Leading Change the Hard Way: Applying Kotter in a Real Company

Why does leading change feel so much harder than it should?

In this episode of On the Surface, Seth Stevens and Brad Marotti sit down to talk through their real-world experience leading change inside a growing organization—and how John Kotter’s Leading Change framework is shaping the way they approach it.

From early assumptions to hard-earned lessons, they unpack why change takes longer than expected, why communication often falls short, and what it really takes to get an entire organization aligned.

They explore:

• Why change isn’t an event—it’s a long, ongoing process
• How communication breaks down across teams (and how to fix it)
• The challenge of creating urgency in already successful organizations
• Why a clear, simple vision is critical—and harder to create than you think
• How short-term wins help maintain momentum without losing focus
• What it takes to turn change into lasting culture

Through honest reflections, practical examples, and lessons learned while applying Kotter’s principles, this conversation reveals the reality behind leading meaningful change: it’s slow, messy, and requires constant effort.

If you’re leading a team, driving change, or trying to improve how your organization adapts and grows, this episode offers a grounded framework—and real insights you can use right away.

Thanks for listening!

Check us out:

deltacos.com

Instragram

LinkedIn

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:04

Welcome back to On the Surface. I'm your host, Seth Stevens, and this week I'm joined by Brad Morati, and we sit down to talk about what it's like leading change initiatives and an impactful book called Leading Change by John Cotter that's helped along the way. But first, if you haven't already, show some love to the show and go follow, rate, and review our show on whatever listening app you're using. And don't forget to talk about it with your friends and put it on social media to help get the word out. All right, let's talk about change.

SPEAKER_03 0:43

We started this podcast talking about how we're gonna have to change and how we just made a whole bunch of changes.

SPEAKER_04 0:49

What are things that you've learned about change as a whole versus what you thought going into it?

SPEAKER_03 0:56

You think everything is gonna could happen quickly. So I mean the biggest the biggest thing that I've learned is that it's gonna take a while. It's it takes a while to get everybody on board. You think you've got a good plan and you're executing that plan and you're communicating to everybody, and once you get out amongst the team, uh you get get a few layers down into the organization, you find out that you know your plan hasn't made it to everybody, uh, it doesn't sound the same. Um it's hard, it's hard to communicate effectively across the entire organization. I think I mean I think that we do a better job of it than we actually do.

SPEAKER_04 1:42

Oh yeah.

unknown 1:43

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_04 1:44

Uh kind of similar to the fact that you think that you can make change fast and it won't it may not be as hard as it actually is, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:55

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_04 1:56

But since we've kind of found out that change takes a really long time and it's actually just a super long journey, just that you're just changing the way that you go about business, basically.

SPEAKER_03 2:10

And that's a struggle. It's a struggle for me at times because I I'm I'm not a super patient person. And when I I'm usually able to get things done fairly quickly once I decide what I'm gonna do, then you know, this is the route that I'm gonna go, and this is this is uh I'm able to put it into effect pretty quickly, but uh it it doesn't work that way with uh with the types of changes that we're trying to make across a a large organization. And you know, I knew that going in, but I thought it would be I definitely thought it'd be easier.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_04 2:43

So what are things that you've like noticed or done to be able to combat that or aid the change journey?

SPEAKER_03 2:55

Well, I think this would be a good time to plug that we've been using a book. Mm-hmm. Um Leading Change. It's uh it's a book written by John Cotter. John Carter. Yeah. Not even in the group, and I now kidding. You absolutely are in the group. Uh John Carter wrote it, It's Eight Steps to Change. Um, I first heard about it in uh like Colos 3 class. Colos 3, for those that don't know, is a it's a leadership training that we go that some folks go through at some point in their career with Colos. Yeah, internal development. Yeah. Um you know, we walked through some of the quickly in like one day we walked through this book and those steps and just kind of learning the uh learning the steps to take. We didn't spend a whole lot of time on it, but once we I started talking about the changes that we wanted to make at Delta uh in our in our G16 meetings uh with the leadership team at Reeves and uh Rob Lohr at the time, he was the vice president, since been promoted to president at Reeves. He uh he said, you know, a good thing for you to to go through would be John Cotter's book, uh leading change. And it it was a it was a good idea and it brought back what I learned at Colosse 3, and it's really helped us so far in this change journey. Yeah, I would agree.

SPEAKER_04 4:18

It's not just a bunch of ideas like theory out there. There's a lot of actionable type stuff in it. I mean, it can't apply directly to your business, you have to implement it into your business, but it's giving it gives all these ideas and examples of successful situations and uh unsuccessful situations within business, basically saying, hey, you have to like this is not gonna be easy, it's gonna be super long. Whatever communication you think you're doing well at, it's not going that well. Like you have to overcommunicate uh, you know, a hundred times more than you think you need to, basically. And then some actionable ways to do that. Like how some businesses did it successfully. Uh creating like a a strategic vision for the future that you can share uh concisely within five minutes, setting short-term goals, kind of most importantly, that I skipped over was establishing sense of urgency. Like people have to feel, they have to be able to feel and understand that this is an urgent situation. We need everybody on board to be working towards this change together. Um and then ultimately like working this into long-term culture, right? That's right. So that's a super high-level summary, but um we kind of we kind of digested each chapter one chunk at a time and kind of talked through what that looks like and all of that. So is there anything that you would bring up that I missed in the book?

SPEAKER_03 6:12

Man, we went through 10 chapters worth of information, so there's definitely a few things that we left out. There's a lot of nuggets. There's a lot of nuggets, and I think if we walk through a couple of these, you know, talk through a little bit about how each chapter helped us, I think that would be a good conversation.

SPEAKER_04 6:29

Um maybe, maybe start with like how before we dive into that, how we utilized uh a book as a group. You know what I mean? Because it's easy to it's easy to be recommended a book or sit down and read one or listen to an audio book yourself and then try to implement that. But I would say nine times out of ten, you have great intentions. We have great intentions as human beings, and it doesn't end up materializing.

SPEAKER_03 7:03

Right. Yeah. I started skimming through, I started reading the book myself by myself and quickly realized I think I got to chapter three or four. Yeah, chapter three. Oh yeah. Well, chapter four, your notes are wrong here, right? Chapter four, creating creating a guiding coalition. I got to that chapter and realized, you know, uh I'm wasting a lot of time if I don't bring some folks into this with me to help to help with this change effort. So uh how we did it, we had weekly meetings where once once we picked out who who was gonna be in this guiding coalition, we had weekly meetings where we would review one or two chapters just depending on um everyone's uh availability and how long a chapter was. It's getting everybody together is is not an easy thing to do. That's you gotta be flexible with that. Yeah. And once you're in the meeting, you know, we set aside an hour and it's it's with everything else that's going on, it's not always easy to stay focused and and come up with with ideas. We tried to do them later in the day so it's not uh interfering with anybody else's schedule in the mornings. But it worked out really good because I think everybody came prepared in some way. You know, we can use Chat GPT or Claude these days to help us summarize chapters if you don't read them. Um but everyone came ready to discuss what they've learned and and and tied it back to like a real life situation that they dealt with um in in the business and had to do with that particular chapter. So it was it was good. It was better it went better than I thought it would go, honestly. And I've been a part of quite a few groups like this, like through church and things, small groups where you meet and you you discuss certain topics or readings that you had that week. So I had some experience leading those types of groups, but I would definitely encourage um anyone going through you know any type of change or if they want to improve leadership, get a small group together and read a book together. It's it's it can be effective for sure.

SPEAKER_04 9:11

Yeah, 100%. So do you remember before I took you back there, do you remember what you were about to dive into?

SPEAKER_03 9:21

Uh I mean, I've got some notes here on on some questions on some of these chapters. You know, the first chapter is uh it talks a lot about how change is not an event, it's a process. And it's kind of what we alluded to earlier. You know, we we think that we're gonna get things done quickly, we're gonna make changes and uh be able to put it into we decided to do this, we put it into effect next week, and we'll start seeing results in a month. You know, and that's yeah, and that's just not the way that it works. Yeah, that's true. You know, you gotta I realize real first you're gonna have to have patience.

SPEAKER_04 9:58

Yeah, his first chapter in the book is basically saying, uh whatever you think about change is wrong, and here's how you should think about it. Right. And it's an instantly deflating.

SPEAKER_03 10:10

Instantly, yeah. Are we sure we want to do this? Yeah. One of the questions uh that I think about with this chapter is why do successful companies have a harder time changing than companies on the brink of bankruptcy? I think that's interesting. Because we're not, you know, our company and the changes that we want to make are not life-saving changes. We're not we're not on the brink of bankruptcy.

SPEAKER_04 10:34

Um, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 10:39

Why do you think that is?

SPEAKER_04 10:40

Why do you think it's it's uh because especially if you're transparent and people are seeing results, they can see that it's successful. So if you're trying to get 250 people to all agree on one direction or follow something, a lot of people by nature are gonna say, well, this is working. Why are we changing it? Which we take that approach with a ton of things, and it's not the wrong approach. It's just um if you want to make yourself better or you're looking out into the future and you anticipate or see change coming, it's really hard to get people on board from what's been successful all the way up to that current day. Right.

SPEAKER_03 11:21

And then say they don't always have a holistic view of the business. Yeah. And they're not looking out ahead, like you said, correct years in advance to see the the trends.

SPEAKER_04 11:30

Obviously, with a company that's on the brink of bankruptcy, I mean you're have no other choice, right? Right.

SPEAKER_03 11:36

Everyone agrees, you're running out of options. Yeah. Everyone can agree. Yeah. And that being on the brink of of bankruptcy establishes a sense of urgency, which is the next chapter. Oh, that's fair. Yeah. And, you know, so how do you establish a sense of urgency when you're already having some success? How do you establish that sense of because of what you see ahead in the future without causing people to panic or to think that we're gonna be sold or you know, fill in a blank. I mean, people run with their imagination whenever you start trying to make changes like this.

SPEAKER_04 12:13

Yeah. That's a very good point. I think that's I guess what I was saying without saying it directly is uh sense of urgency is very hard to implement for a business that is going well so far. Right. And in other cases, if people feel being on the brink of bankruptcy and like losing their job, then the urgency is already there. It's not something that you have to instill that's there.

SPEAKER_03 12:40

Right. I think thinking back to how we did this and how we're continuing to establish and keep that sense of urgency alive is just by transparency. You know, we we aren't making the the money we need to make. Uh we're not always making the changes that we need to make to adapt to the market changes. You know. Um so just just keeping people aware, like this is where we're at, this is where we need to be, this is how much money we're making today, and this is how much money a successful business in our industry should be making. And this is our goal, our goal is to get here. But you know, so I feel like that's how we've that's how we are establishing a sense of urgency.

SPEAKER_04 13:26

Yeah, right. I agree with that. Yeah. What do you without going through every chapter, what do you think was um what chapter sticks out to you the most as being the most cemented in your brain?

SPEAKER_03 13:44

I think developing the vision and the strategy. I mean it's that is such a is such a key part of change and being able to communicate that to where everybody can understand it. I learned a lot from this chapter because you know, when I think back to our visions in the past or vision statements, mission statements that we've used or uh the coloss has used, I think about I think about how it it sounds like a corporate language. It's very vanilla typically. Very vanilla. It's almost something that you would expect it to be, you know. If you've been in a corporate company for a long time, you can probably come up with a a pretty familiar vision statement for anybody. Yeah. Using the words integrity and uh you know, the corporate lingo. Uh so diving in this chapter, they really talked about how this should be uh it's not a fluffy mission statement, it should be a realistic, clear picture of the future. It should be simple, it shouldn't use corporate lingo. Um and I feel like we you know, we spent a lot of time here, we created a vision as a as a leadership group, and we've been communicating that out, you know, at the kickoff meeting and then in in voice memos w weekly, not always weekly, but sometimes monthly. But you know, I feel like uh it's definitely a first step and in that has to do with change, and it's not a step that we've done well in the past and a lot of companies don't.

SPEAKER_00 15:19

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_03 15:21

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 15:22

It's a long process too. Just uh I think it's easy, especially for visionary type people to look into the future and be dreaming about what that looks like, but then actually like converting that into words and strategy just takes work and time. It doesn't come supernaturally. Gotta have a lot of good like questions and conversations and different uh thought-provoking sessions and processes until you come up with oh yeah, this is good. Like this is makes sense on paper. This is exactly what I was thinking about, or we made a few tweaks based on other people's opinions and their uh expertise and insight into certain areas of the business. So it's definitely a long process.

SPEAKER_03 16:17

It was a long process, and we went through it quite a few times, and we probably, you know, it may be something that we tweak uh as we go through this. I think I would say with 100% confidence it'll change at some point. Do you do you remember what it what it was? Uh I mean reading in the book, if your company vision can't be explained to an outsider in less than five minutes, then you don't have one.

SPEAKER_04 16:39

Yeah, way to put me on the spot. But it's um something to the extent of we need to be more profitable and more innovative into the future. We need uh diversify our revenue and grow our customer base. We need to utilize technology to to um reduce our costs and innovate into the future with what we're doing, basically. Uh, and then become the top choice for customers and employees.

SPEAKER_03 17:11

Yep. And consistently produce at least a five percent operating income. Yeah. Yeah. Look at that. That's good. You got it. Uh I have the ideas. I don't have the exact wording. But that's that was the that was the goal, is to for it to you don't have to be able to recite it word for word. Yeah. But you it should be something that gives you uh a pretty clear picture of the ideas, yeah. The a roadmap. We need to we need to accomplish these things to ultimately become the employer of choice and make a consistent uh profit margin. Right.

SPEAKER_04 17:49

So I think you know, you were talking about that chapter sticking out, which I agree. Um for me, the one that sticks out the most, and it could just be especially right now because we're at more of this point, is like about short-term wins and making sure that we have um checkpoints along the way. Like there really is no finish line ultimately, but we need checkpoints to you know complete something and be and say, oh, that was exactly, you know, this we're on the right track. That was a goal that we had to hit this certain point. Uh we should celebrate that briefly and then get right back on it on the horse to say, here's our next checkpoint and goal. And it's supporting the overall, overall cause and strategic vision, but it's breaking it down into bite-sized chunks so that we don't lose steam. Right.

SPEAKER_03 18:52

And you have to be intentional about that. Sometimes you have to plan ahead for those short-term wins and then being able to communicate it out. Yeah. Also not easy. Also not easy. Um, you know, part of the strategy and the roadmap is having things that you track, um, you know, monthly goals. We've got KPIs that we're tracking that that point back to the the vision statement for each business. And, you know, we know that once, you know, as we track these KPIs and we hit these KPIs, we're gonna celebrate uh hitting hitting them.

SPEAKER_04 19:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 19:27

One of the ones that comes to mind, a short-term win that we recently, you know, we've celebrated, we're obviously not where we, you know, we're not there yet, but we can recognize that you know some of the things that we've started putting into effect are working and celebrate that was with estimating. Yeah. Um, you know, back to the vision statement, part of our goal was to, you know, expand our customer base, grow our customer base. Um, and how we how we're doing this with estimating is that we're going after types of projects that we typically haven't looked at in the past. Maybe they're smaller, more commercial work. And you know, most of the work that we do is with DOTs. So putting more of a focus on commercial type work, private jobs, smaller projects in some cases. Uh, we've already seen, you know, since we've really pushed into that, uh, you know, we were able to celebrate that at this point, this point this year we've bid about 30 more projects than we had last year, and our win rate was about 20% higher than it was last year, which means the number of projects that we've won is 20% higher than the number we won last year. So, you know, we can tie that directly to our vision statement and our goals to get to that particular part of the vision and and celebrate it. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Real life example.

SPEAKER_04 20:48

No, I like that. Yeah. It's it is funny because I bring that chapter up and that point, but literally, I think the next chapter is like saying, yes, celebrate short-term wins, but don't overdo it. Because that'll also cause you to lose steam. Yeah. As if you over celebrate, people think, ah, well, we're close to the finish line or we're there, right? And you have to keep the the momentum up uh to keep going because it never ends until you fully anchor it into your culture, which is kind of how the close to how the book leaves off is this has to be anchored in culture. This has to be um part of just the mindset moving forward. It has to be um, it has to be obvious. And you know, employees have to display it, managers have to display it. You have all promotions and hires need to be around this new culture. Like they have to display that new culture. Uh if they don't and you still promote or hire somebody based off of that, then you're really bringing a lot of that back down, right? You're kind of reinforcing old ways or not the culture that you want to change to.

SPEAKER_03 22:10

So uh it takes a while to get to the point to where it's a a new system.

SPEAKER_04 22:16

It's oh years.

SPEAKER_03 22:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 22:19

Years.

SPEAKER_03 22:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 22:21

I think.

SPEAKER_03 22:22

I mean they say that in the book and I I mean I hope not, but I think it would it could it could definitely I think it's years to the for everybody to be moving in the same direction where it's just part of new like completely new yeah I say I hope not because I like for things to get done quicker than that but everything in the book points towards you know these companies that make these large changes again doing it again. Yeah I know I'm here for the process for sure.

SPEAKER_04 22:56

Um how would you so I think you would obviously recommend this book to other people in what situations and how would you recommend it?

SPEAKER_03 23:13

I think it could be it's scalable. It could be it doesn't have to be huge organizational type changes what we're going through right now. It could be um you know say uh say a sales manager had uh a a small sales team and he wants to um they've got to make some changes in their market they've got to start doing things different to to find more success than they're finding right now I think I think this is a it's a you could use this book for that. Mm-hmm you can create a a small guiding coalition. Everyone needs that I think if you're in management if you're a manager and leadership at all you need a small group of people that you can trust and go to uh for ideas. You know I I would I'm uh definitely a proponent of having a a guiding coalition just in life in general for for every everyone especially if you're leading in any kind of way uh but but yeah I think it can be used for small changes. I think it could be used for large changes like what we're talking about.

SPEAKER_00 24:23

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_04 24:23

Yeah I mean you can I think you're alluding to it but you can even use it for personal stuff, changes, whatever. I mean that's really just kind of fantastic framework across the board for implementing changes to your life a team a business uh your family whatever right because it's all a lot of it is points back to like psychological based stuff of to keep your momentum up you need you need to define your finish line of where you're going you need to make sure that you have that it's what you want you got to make sure that it's you have short term check-ins to to keep get to urge you to keep going basically you have to just make this a new way of living or doing business. So yeah it is a super useful book it is uh and it's really not that long I bet the audio book is under two hours I don't actually know that but yeah I don't I don't know that would be very short I'm an avid audiobook listener uh a two hour audiobook maybe yeah I would guess it'd be around four you looking right now oh man that's I would suck at uh estimating this then but it it's not long it's not a long read and it's not written in a way that's uh uh confusing or wordy you know it gets to the point pretty quick oh my word I'm terrible it's a six and a half hours six and a half and we were both off way off okay well we read it in chunks but none of the chapters are really that long no no they're good I'm gonna be honest I fell asleep during a couple because I was trying to cram them in at night before I went to bed and then I'd wake up with a highlighter in my hand and yeah I mean it's not probably not the most riveting read I wouldn't read it right before bed.

SPEAKER_03 26:26

Uh no yeah well it's a good it's like better than it's similar to taking melatonin I guess but I'm glad that we've I'm glad that we have used it though um it's definitely given us the framework uh for the changes that we've made and 100% yeah 100% that we're still pushing through you know for the next couple of years it sounds like yeah how do you think that this plays out w over the next year for us I think you have to we have to keep talking about we have to keep it alive. This is we have to keep tracking monthly goals and that point back to the vision in in monthly weekly meetings we need to be talking about the vision and the goals and how they how how it's all working together. Um I think we we definitely need to recognize that if part of this isn't going the way we we want it to we can pivot you know and and make a change you know so to answer your question it's just in us continuing to find ways to talk about it. Continuing to find ways to to help hold people accountable to the goals that we've made yeah also. Yeah that's a monthly thing.

SPEAKER_04 27:52

No yeah that's true. Just making I guess that's ultimately part of the culture type thing is just working it into everything that you're doing and being aware of that whenever you're making the vision is uh making sure that it's measurable and that you can work it into conversations and data and numbers and be able to support all of it along the way because you're kind of in the in the grind period. It's a lot of work and maybe a lot of fun to implement it and then you're in this super long grind period of it has to become a way of life and continuing to mention it and track it and celebrate little wins and all that kind of stuff. So yeah.

SPEAKER_03 28:37

And we try not to make it super complicated either and you know when we say we've got goals that we're tracking monthly, you know maybe for our manufacturing business, our aggregates and asphalt business, we've got you know three KPIs that we're tracking on a monthly basis that, you know, those KPIs drive our business, drive the performance of of that particular business unit, but we're keeping it simple. We're not yeah we're not tracking and talking about 15 different things we're talking about three. And I and I think that's also going to help keep us from burning out 100%. Keeping it simple.

SPEAKER_04 29:11

Yeah any last thoughts on the book the process I don't think so I think uh wonderful I think we covered it I love it if y'all enjoyed the episode please rate our show and leave a review on Apple Podcasts Spotify or wherever you listen and check out Delta on all social media platforms at Delta Companies and our website at DeltaCos looks like deltacos com thanks for listening and we'll see you next week