change management | change leadership | kotter | adkar | organizational development | employee engagement | culture
What You Will Learn:
- Run a change through Kotter’s eight steps, and recognise which step you are stuck on
- Use the rider, elephant and path model to move behaviour rather than only opinion
- Manufacture genuine urgency, and tell it apart from announced urgency
- Diagnose an organisation with observation, interviews, surveys and data before intervening
- Choose the right intervention level: individual, team, process or organisation-wide
- Measure a change programme with Kirkpatrick, a balanced scorecard and a defensible return figure
- Handle the conflict a change produces, including the political and the unspoken kind
- Anchor a change in culture through rituals, hiring and behaviour, so it survives the next reorganisation
- Learn alongside Mike’s 1.6 million students from 185 countries
- Get the author’s experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank
Overview: Beyond the Theoretical Fluff
Let’s be honest: most “change management” training feels like it was written by someone who has never actually had to tell a room full of burnt-out engineers that their entire tech stack is being migrated by Monday. We’ve all seen those dry, academic certification prep courses that treat organizational change like a simple software patch. This course, ‘Change Leadership: Engage People, Overcome Resistance,’ is the antidote to that. Mike doesn’t just recite the industry-standard tools; he brings “street-smarts” from the trenches of high-growth companies like Wargaming and Preply.
What sets this apart from your standard beginner to advanced leadership track is the focus on the “messy middle.” We know the theory, but Mike focuses on the psychological friction of moving from A to B. It’s not just about a roadmap; it’s about understanding why your team is staring at you with crossed arms. He bridges the gap between high-level executive strategy and the real-world projects where the actual work happens. If you’re looking for a career growth catalyst that moves you from a “task manager” to a genuine “influence driver,” this is where you start. It’s less about the “what” and entirely about the “how” of human behavior in high-pressure environments.
Prerequisites: What You Actually Need
You don’t need an MBA or a specific job-ready skills certificate to get value here, but you do need some “battle scars.” This course hits differently if you’ve lived through a botched reorg or a failed digital transformation.
- Foundational Management Experience: Ideally, you’ve led at least a small team or a project workstream.
- Organizational Context: A basic understanding of how budgets, stakeholders, and KPIs interact in a corporate setting.
- Emotional Intelligence: A willingness to look past the spreadsheets and acknowledge that “resistance” is usually just unaddressed fear.
- Patience for Detail: Mike moves fast, so you need to be ready to pause and reflect on your own hands-on labs—meaning, applying these frameworks to your current office politics immediately.
Skills & Tools: Your New Leadership Toolkit
This isn’t just a lecture series; it’s a deep dive into the industry-standard tools that actually move the needle in modern organizational development. You aren’t just learning names; you’re building a job-ready toolkit.
- The Behavioral Triad: Mastering the Rider, the Elephant, and the Path. This is a game-changer for anyone trying to influence behavior without relying on “because I said so” authority.
- Diagnostic Frameworks: Learning how to use surveys and data alongside qualitative interviews to find out why a team is actually stuck.
- The Kotter 8-Step Execution: Not just the theory, but the hands-on application of identifying which specific step is stalling your current project.
- Measurement & ROI: Using Kirkpatrick’s Model and Balanced Scorecards to provide a defensible return figure to the C-suite. This turns “soft skills” into “hard data.”
- Conflict Resolution: Navigating the “unspoken” politics—the stuff that usually happens in the hallway after the meeting is over.
Career Benefits & Job Roles
Investing time in this course is a massive career growth move. In an era of constant AI disruption and “pivoting,” the person who can lead people through the fog is the most valuable person in the building.
- Strategic Lead / Program Manager: Move beyond tracking Gantt charts to actually ensuring project adoption and real-world project success.
- Director of Operations / VP of Engineering: Gain the vocabulary to handle the “people debt” that accumulates during rapid scaling or mergers.
- Change Consultant: Build a job-ready skills profile that allows you to walk into any organization and diagnose their cultural bottlenecks.
- HR & People Partners: Transition from administrative roles to strategic partners who can anchor change in culture through rituals and hiring.
Pros: Why This Course Sticks
- Battle-Tested Experience: Mike’s background at Alfa-Bank and Wargaming isn’t just for show. He shares anecdotes about real-world projects that didn’t go perfectly, which is far more educational than a polished success story.
- The Urgency Distinction: His breakdown of “manufactured urgency” vs. “announced urgency” is worth the price of admission alone. It’s a masterclass in employee engagement without the burnout.
- Holistic Intervention: Most courses stay at the “process” level. Mike forces you to look at individual, team, and organization-wide levels simultaneously. It’s advanced thinking made accessible.
Cons: The Honest Truth
If I have one gripe, it’s that the “Data and Observation” section could be even more hands-on. While he covers how to diagnose an organization, I would have loved to see a few more templates or industry-standard tools for raw data analysis to help bridge the gap for the more analytical, data-driven leaders who struggle with the “soft” side of change leadership. It requires you to do a bit of your own heavy lifting to translate his insights into your specific reporting software.