While an organisation is working on different parts in the process of change, the key to the change effort is to connect and balance all pieces, just like an orchestra. In order to achieve this balance, an idea of having a Transition Management Team (“TMT”), consisting of a group of leaders and managers, reporting directly to the CEO, should be formed. There can be pitfalls though, if people in TMT are not right people.

John P. Kotter would call it the Guiding Coalition, and creating a strong one is number two in his eight steps to transforming an organisation. He stated several times that it is very important to create a strong guiding coalition with right membership.

Transition Management Team can be compared with a typical task force that companies usually create to approach change. A typical task force will work in isolation, reporting only to the boss, and they won’t communicate with any people in the organisation until they finished whatever plan they are working on. This could be totally disastrous to the organisation as it is creating information vacuum, inevitably forcing people to create their own imaginary assumptions to fill in the gap. Unfortunately, imaginary assumptions are usually worse than what is really going on.

However, a Transition Management Team is nothing like that. The TMT oversees the large-scale corporate change efforts. The team should include a cross-functional team of highly talented leaders from different levels in the organisation, and manage the operational issues, anticipate and manage the reactions that change generates, and ensure there are ample and congruent communication. Not only that, Transition Management Team also deals with emotional and behavioural issues rising from the change efforts.

In principle, Transition Management Team has eight main responsibilities, which are roughly similar to John Kotter’s eight stages of transformation, though not in the exact order. And these responsibilities are what they have to coordinate and manage, but not entirely accountable to fulfill them, as it will require every person in the organisation to participate. » Read more: Change Management in Business