For both the financial and physical health of the United States, there is an urgent need to improve the quality of patient care. Numerous evidence based practices exist that would improve the quality of patient care, however health care organizations struggle to implement them. Health care organizations often place the onus for successful change implementation on the care providers. However, implementing change involves unique functions that fall outside the care provider’s core job role. As care providers are asked to become change leaders, training will be an important part of the transformation. As the first step to developing such a training program, I sought to understand what it takes to lead change. I conducted semi-structured interviews with 31 care providers from a variety of different professions (e.g., doctors, nurses) that were currently or previously involved in implementing change. The interviews focused on three core questions: 1) what functions are needed to effectively lead change; 2) what knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) are needed to perform each of the change leadership functions; and 3) whether the importance of the functions varies across the change process. Together these three questions contribute to building theory on how to lead change and offer practical insight for change leader training development. Utilizing inductive content analysis, I discovered six core pillars of leading change, which were supported by a foundation of effective communication. Within these six pillars, there are 12 functions and 34 KSAs. The data also revealed some variance in the importance of certain functions at different times in the change implementation process. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed, followed by the limitations and directions for future research.