Dr. John Kotter, an expert on leadership and transformation states that 70% of all major change fails at organizations. In order for change to be successful within an organization 75% of the organization must be agreeable to the change (Thomsen, 2013). I work in a 14 bed critical access hospital, we have unique challenges with decreasing numbers in our population that we serve. After learning of the 8 keys to successful change that Dr Kotter suggests, I noted that our facility doesn’t fulfill many of the needed processes to make our facility successful. We have focused on generating short term wins within our facility and have developed a system for documenting and celebrating those short term wins with our team. We have given our staff the tools to empower them to create change, however we have not effectively taught them what the change is that they need to be making. Our facility has made significant improvements and changes over the last year, and from the inside out most of our c-suite would state that we have these processes in place. However, we don’t have a sense of urgency established, no one really has a clear understanding of what needs to happen. Our guiding coalition is a group of nine people that is designated to help with service excellence, not what our overall changes in the facility are working towards. We aren’t communicating effectively through any level of our organization, there are significant gaps, too many people doing too many jobs and forgetting were all of their responsibilities are. We don’t actively reward those staff that are helping us achieve our goals and evaluating those that aren’t and if they are a benefit to our facility or we should consider our time together is done. We had established that we would be limiting overtime and everyone in the facility would have to fill out paperwork for any overtime over 3 hours. The paperwork is being filled out, but this hasn’t stopped the overtime, our biggest overtime departments are ones that have 8-5 hours not the ones that are open 24 hours a day. After watching this video it makes sense why some of the new changes that our facility has tried to incorporate have not been successful.
References
Thomsen, S. (2013, February 17). Kotter’s 8 Step Organizational Change Model FC. Retrieved May 11, 2017 from https;//www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxtF4OXhy1#action=share
When I watched the video on Kotter’s change model, I was surprised that the failure rate was so high at 70%. However, after reading the material and thinking about certain changes within my own organization, I can see why most changes fail. Communication is crucial when trying to implement change.
Hi,
I enjoyed reading your post. My facility does not employ a change model either and change is often difficult and meet with resistance. Employing a change model like Kotter’s would make change a much smoother process. Now that we know about Kotter’s changes model maybe we suggest its use to management for a smoother change transition.