Nursing Leader Interview
Effective leadership is very important in the delivery of high quality care and ensuring patient safety and aiding staff development. As an effective nursing leader, my role has primarily been based on decision making, appropriate authority delegation, integrity oriented actions and conflict resolution (Marriner-Tomey, 2009).
All these and other roles I have done with the intention of being a role model to other future nurse leaders. For the future nurses, I have made sure that I nurture them and that I remain aware of how other team members feel by being emotional tuned with the rest of the institution’s staff. These qualities have made me a good democratic leader (Short, and Kaluzny, 1997). For most of my decisions as a democratic leader, I have made sure that I first seek the opinion of other nurses and team members.
This way, the nurses have been able to view me as a leader concerned about their feelings and one who is willing to listen to their opinions before making up any team or organizational decision. This is viewed by the other nurses as mass empowerment since they believe by being part of the decision making their accepting change will be faced with little or no resistance (Marriner-Tomey, 2009). I also a situational leader since I have to first access the nature of the decision making situation to decide whether or not there is time to include participation or not.
Upon identifying the nature of the situation, I do go ahead t select the best style to have decisions made or implemented. This mostly applies in different situations, and it means different parallel events can have different leadership styles applied to accomplish them. In situations where the promotion of subordinates outputs and performance needs to be developed and promoted, transformational leadership becomes handy for me. I have seen this work especially where change needed to be influenced with remuneration.
I have not always exhibited high quality leadership. This was the case especially during my first years and a leader. Back then, I did have intense and valuable knowledge about great leadership but I did not have any experience of putting this theory into practice. All I knew was that I was required and expected to direct instructions and orders on what was expected of the staff and leave the role of completion to them. This landed me into lots of trouble as jobs got completed but not with the expected outcomes.
In addition, accountability and transparency was lost since the there was no one to question in the case of team work (Marriner-Tomey, 2009). I also did not have the ability to assess the situation before implementing any my leadership style. I remained the sole source of command and information and not in any moment did I hold participatory decision making sessions to hear out what others had t say. Although some situations were well suited for autocratic leadership, others failed as they required participative, transformational situational leadership styles. Serving as a leader has made me grow and learn that different work situations require different forms of leadership styles (Curtis, Vries, and Sheerin, 2011).
In all health institution, the nurses and other staff unlike the nurse leaders are more in contact with the patients. This means that they obtain first hand complaints, opinions and suggestions from the patients. At this point, the situational leadership comes to play as I have to assess the requirements and nature of the situation before settling down to the best form of leadership style. In the case where there is long time duration, participative or democratic leadership comes to play. In the case of limited time, participation is eliminated or minimally applied to see that all stakeholders have well been represented.
In the process of adaptation to leadership within an environment characterized by changing leadership roles, several challenges have come my way. Organizational culture is one and the strongest challenge I have dealt with in my leadership role (Curtis, Vries, and Sheerin, 2011). In the health institutions, culture is very strong and it shapes the roles of the played by the different individuals. In this case, change is not easy to implement as there is too much resistance and much resources have to be allocated to eliminating such change.
As a leader, I have found myself operating way above the allocated budget as I have had to plan for employees training to have them adopt change. In other instances, change has been implemented through the incentives and other awards. Apart from hindering change, culture has had been of great threat to employees creativity. Within the health care industry, everything is based on laid down practice standards and core ethical codes. This makes employees compliant to such codes leaving little room for creativity as one is afraid of breach of contract that may have their nursing practice come to an end (Marriner-Tomey, 2009).
The delayed or completely locked out creativity and resistance to change amongst the employees have led to the inability to innovate and adopt digital technologies that are within the customer expectations. This has resulted to the loss of confidence by patients with our healthcare services. in cases where the adoption of health care digital technologies are mandatory, the organization has had to spend a lot of resource training the staff on the need for such technology and how to go about implementing such technology during practice. This is the case especially with electronic health records.
To overcome or minimize the effects of healthcare industry challenges, nurses must have power over their nursing discipline so as to promote autonomy professionally. Since time immemorial, power has been defined as the control, influence or domination over someone or something and has taken both formal and informal nature. Power has also been defined as an individual’s ability to have things done to meet a specified goal. In order for there to be empowerment, there must be power present.
Within the nursing field, I have experienced formal power from my position as a nursing leader. My position has seen me implement different work programs, delegate power, assign duties and responsibilities and make organizational decisions that are aimed at meeting organizational goals. Formal power has also enabled me to draw lines on my roles and responsibility and avoid conflict of interest by avoiding doing what is beyond my job position. In my position, I have also been able to lead teams through different projects as I have the power to organize resources, delegate duties and motivate team members to have their tasks done timely and in unsurpassed abilities.
In the course of my work and position, I have also come to build relationships with my employees. I also have great deal of respect from coworkers which have seen me earn influence them (Short, and Kaluzny, 1997). This has been facilitated by my experience and knowledge such that employees come to value my opinions on aspect such as change and employee employment. I have very good time keeping ability and employees have respected this fact and made it their duty never to attend meetings late or fall for laziness. I am also very social and my interactions with other staff have acquired me the position of a conflict resolver.
References
Curtis, E., Vries, J., and Sheerin, F., (2011). Developing leadership in nursing. British Journal of Nursing. Vol. 20. Iss. 5.
Marriner-Tomey, A. (2009). Guide to nursing management and leadership. St. Louis, MO: Mosby Elsevier.
Short, S., and Kaluzny, A., (1997). Essentials of health care management. Cengage learning. USA.
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