HCS 475 Week 2 The Leader's Role in Implementing Change Example

Five Scheduling Desks Into One: The Leader's Role, Management Styles and Staff Motivation in Implementing Change in a Hospital Imaging Department

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

HCS/475: Leadership and Performance Development

Week 2 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The imaging department, its schedulers and its figures are composites written for a model paper; theories and research come from the sources listed.

Patients calling the imaging department of a composite 320-bed hospital to book a scan reached one of five scheduling desks: CT, MRI, ultrasound, general radiography or interventional radiology. Each desk kept its own rules and hours, and a patient needing both an ultrasound and a CT was transferred between desks and often lost. Call data showed an average hold time of six minutes and an abandoned-call rate of 21%. Referring physicians complained, and the hospital's outpatient imaging volume had fallen 4% while a freestanding imaging center nearby grew. The imaging director decided to combine the desks into one central scheduling team. This paper examines her role in leading that change.

The Leader's Role

In a health care organization, a department leader translates strategy into daily work, secures resources, removes barriers, develops people and represents the department to physicians and executives. For the scheduling change, the director's role was to explain why change was needed, design it with the people affected, win executive support for new software and training time and protect the schedulers through a difficult transition.

How the Change Affected Others

The schedulers were not the only people affected. Technologists who had called their own desk to adjust a schedule now had to call the central team, and some felt they had lost control over their day. Radiologists worried that urgent add-on exams would be buried in a general queue. Referring physician offices had learned five different numbers and now needed to learn one. The director mapped each group's concerns before launch and assigned a member of the guiding team to each group, so that questions reached someone who could answer them rather than circulating as rumors.

Why Staff Resisted

The 14 schedulers had strong reasons to be wary. Many had worked beside the same technologists for years and valued those relationships. Each knew one modality's rules in depth and feared learning four others. Some worried that centralization meant job cuts. Treating these concerns as stubbornness would have made them worse.

Step One: Establish Urgency

Kotter (1995) found that many change efforts fail because leaders do not establish enough urgency. The director shared the call data with schedulers, technologists and radiologists, and played two recorded calls, with patients' permission, in which callers were transferred three times.

Steps Two and Three: Coalition and Vision

She formed a guiding team of two schedulers respected by their peers, a technologist from each modality, an information technology analyst and the outpatient imaging manager. The team wrote a short vision: one call, one scheduler, every exam booked in under three minutes.

Steps Four and Five: Communicate and Remove Obstacles

The director explained the vision at every staff meeting for two months and answered questions in writing. She removed obstacles by securing a scheduling software upgrade that showed all modalities on one screen, protected four weeks of cross-training time and guaranteed in writing that no scheduler would lose a job.

Readiness for Change

Rafferty et al. (2013) reviewed research on change readiness and described it as individuals' beliefs that change is needed, that they and the organization can carry it out and that it will benefit them, along with their emotional response. The director surveyed schedulers before training and found that most accepted the need for change but doubted they could learn four new modalities. Cross-training with modality technologists and a printed guide for each exam type addressed that doubt directly.

Motivation

Herzberg (1968) drew a line between conditions that only prevent unhappiness when they are adequate, pay, policy and job security among them, and the things that actually make work worth doing, like accomplishing something, being noticed for it and growing into more responsibility. The director addressed hygiene first by guaranteeing jobs and adding a pay differential for cross-trained schedulers. She then built motivators: a new senior scheduler role, weekly recognition of the fastest and most accurate bookings and a chance to help design the workflow. Security got the schedulers to the table; growth and recognition kept them there.

Steps Six to Eight: Wins, Building and Anchoring

The team launched with CT and ultrasound first, the two most common combined exams, producing an early win within three weeks: hold times for those calls fell under two minutes. The remaining modalities joined over three months. The new process was anchored by writing it into job descriptions, onboarding and the department's monthly dashboard.

Five Management Styles in One Change

Different moments called for different styles. An autocratic approach fit the non-negotiable decisions, such as the go-live date and the guarantee of no job losses. A persuasive style fit the urgency stage, when the director sold the reasons. A consultative style fit design questions, where she asked schedulers for input and then decided. A participative style fit workflow design, where the team decided together. A laissez-faire approach fit the senior schedulers once the change was stable, when they needed room to improve their own processes.

Results After Six Months

Average hold time fell from six minutes to 1.8 minutes, abandoned calls from 21% to 6% and the share of combined exams booked in one call rose to 92%. Outpatient imaging volume recovered and grew 3%. One scheduler left for a position elsewhere; the rest stayed, and two became senior schedulers.

What the Director Would Do Differently

She would involve radiologists earlier, since several objected late to changes in how urgent exams were prioritized, and she would have scheduled cross-training during a slower season rather than in winter, when respiratory illness left the team short-staffed during the hardest weeks of learning.

Conclusion

Combining five scheduling desks into one required more than new software. The director's role was to create urgency with real data, involve respected staff in designing the change, remove barriers, address readiness and motivation and adapt her management style to each stage. The results show that change in health care succeeds when leaders attend to people as carefully as to process.

References

Herzberg, F. (1968). One more time: How do you motivate employees? Harvard Business Review, 46(1), 53-62.

Kotter, J. P. (1995). Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail. Harvard Business Review, 73(2), 59-67.

Rafferty, A. E., Jimmieson, N. L., & Armenakis, A. A. (2013). Change readiness: A multilevel review. Journal of Management, 39(1), 110-135. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206312457417