Enhancing practice environments and creating a workplace atmosphere pleasurable for the productive day, a nurse administrator builds a safer health system. As patient care is the main objective of nursing, the ultimate goal of a nurse administrator is to create patient safety culture by means of managing people and resources.
Nurse Administrator Behaviors That Provide a Good Practice Environment
One of the behaviors a nurse administrator can embrace to achieve good environments for practice is the empowerment of the staff. The link that connects the nurse administrators and the staff nurses are comprised of the nursing managers (NMs) and their assistants (ANMs) (Regan & Rodriguez, 2011). That way, the empowerment of the staff is based on that of the frontline managers. Empowerment of the staff is important because it is the best way to enforce and sustain change and innovative practices crucial for the rapidly developing field of nursing (Regan & Rodriguez, 2011).
Another vital behavior for the good practice environment is stress reduction as stress tends to affect the individuals on the emotional, mental, and physical levels (Williamson, 2011). As stress and the ways of its reduction are individual for each person but have very similar outcomes in the workplace, the nurse administrator is to demonstrate understanding behaviors when the staff members are stressed out and need help.
Besides, nurse administrator is to act as a supervisor for the staff and go beyond nursing working with the teams of practitioners that include members from various disciplines (Cipriano, 2011). Facilitating the connection between the professionals from different spheres the nurse administrator achieves a multidimensional approach to the patient care and improves the patient satisfaction.
Nurse Administrator Behaviors That Do Not Provide a Good Practice Environment
For a nurse administrator, it is important to remember that their role is to manage production, as well as people (Tsai, 2011). As the leadership style of the nurse administrator is directly connected to the job satisfaction level of the staff members, the leader unaware of their influence on the followers are likely to disrupt the practice environment. For instance, the behaviors that contribute to counterproductive practice environment is the abuse of power, lack of understanding and sensitivity, bullying, extreme authoritarian approach, inequitable allocation of workloads and resources, and a failure to provide appraisal and recognition to the employees.
Behaviors to Incorporate into My Leadership Style
Among the primary competencies of the nursing administrator, there is the development of human resources, the promotion of professional and health communication, and the facilitation of high-quality performance (McDonnel, 2012). To fulfill these competencies, my leadership style is to involve transformational practices. First of all, it is highly important to build a stable and responsible staff able to perform self-management so that I could delegate some of my duties and ensure that some urgent situations can be professionally addressed by the nursing teams when they do not have time to wait for my presence. Secondly, I believe that it is important to allow the staff to realize themselves, learn, and have opportunities for self-development and progress. As a result, the facilitation of ongoing learning experience is a behavior that needs to be added to my leadership style because could achieve several positive effects simultaneously – empower the staff, inspire innovation and sustainable change, ensure professional excellence, maximize job satisfaction, and improve high-quality patient care. Finally, as resource management in nursing has to do with a lot of stress and insufficiencies, the leadership style is to include situational behaviors for the smarter allocation of financial and human resources, and the optimization of operations for the higher efficiency. Namely, the embrace of change in a form of new software and technologies for faster and more effective work of the staff would help to save some costs and alleviate the burdens of the employees.
Handling Situations of Harassment, Bullying, Hearsay, and Gossip in a Practice Environment
In nursing, bullying, harassment, gossip, and other unethical behaviors are connected to such tendencies as absenteeism, low job satisfaction, high levels of work-related stress, and, as a result, turnover (Rocker, 2012). Needless to say, these behaviors are not just harmful to the productivity of the nursing staff but are also costly for the healthcare organizations. In addition, all of these behaviors are rather complicated to investigate for the leader willing to defeat them in the workplace. The first step towards the end of these behaviors is the identification of the victims and the perpetrators. Out of all the harmful behaviors mentioned above, bullying is the only one that may have malign and non-malign nature; the rest are just destructive (Rocker, 2012). The cause of disruptive behaviors is hierarchical inequality combined with the abuse of power (Longo, 2011). The former fact is normal in any workplace, while the latter can and should be addressed. The leader willing to create an equitable workplace is to implement policies that prevent power abuse. The employees should be aware of the measures that would protect them if they become victims of disruptive behaviors. That way, the reporting of such actions could be encouraged.
Ethics Game Case Studies, DiSC, and Lifelong Learning
The Ethics Game and DiSC revealed some new aspects of the roles and competencies a nursing administrator is to have, but they have not changed my perception of this occupation cardinally. DiSC taught me about my qualities in terms of performing as a leader while Ethics Game showed how challenging the tasks of a nursing administrator can be. Namely, dealing with the case about the allocation of human resources to fulfill the needs of the patient and their family helped me realize that the difficulty of this assignment was not only the problem of the insufficient number of qualified staff members but also the ethical question concerning treatment of the employees in terms of excessive workloads where the nurses are to sacrifice their rest for the sake of the patients’ wellbeing. This aspect made it clear for me how crucial the empowerment and recognition are for the staff in nursing. DiSC helped me understand the compatibility my character with the kind of leadership at which I would be able to achieve better results – dominance style.
The experience and knowledge required for a leader to be able to make such complex decisions and manage so many various challenges comes with practice and through learning and self-improvement. In a field that develops as fast as nursing, the practitioners’ skills become outdated within just a couple years. That is why learning in this profession should never stop. Once a nurse stops learning, they begin to lose qualification and gradually become less and less useful as a professional by the day.
References
Cipriano, P. F. (2011). Move up to the role of nurse manager. American Nurse Today, 6(3), 61-62.
Longo, J. (2011). Combating Disruptive Behaviors: Strategies to Promote a Healthy Work Environment. OJIN: The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 15(1), Manuscript 5.
McDonnell, A. (2012). Managing geriatric health services. Burlington, MS: Jones & Bartlett Learning.
Regan, L. C., & Rodriguez, L. (2011). Nurse Empowerment from a Middle-Management Perspective: Nurse Managers’ and Assistant Nurse Managers’ Workplace Empowerment Views. The Permanente Journal, 15(1): e101–e107.
Rocker, C. (2012). Responsibility of a Frontline Manager Regarding Staff Bullying. OJIN:Â The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 18(2).
Tsai, Y. (2011). Relationship between Organizational Culture, Leadership Behavior and Job Satisfaction. BMC Health Services Research, 11(98), 1-9.
Williamson, C. (20110). Using life coaching techniques to enhance leadership skills in nursing. Nursing Times, 105(8), 20-23.