Nurse leaders contribute optimally in health facilities, especially when they are well equipped with nurse manager and/or leader inventory tools, for instance, personal and professional accountability and career planning among others. Such tools spell the behaviors that are necessary for any successful nursing manager. Nevertheless, as this paper reveals, as a nursing manager, I have strengths and weakness in such leadership inventory tools.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Personal and Professional Accountability
As a registered and ANCC certified nurse, I am committed to advancing my nursing skills to meet new challenges in the field through my participation in evidence-based knowledge inquiries. I am driven by the need to guarantee accountability while remaining truthful to my calling of protecting, promoting, and optimizing people’s health (Nurse manager skills inventory, 2006). However, I am poor when it comes to dealing with coworkers who do not understand that nursing is a professional calling to care for people’s lives in the best of one’s capacity.
Career Planning
The nursing career is dynamic due to the emerging new approaches to patient care. Hence, I am committed to avoiding future redundancy by engaging in a lifelong and self-monitored process of planning my career. For instance, I have established and set particular goals and strategies for realizing my agenda in the nursing field. However, due to work demand and tight schedules, I have a limited time for implementing my career plans. The only option is to multitask, a situation that compromises the quality of my work. In other words, I achieve the best results when doing one chore at a time.
Personal Journey Disciplines
In terms of personal journey disciplines, I can reflect on each decision to scrutinize its loopholes before undertaking any implementation. I seek other people’s opinion concerning all decisions as the foundation of shared leadership. This strategy allows me to implement only the best solution to a problem. My weaknesses in this area include poor tolerance to decisive inputs that seek to promote individual advancements at the expense of the core values of protecting, promoting, and optimizing health. However, for nurses to deliver the best outcomes, the facility must also satisfy their motivational needs, including individual advancements.
Reflective Practice Reference Behaviors/Tenets
I always uphold to the truth while also believing in diversity as the primary tool for achieving wholeness in my nursing practice. Integrity is a key value to leadership. It ensures that one makes decisions that promote good for all. I appreciate the fact that people are different ethnically, racially, in sexual domains, religiously, and in terms of gender. Hence, listening to all is the only vehicle to ensuring their inclusion in the nursing decision-making processes. Nonetheless, my poor tolerance to those seeking self-advancement in the nursing practice at the facility suggests the inability to control my intellectual and emotional self. I shy away from developing my knowledge about such people in the attempt to develop my emotional self-will regarding how to handle them.
Using My Current Leadership Skill Set to Advocate Change
Through my people-centered transformational leadership skills, I can advocate change by developing a plan of care while working collaboratively with physicians, therapists, patients’ families, and other team members. The goal here focuses on treating illnesses to improve the quality of life for all. Indeed, nurse leaders participate in advocacy, the promotion of a safe environment, research, participation in shaping health policy, and in patient and health systems management coupled with education (Marcella & Honour, 2013).
I can use my direct experience with patients to induce a change that facilitates the development and growth of coping skills among nurses. Effective nursing leadership emerges from caregivers’ direct experiences with patients. In other words, an express contact with patients at their bedside can help to induce better coping skills, which every nursing leader needs to understand, especially when leading new recruits. This skill is imperative upon considering that the profession is strenuous where practitioners experience a high rate of burnout (Marcella & Honour, 2013).
In my job setting, the current leadership skill set can help to advocate change. Effective leadership enhances organizational commitment and work morale for nurses. It ensures that they do not consider leaving healthcare organizations to pursue other duties. One of the ways of accomplishing this goal is by ensuring that work environments transform to meet the emerging needs of employees while minimizing work stress that leads to burnout (Marcella & Honour, 2013). This strategy suggests the importance of my transformational leadership skills in the nursing facility, especially my agenda of advocating change.
Personal Goal for My Leadership Growth and the Implementation Plan to Achieve this Ambition
My chief goal entails ensuring that people attain optimal health and quality life, thanks to my transformational leadership in the nursing facility. The role of nursing leaders in leading change constitutes an emerging body of literature where many of the models of facilitating nursing leadership are still not adequately tested to provide evidence-based approaches (Strickler, Bohling, Kneis, O’Connor, & Yee, 2016).
Hence, the implementation of the plan to achieve the goal calls for my integration of a collection of nursing evidence-based management strategies and approaches. This plan requires an envisioned future to avoid impediments that may hinder the success of the developed creative solutions. To achieve the goal, I will need to incorporate governance approaches, thinking strategically, and ensuring continuous and a consistent assessment of the capabilities of the facility’s workforce to guarantee productivity, safety, and quality care delivery.
Conclusion
Nurse leaders play an incredible role in ensuring the existence of a healthy working environment. They have a direct impact on the quality of care delivery. Thus, as revealed in the paper, their work has far-reaching impacts on patients, their families, and the medical personnel in any healthcare facility.
References
Marcella, R., & Honour, M. (2013). Elevating nursing leadership at bedside. NAINR, 13(3), 127-130.
Nurse manager skills inventory. (2006). Washington, DC: Nurse Manager Leadership Partnership.
Strickler, J., Bohling, S., Kneis, C., O’Connor, M., & Yee, P. (2016). Developing nurse leaders from within. Nursing, 46(5), 49-51.