Struggles in Transformation: A Study in TQM, Leadership, and Organizational Culture in a Government Agency

Listen to the experts in total quality management (TQM), and you will repeatedly hear that the key to successful implementation of TQM is to begin at the top of the organization, and then, with constancy of purpose, proceed downward (Deming, 1986; Imai, 1986; Townsend, 1990). What does "begin at the top" mean in practice? What is its significance in relation to the everyday behavior of the organization? This article describes the efforts undertaken and lessons learned by the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation (TDMHMR) as it began the transformation of the agency culture in keeping with a TQM model. The story is not complete, far from it. Although there have been successes over the past four years, these have been marked by a series of struggles that has its roots in a mixture of uncertainty regarding the next step to take and in the need for the agency's senior managers to personally transform the way they go about their work. We have come to realize that if the transformation of our agency culture is to occur, it must be preceded by a personal transformation. The struggle encountered in making this personal transformation is the subject of this study. Establishing the Context: The TDMHMR Vision While we have encountered many issues in our four-year implementation of TQM, the most significant has been the need for the agency senior managers to change the way they conceptualize and approach their work. That is, the senior managers must become the leaders of the agency.(1) In our experience, if this personal transformation does not occur, it is unlikely that our effort to transform our agency culture will be successful. Much has been written on the behaviors that distinguish managers from leaders (Conger, 1989; Marconi, 1993). Leadership is the first of the seven Malcolm Baldrige Award categories. Workshops on leadership skills abound. In preparation for our TQM journey, we became familiar with much of this literature and attended more than our share of workshops.(2) In retrospect, however, our knowledge was more literary than experiential. We knew the concepts and believed that we had thought through them carefully. Yet, at the time, we lacked an appreciation for the meaning that only experience can provide. It is from our experience that we derive our emphasis on the importance of personal transformation. From our efforts, we have discovered that it is one thing to embrace the concepts of leadership, to espouse them in speech, but it is quite another to change the way one personally approaches his or her job. Why Change: TQM in TDMHMR Why must top managers change both the conceptualization of their responsibilities and the way they work to meet these responsibilities? What makes this change important and not just a by-product of an allegiance to a different management philosophy? Because further transformation of the TDMHMR agency culture is contingent on this change. To understand the nature of this contingency, we need to review our involvement with TQM, and where it has taken us. TDMHMR is a configuration of 13 state schools providing services to people with mental retardation, 8 state psychiatric hospitals, 35 community mental health and mental retardation centers, 5 state community centers, 1 residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed youth, and a central office which is headquarters for the system. As a public provider of mental health and mental retardation services, our mission is to provide services to the 17 million citizens of Texas. In 1994, we served over 150,000,000 Texans with a biennial budget of almost $2.4 billion. We provide services to people who have little, if any, insurance and who otherwise cannot afford to obtain services. As a public provider operating in an environment where the "old" ways of doing things were drawing increasing fire, we were seduced by the customer appeal of TQM. As with most seductions, we began our relationship with TQM somewhat ignorant of some of its "deeper" concepts. …