The Potential to Transform And Empower People To Become Great Leaders

Great leaders have the power and potential to transform and empower people to become great leaders. According to Marquis and Huston, a leader is someone “who is out front, taking risks, attempting to achieve shared goals, and inspiring others to action.” Nurses are leaders in all aspects of their career, whether it be at the bedside, clinic, or classroom. To be effective leaders, nurses must act as experts, educators, advocates, and role models. Strong and practical leadership skills that contribute to patient safety and quality of care include emotional intelligence, communication, and collaboration.

As a nursing student, I had the opportunity to work with many preceptors and mentors with various styles of leadership. I have gained knowledge and skills from working with them that will be invaluable to my future as a nurse. A leader that I have worked with that encompasses the qualities of a successful leader is my preceptor. My preceptor, Danilyn, is a clinical nurse manager in the medical-surgical unit. Danilyn’s exemplary leadership skills were both inspiring and enlightening to witness.

One of Danilyn’s many strengths that initially caught my attention was her excellent communication skills and demonstration of fairness. Danilyn builds relationships with her staff by starting every morning by going around the unit to see how everyone is doing. She instituted a sort of open-door policy with her staff that ensured her team could comfortably come to her with any problems, and they would work together to resolve the issue. When there is a time that she needs to correct one of her staff’s actions, she makes sure that it is done positively and enabling. Enabling others to act demonstrates one of Kouzes and Posner’s practices for exemplary leadership to encourage collaboration, trust, and strengthening through the sharing of power. Her positive attitude promotes a productive environment for staff development and allows them to overcome stress and burnout. As a genuinely efficient leader, Danilyn supported, empowered, and inspired her nursing staff to achieve the highest goals in personal and professional growth.

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She made sure to acknowledge her staff’s achievements and makes recommendations in areas that need improvement. When she sees potential in her nursing staff, she encourages them to seek leadership positions, such as charge nurse. She performed equally well, interacting with nurses, physicians, and other members of the healthcare team. When collaborating with other members of the team, Danilyn always made sure to remain informed and patient-centered. I also got to observe Danilyn’s decision-making skills. Danilyn’s entire unit had to close due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She had to make decisions on which departments to put her staff and who’s hours to cut. With this challenging task, she had her charge nurses help in figuring out the staff schedule. This demonstrates a democratic leadership in which decision-making involved others.

Danilyn exhibits the interactional leadership theory because she incorporates both transformational and transactional styles of leadership. To be a successful leader, one must be adaptable to the current situation and select the appropriate leadership strategy for that situation. Danilyn, for the most part, fits the definition of a transformational leader because she encourages and inspires her staff to work together to achieve the common goal of quality and safe patient-centered care. As a transactional leader, Danilyn intervenes when there is any non-compliance to the hospital’s policies and standards and corrects the problem when necessary.

My vision of leadership is to be a transformational leader. This type of leader has the skills to share their vision, motivate their team, and gain commitment, which will, as a result, inspire performance in their followers. Working with Danilyn on my leadership project on improving pain medication safety, we motivated staff to improve their medication administration skills and promote safety through encouragement. A study found that nurse managers with transformational leadership styles have a strong correlation with increasing medication safety. Another leadership style that works hand in hand with transformational leadership is shared leadership. Shared leadership, where no one has authority over another, values trust, engagement, and democracy and are supportive of each other’s ideas. A transformative leader brings a problem to the group, and shared leadership is necessary so that different groups can work together and collaborate to benefit everyone. Shared leadership was demonstrated during my leadership project when I presented the problem to the Acute Care Team, which consisted of clinical managers from the acute care units. We worked collaboratively to share ideas and come up with a solution.

Three leadership skills I have focused on and continued to develop throughout this course are communication, organization, and delegation. Being an effective communicator is essential in a leader because it helps teams’ complete projects and helps develop a better understanding between team members. The progression of my communication skills is evident throughout my leadership project. I anxiously went into this semester, dreading the thought of presenting in front of Cottage Hospital’s leaders and managers. The development of my project required me to meet with various people, such as the Medical Quality Officer and the Administrator of Acute Care, to present the problem and influence them to achieve the desired goal. As I became more knowledgeable on my topic, I gained the confidence to effectively present my ideas. Communication is one of my biggest weaknesses that I will continue to work on and can be improved by improving my self-confidence.

The second leadership skill I have continued to develop is organization. Organization and time management is an important skill to have in a leader because it can lead to a positive outlook for team members. Having two jobs while in school can be stressful, but I have managed through good organization and time management by prioritizing and keeping a strict schedule. Without good organization and time management, objectives can be left too close to the deadline, which creates a poorly planned outcome that can affect the quality of my work.

The third leadership skill I have continued to develop and focus on is delegation. Delegation is crucial in nursing leadership because it increases productivity and involves an understanding of responsibility, authority, and accountability. I have exhibited delegation skills through group projects, where I delegated different tasks to group members in order to meet project deadlines. Delegation was also demonstrated in my leadership project when I delegated tasks to my preceptor, such as setting up meetings and obtaining reports. The leadership skills I have adopted since taking this course are self-reflection and inspiring change. Conflict resolution is a skill I plan to adopt in the future.

Self-reflection will be integrated into my nursing practice because it will allow me to examine my own professional practice and compare it to current standards and best practices. Inspiring change can be integrated into my nursing profession in a variety of ways, such as inspiring a policy change to promote a better system, inspiring colleagues to do better, or inspiring change in a patient so that they can live a healthy lifestyle. I would like to adopt conflict resolution skills because conflict and confrontation is something I often avoid. There will be times in my nursing career where I encounter conflicts with patients or colleagues, so it is important I learn how to deal with conflict to promote a healthy workplace. Being able to de-escalate conflict involves effective communication.

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