Leading Change Competency
Business Problem
Rapid change is overwhelming our organization, and our leaders lack the mindset and skills to lead transformations effectively.
Business Outcomes
- Accelerated execution of strategic priorities by equipping leaders to align teams, remove obstacles, and sustain momentum through change.
- Greater organizational agility by enabling faster, more confident responses to disruption, customer demands, and emerging opportunities
- Improved transformation ROI by reducing resistance, rework, and failure rates across large-scale change initiatives.
Why is the Leading Change Competency important?
Organizations today are under constant pressure to adapt. Technology disruption, evolving customer expectations, economic uncertainty, and competitive threats make change not just inevitable but continuous. The pace and complexity of these shifts mean that traditional, top-down approaches to change no longer work. Without strong change leadership, even well-designed transformations stall, resistance builds, and the organization risks wasted investments, frustrated teams, and missed opportunities.
That’s why mastering the competency of Leading Change is so critical. When leaders demonstrate this capability in an organization utilizing SAFe as part of a transformation, the organization begins to operate with clarity, alignment, and energy around a shared purpose. People at all levels understand not only what is changing, but why, and they feel personally invested in making it successful. Teams become more proactive, empowered to solve problems, and aligned around delivering value. Cross-functional collaboration increases, resistance decreases, and a culture of continuous improvement begins to take hold.
Behaviors also shift: leaders ask different questions, focus on flow, and support decentralized decision-making. People experiment more freely, feedback loops shorten, and wins are celebrated across the enterprise. Planning becomes more transparent, and delivery becomes more predictable.
Even systems evolve—funding models begin to support flow-based work, governance adapts to enable faster learning, and metrics shift from activity tracking to outcomes and value.
In short, effective change leadership turns what could be a disruptive overhaul into a unified, value-driven evolution—and it separates organizations that thrive from those that merely survive.
Which roles would benefit from mastering the Leading Change Competency?
Mastering the skill of Leading Change empowers leaders at every level to turn strategy into action and sustain momentum. Executives use it to align stakeholders and model transformation. Portfolio and business unit leaders apply it to break down silos and drive adoption. People leaders support teams through uncertainty and reinforce new behaviors. In SAFe, roles like Business Owners, RTEs, Product Managers, SPCs, and Agile Coaches rely on this skill to engage teams, remove resistance, and embed change into daily work. Across all roles, this competency enables leaders to guide change with clarity, purpose, and lasting impact.
Learning about the Leading Change Competency
A Harvard Business School professor Emeritus, Kotter is renowned for his 8-Step Process for Leading Change. This comprehensive model focuses on the human and psychological aspects of change, stressing the importance of creating urgency, building a guiding coalition, developing a vision, communicating it, empowering action, generating short-term wins, consolidating gains, and anchoring changes in the culture. It is grounded in decades of research and tested in thousands of real-world transformations. The process offers a practical, proven approach that helps leaders mobilize people, overcome resistance, and sustain momentum.
Eight Steps for Leading Change ebook
This ebook introduces the eight accelerators, provides an introduction to Kotter’s change principles, and includes use cases.
The eight accelerators align closely with the behaviors and mindset shifts required for a successful SAFe transformation. After reviewing the ebook, consider how they apply in a SAFe context, described below:
Establish a sense of urgency: Make the case for change by connecting SAFe to real business challenges—delays in delivering value, lack of alignment, or inability to adapt quickly. Use data and stories to show why staying the same is riskier than transforming.
Build a guiding coalition: Form a cross-functional team of influential leaders and early adopters who believe in Lean-Agile values. Ensure they represent different levels and functions so they can lead by example and influence others across the enterprise.
Form a strategic vision and initiatives: Define a clear vision of what SAFe adoption means for the organization. This includes more than the framework components, also defining how it improves flow, quality, and customer outcomes. Tie initiatives to strategic goals to maintain relevance.
Enlist a volunteer army: Invite participation by explaining how individuals and teams can contribute to and benefit from the change. Create forums where people can engage, ask questions, and get involved in shaping the new way of working.
Enable action by removing barriers: Identify and eliminate structural, procedural, or cultural blockers—command-and-control leadership behaviors, rigid funding models, or outdated policies that conflict with Agile ways of working.
Generate short-term wins: Highlight and celebrate early successes, like the first successful PI Planning, improved lead time, or a breakthrough in team collaboration. Make progress visible and meaningful.
Sustain acceleration: Build on momentum by expanding SAFe practices to more areas, reinforcing learning, and coaching leaders to continuously evolve their mindsets and actions.
Institute change: Anchor Lean-Agile thinking into leadership development, performance systems, and daily operations. Make the new way the normal way.
These require the active participation of the leaders driving the change. Successful organizational change requires leaders who will lead the transformation (rather than simply support it) by creating the environment, preparing the people, and providing the necessary resources to realize desired outcomes. Research shows clear correlations between leadership behaviors and the success of organizational change driven by Agile and DevOps initiatives. Other researchers found that leader behaviors influence employees’ commitment to supporting a change rather than simply following a prescriptive change model.
Applying the Leading Change Competency
Driving a successful SAFe transformation requires more than adopting a framework—it demands intentional leadership, cultural alignment, and disciplined execution. This is where the Leading Change Competency moves from concept to action. The SAFe Implementation Roadmap is built on the same principles found in Kotter’s change leadership model, offering a proven sequence for introducing, sustaining, and accelerating enterprise adoption. Each step reflects key change accelerators—from establishing urgency to sustaining momentum.
SAFe Implementation Roadmap
The SAFe implementation roadmap is described in a series of articles that align with Kotter’s blueprint for change. For example, the sense of urgency is often established in the many conversations that lead to an organization ‘reaching the tipping point’ and deciding to ‘go SAFe.’ The next recommended action is to train a core group of Lean-Agile change agents and leaders who will form the powerful guiding coalition. The pattern continues throughout the roadmap, designed to incorporate successful organizational change lessons into the SAFe transformation model. This roadmap helps leaders to ‘know the way’ as they drive for successful change.
One of the pivotal early steps is creating the Implementation Plan, and at its heart is building a powerful coalition. One main element of the powerful coalition is the Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE), a cross-functional group of committed change agents who lead by example and guide the rollout. These individuals must not only understand SAFe but also believe in its value and embody the mindset. Their credibility, influence, and ability to align diverse stakeholders can make or break the transformation.
From there, success depends on applying change leadership principles consistently. These practical tips support that effort:
- Anchor the why in the strategy: Connect the SAFe transformation directly to business goals like speed, customer focus, or innovation. Make the purpose clear and compelling.
- Activate a broad leadership coalition: Engage executives, Business Owners, and Agile leaders to model Lean-Agile thinking and guide the change together.
- Design for participation, not compliance: Involve teams and ARTs in shaping the rollout. Co-creation drives ownership, trust, and better solutions.
- Make early wins visible: Highlight successful PI Planning events, improved delivery flow, or team engagement to build belief and momentum.
- Reinforce through systems and habits: Align governance, metrics, and rituals (like Inspect & Adapt) to sustain new behaviors and mindsets.
To accelerate your competency development as a change leader, start by practicing visible alignment: consistently link your words and actions to the vision behind SAFe. Reinforce short-term wins, coach other leaders, and stay engaged in the change, especially when it gets hard. Keep listening. Be willing to adjust the approach while staying firm on the purpose.
A good start looks like engaged teams asking better questions, PI Planning delivering clarity, and a growing number of leaders modeling the new behaviors. Don’t wait for full buy-in. Momentum builds from participation, not perfection. Focus on making progress visible, removing barriers early, and reinforcing the behaviors you want to scale. Change leadership is a habit, not an event.
The following resources are useful for exploring the skills needed to apply the Leading Change competency. Each video shares experiences, research, and scaled use cases for leading your people through change.
The Long Game: Balancing Relentless Improvement and Change Fatigue
In this SAFe Summit video, Kimberly Wade, the Chief Strategy Officer for the NAVAIR F/A-18 and EA-18G Integrated Product Team, provides in-depth real experiences in leading change. She discusses what it looks like for people going through multiple changes all at once and how to help your people through the changes as a leader.
Transformational Leadership and Successful Change
What does peer-reviewed research say about the secret to successful organizational change? In this Summit video from 2018, Dr. Steve Mayner shares his learning journey to understand the relationship between how leaders lead and the success (or failure) of change initiatives.
Tools and Techniques for Living the Change
In this SAFe Summit video, Aine Lane and Robbie Hoeks share their years of experience leading change as Agile Coaches. They discuss what action looks like as a Lean Agile leader in relation to change leadership.
Mastering the Leading Change Competency
Kotter identified four essential change principles that underpin successful transformation. These principles shift the focus from rigid process to dynamic leadership behaviors that inspire action, build momentum, and create lasting change. They are especially important in today’s fast-moving, complex environments, where adaptability, speed, and engagement matter more than ever. Leaders who apply these principles are better equipped to guide their organizations through uncertainty and sustain progress over time.
1. Leadership + Management: Both are needed. Management provides structure and discipline, while leadership energizes people and drives commitment to a shared vision. Ensure senior leaders consistently demonstrate change leadership behaviors while empowering managers to provide structure, clarity, and execution support.
2. Head + Heart: Logical arguments alone won’t move people; emotional connection and purpose create deeper engagement and motivation. Craft messages that combine rational business drivers with emotionally resonant stories that connect people to the purpose of the change.
3. Select Few + Diverse Many: Change accelerates when a small group of committed leaders activates a broad, diverse network of people across the organization. Build a small, committed core team to guide the change, then activate a broad network of champions across levels and functions.
4. Have To + Want To: Compliance may create initial motion, but lasting change comes when people are inspired and choose to engage willingly. Create conditions—like visible impact, recognition, and involvement—that inspire people to choose engagement rather than comply out of obligation.
These insights into change leadership, particularly Kotter’s principles and their application within a SAFe context, provide a deep backbone for successful transformations. To assess the organization’s current capability in this crucial area and identify opportunities for growth, consider the following mastery assessment questions.
- Do our leaders consistently link strategic initiatives to the “why” of our SAFe transformation?
- Has a cross-functional Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE) or similar guiding coalition been formally established and empowered?
- Are teams and ARTs actively involved in shaping our SAFe rollout, beyond just complying with directives?
- Do we regularly highlight and celebrate early successes (e.g., successful PI Planning, improved flow) to build belief and momentum?
- Are our governance, metrics, and rituals (like Inspect & Adapt) aligned to reinforce new Lean-Agile behaviors and mindsets?
- Do our leaders consistently demonstrate change leadership behaviors that energize people and drive commitment to a shared vision, rather than solely focusing on management structure?
- Do communications about change combine rational business drivers with emotionally resonant stories to connect people to the purpose?
- Are we creating conditions that inspire people to willingly engage in the transformation rather than just comply out of obligation?
Leading Change Competency Assessment
Taking this assessment in Comparative Agility will help you understand your organization’s proficiency in this competency and identify areas for improvement.
A Foundation for Global FinanceCo’s SAFe and AI Transformational Changes
Global FinanceCo’s successful AI-native transformation wasn’t solely about technology; it was a testament to their mastery of change leadership, a skill honed through previous strategic shifts, including a full enterprise SAFe® adoption. CEO Natalia Roma recognized that people, not just technology, transform companies, and, echoing Kotter’s principle of getting the urgency right, invested heavily in building the organizational muscle for leading change.
When the urgency of becoming AI-native arose, the company mobilized by building on some already begun SAFe change principles. Rather than a top-down initiative, Roma formed a cross-functional AI Enablement Office paired with an existing LACE to provide vision and influence, acting as Kotter’s guiding coalition. Leaders, already adept at navigating ambiguity and guided by SAFe’s emphasis on Lean-Agile Leadership, framed the why of AI in terms of value to employees and customers, creating a compelling vision and strategy.
The rollout prioritized trust and psychological safety, key tenets of SAFe’s culture. Leaders encouraged experimentation, modeled curiosity, and made short-term wins visible and celebrated, demonstrating a commitment to relentless improvement and generating short-term wins. Resistance was engaged early, and new rituals and reinforcement systems, aligned with SAFe’s focus on organizational learning and continuous improvement, were introduced to anchor AI use and anchor new approaches in the culture.
As AI tools scaled, belief in the change grew. Employees understood their role and had developed habits—open communication, shared ownership, and outcome focus—that solidified the transition. Global FinanceCo’s AI success stemmed from their mindset, built through years of mastering the skill of leading change, particularly within the Framework of SAFe and its alignment with Kotter’s change model.
Continuing your Journey Through the Leadership and Culture Discipline
Transforming People Development
In this competency, the role of the People Developer is introduced. It offers methods for rethinking the role of people management within an ART. You will explore why this role can be useful, what it entails, and how it connects to the rest of the organization.
Balancing the Dual OS
This competency will cover methods for balancing the hierarchy and the operating system in the organization’s areas that utilize SAFe.
Last Update: 13 February 2026