NURS 8302 Discussion: Evaluating and Sustaining Change ANSWER

NURS 8302 Discussion: Evaluating and Sustaining Change ANSWER

NURS 8302 Discussion: Evaluating and Sustaining Change ANSWER

Post a brief comparison between change management and change leadership. Be specific. Explain how leadership approaches may relate to processes for evaluation of and sustainment of change in a healthcare organization or nursing practice. Then, explain the function of leadership in evaluating, maintaining, and sustaining change. What is the influence of leadership on these aims? Be sure to include a brief explanation of whether you should stop measuring change in an organization, and explain why. Be specific and provide examples.

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Evaluating and Sustaining Change

Some people think of change management and change leadership as two in the same not realizing this is a significant difference between the two. Change Management is the tools or processes used to control a change effort (Kotter, 2011).  Change management is necessary to control such things as staff resistance/rebellion, the costs associated to change, problems, etc (Kotter, 2011).  Change management is very much about control and making sure there are designated people to control specific aspects of the change effort (Kotter, 2011)

Change leadership differs in that it is the “driving forces, visions and processes that fuel large-scale transformation” (Kotter, 2011, para. 1).  Change leadership more about urgency and having many people come together who want change.  Change leadership is vision driven and the people are empowered (Kotter, 2011).  According to Kotter (2011), change leadership is more associated with igniting the whole change process, speeding up the process, and working smarter and more efficiently.

Leaders articulate and communicate a vision, align constituents with the vision, and motivate the people for purposeful action (Fisher, 2018).  Quality leaders empower the team as change champions.  Evaluating processes through a team approach and creating a shared vision with the team leads to sustainability of quality change.  A leader must be able to effectively communicate a vision with purpose in order to obtain buy-in from the constituents and align the people with the vision.  Alignment means that people don’t just know the vision but understands and embraces the vision (Fisher, 2018).  Aligning the people leads to commitment and moves people forward as part of the journey (Fisher, 2018). Once a leader has aligned the people with the vision and solidifies the commitment of the team they can move forward with evaluation, maintaining and sustaining change.  Without the alignment and commitment leaders face resistance and rebellion thus leading to difficulty with maintaining and sustaining change.  Evaluating change should be ongoing in an organization to ensure continuous quality.  Change evaluation is necessary to identify gaps in a vision or process.  Ongoing evaluation allows change leaders to proactively foster improvement rather than being reactive.  Being reactive does not allow time to gain team alignment and may lead to resistance and failure.

References

Fisher, J. (2018). A model of integrated leadership. Organizational Dynamics, 47(2), 70–77. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2018.01.006