it: what the platform meant for each analyst's day.

I communicated well at first, with weekly updates and the vision on every training slide. When problems arose, I went quiet. In week three of the pilot, the knowledge base search returned irrelevant articles, and chat volume overwhelmed the three analysts assigned to it. I spent the week fixing schedules and said little to the team about why. Rumors filled the gap: that chat would replace phone jobs, and that the pilot was failing. Kotter warns that under-communicating by a factor of ten is common; I proved it.

Empowering Action and Short-Term Wins

Empowerment worked better. Kotter urges leaders to remove obstacles, including structures and systems that undermine the vision. The biggest obstacle was our handling time target: chat conversations run longer than calls because analysts handle two at once, and analysts feared their numbers would suffer. I persuaded my manager to suspend handling time targets for the pilot and replace them with contacts resolved in one interaction. Dana and Luis designed chat scripts with the team, and analysts tested and rated knowledge base articles. Lussier and Achua describe empowering leadership as sharing authority and building others' confidence; the team's ownership of scripts and articles made the platform theirs.

Short-term wins were my biggest mistake. For Kotter, visible wins in the first six to eighteen months prove the effort worthwhile and take the wind out of cynics. Our first wins came in week two: chat resolved 71 percent of agents' questions in one contact, against 52 percent by phone. I did not share them until week five, after the rumors had spread. Had I published them at once, the week three problems would have looked like setbacks in a winning effort rather than signs of failure.

Resistance and How I Responded

Resistance came from two analysts in particular. One, a twelve-year veteran, said openly that chat was a way to make analysts handle twice the work for the same pay. Another said nothing but kept taking phone calls when assigned to chat. Lussier and Achua describe resistance as a natural response to the uncertainty, loss and threat to self-interest that change brings, and they recommend that leaders listen, involve resisters and explain the reasons for change. My need for affiliation pushed me to avoid both analysts. When I finally met with each, in week four, the veteran's concern turned out to be fair: no one had told the team how chat volume would count in performance reviews. I took the question to my manager and returned with an answer, chat contacts counted equally with calls, and the veteran became one of the platform's most careful testers. The quiet analyst was afraid of typing errors in front of agents; a week of paired chat with Dana resolved it. Both cases taught me that resistance often carries information the leader needs.

Power and Influence From the Middle

Lussier and Achua distinguish position power, which comes from a role, from personal power, which comes from expertise and relationships. As a team lead, my position power over the project team was nil. My influence came from personal power: my expertise in the old system's failures, and the credibility my team's results gave me. When I asked the project team to change the knowledge base search, I brought data from our testing, 140 searches and the share returning a useful article, rather than complaints. That evidence, more than my title, got the fix made. My low need for power had led me to underuse this kind of influence before the change; seeing it work has made me more willing to use it.

Team Leadership During the Change

The concepts from Module 2 applied directly. The change restarted the sequence Tuckman (1965) described: the team storming over chat schedules in week three was predictable, and I should have expected it. The weekly fix review I had introduced earlier became the change's most useful routine, because it gave analysts a safe place to report problems with the platform. Edmondson (1999) linked psychological safety to learning behavior; analysts who had learned to admit gaps in the fix review now reported platform faults the same way, and the knowledge base improved quickly as a result.

Fairness in Small Decisions

One question I had not expected was fairness. Chat shifts were more demanding than phone shifts in the first months, and analysts noticed who received them. I rotated chat assignments weekly and published the rotation, so no one could suspect favoritism toward either original team. Fairness in small decisions protected the trust that the coalition had begun to build.

Culture: The Limit of Leading From the Middle

My Module 3 paper found that the company's underlying assumption treats support as a cost. That assumption shaped the change. The project team measured success partly by whether chat would let the company reduce support staff. My team sensed this, which gave the rumors credibility. Kotter's eighth stage, anchoring change in culture, requires showing people how new approaches have improved performance and ensuring that leaders embody them. I could anchor new routines in my team's culture, but I could not change the company's assumption about support. Schein and Schein (2017) argue that culture is embedded by what leaders measure and reward; while executives measure support by its cost, a team lead's changes remain local.

Results

The pilot went live on schedule. After six months, first-contact resolution climbed from 52 to 68 percent, agents rated support 4.1 on a five-point scale instead of 3.4, and no analyst left the team. The platform is now being rolled out to the other three teams, and Dana and Luis are training them. The team also handled 9 percent more contacts in the sixth month than in the month before the pilot, with the same staff, which the project team has used to justify the wider rollout.

What I Would Change

Three changes stand out. First, I would communicate most when things go wrong, not least. I will now send a short update every week of a change, even if the only news is a problem and what we are doing about it. Second, I would celebrate wins the day they occur, since a win shared late cannot answer cynics who have already spoken. Third, I would raise the staffing question with my manager before the pilot, asking for a clear statement that chat would not cut jobs on my team, so that I could tell analysts the truth instead of leaving them to guess. Finally, I would involve the two analysts most likely to resist from the start, perhaps in the guiding coalition itself, since their objections improved the change once I listened to them.

I would also act on what my self-assessments taught me. My need for affiliation made me avoid telling the project team that the knowledge base search was failing. When I finally did, in week four, it was fixed within days. Speaking up early is the behavior I committed to in Module 1, and this change showed its cost when I did not.

Conclusion

Leading change from the middle means using credibility where position power is lacking, translating others' strategy into the team's daily work and accepting that some stages, especially anchoring change in the wider culture, depend on leaders above. Kotter's stages helped me see where I succeeded, in urgency, coalition and empowerment, and where I failed, in sustained communication and early wins. The course's concepts on traits, teams and culture explained why. The most lasting lesson is personal: my natural strengths carried the plan, and my natural gaps nearly derailed it.

References

Appelbaum, S. H., Habashy, S., Malo, J.-L., & Shafiq, H. (2012). Back to the future: Revisiting Kotter's 1996 change model. Journal of Management Development, 31(8), 764-782. https://doi.org/10.1108/02621711211253231

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Judge, T. A., Bono, J. E., Ilies, R., & Gerhardt, M. W. (2002). Personality and leadership: A qualitative and quantitative review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(4), 765-780. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.87.4.765

Kotter, J. P. (2012). Leading change. Harvard Business Review Press.

Lussier, R. N., & Achua, C. F. (2022). Leadership: Theory, application, and skill development (7th ed.). Sage.

Schein, E. H., & Schein, P. (2017). Organizational culture and leadership (5th ed.). Wiley.

Tuckman, B. W. (1965). Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological Bulletin, 63(6), 384-399. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0022100