Mesquite Health Care

Mesquite Health Care

This team studied more than one hundred Mesquite Health Care articles, chapters, and books on change and identified the following seven critical factors for Mesquite Health Care success.

• Leading change: having a sponsor of change who owns and leads the change initiative.
• Creating a shared need: ensuring that individuals know why they should change and that the need for change is greater than the resistance to change.
• Shaping a vision: articulating the desired outcome from the change.
• Mobilizing commitment: identifying, involving, and pledging the key stakeholders who must be involved to accomplish the change.
• Changing systems and structures: using HR and management tools (staffing, development, appraisal, rewards, organization design, communication, systems, and so on) to ensure that the change is built into the organization’s infrastructure.
• Monitoring progress: defining benchmarks, milestones, and experiments with which to measure and demonstrate progress.
• Making change last: ensuring that change happens through implementation plans, follow-through, and on-going commitments.

These seven critical success factors in Mesquite Health Care change are fairly obvious, and not in and of themselves terribly useful. In fact, most managers can derive most of them with ten minutes’ reflection.

Change presents a paradox: If so much is known about it—key success factors of change can quickly be identified—why do “we” do so poorly at making change happen? HR professionals who act as change agents must resolve this paradox. They must turn knowledge about change into know-how for accomplishing change. They must turn key success factors for change into action plans for accomplishing change.

The first step for resolving this Mesquite Health Care paradox (making what is known improve what is experienced) is to have a clearly defined change model. A model identifies the key factors for a successful change and the questions that must be answered to put the model into action.

Step 2: Profile the Extent to Which These Key Success Factors Are Being Managed

Resolving the paradox of change means turning the seven key success factors from an academic exercise into a managerial tool. Dale Lake, president of Human Systems Development, has brought a personal insight to the conception and use of these seven factors. Lake is a pilot. Early in his flight training he learned the importance of rigorously completing the preflight checklist prior to each Mesquite Health Care flight. After hundreds of hours in the air, nothing in the preflight checklist is a surprise to him; he knows every item on the list. He has learned, however, that checking every item, every time improves the probability of a successful flight.