708 response 2
DISCUSSION POST
Icebreaker and Leadership Role
A warm Hafa Adai from Guam! My name is Claudine; I love reading and eating good food. I have been a nurse for fifteen years, and ten of them have an intensive care background. I am also a Navy Nurse Corps Reservist and have been of service to our country for 14 years. I am pursuing the acute care Doctor of Nursing (DNP) path. Since the beginning of this year, I have stepped into a leadership position to have the flexibility of being a student once again while still retaining the ability to support my family. This leadership position is titled Director of Ancillary Services. It encompasses six departments that are part of the multidisciplinary team that is not nursing, including Clinical Dietary, Laboratory, Pharmacy, Radiology, Rehabilitation, and Respiratory. I still have significant challenges that I am learning to navigate, the biggest of which is that I am a nurse. The phrase, jack-of-all-trades and a master of none, describes how leadership has affected my career and life thus far because although I understand bits and pieces of my team’s job scope, I cannot fully picture their roles unless I have stepped into their shoes. I also rely heavily on my managers as the subject matter experts in their fields – after all, they are licensed in their respective areas.
Leadership Experiences
I have had many bad experiences with a nurse manager but also very good ones and this has shaped my leadership style today. Digging deeper, I see that the bad experiences were caused heavily by the generational gap and the historical culture of nursing that both my previous manager and I faced. She was more oriented with the “old style†of nursing, characterized by a chain of command and, conversely, bullying and intimidation – not by her specifically, but she tolerated the behavior with her more senior staff, stating that this “builds character†of the new nurse and that one either “sinks or swims, there is no in-between.†The first four years of my nursing profession were tough, especially since there were few choices for places of employment in this tiny rock I call home, and I did experience bullying and intimidation. However, I found my passion in the critical care arena. I switched gears from being a telemetry nurse to being an intensive care nurse. My nurse manager at the time earned my respect and loyalty early on because she ruled as a transformational leader; she was able to navigate conflict better (than my previous manager) by way of promoting a civil workplace and a safe, supportive space to be a practicing nurse (Mrayyan &Al-Rjoub, 2024). She also has the credentials (Master of Nursing) to support her leadership and management style. In a study by Welch (2024), transformational leaders tend to handle conflict better, and nursing leaders are recommended to improve their conflict management skills. Looking at the difference between the two managers I have experienced and relating it to a DNP-prepared nurse, what is unique is that the latter is trained to lead with a systems-level perspective with an advanced level of clinical and educational expertise (via an emphasis on evidence-based practices). At this time, I am enjoying my current position, and being given the ability to work on and build relationships with my team is fulfilling for me. I may not seek other leadership avenues, but the door will not be closed to other opportunities.
Leadership Style
Based on the StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Rath (2007) test, my top five strengths are context, intellection, learner, consistency, and deliberative. Contemplating my results, I agree wholeheartedly with the assessment as it described who I am almost perfectly. I had multiple “aha!†moments reading through each characteristic and applying it to my practice as a DNP, the combination of strengths lends itself to effective leadership by way of learning from the past (context) that can assist in standardizing clinical procedures (consistency) while respecting the historical context of the area (both geographically and departmentally). As a learner who enjoys the mental hum during moments of alone time, it can empower me to think critically and stay updated on emerging trends that enable me to innovate and implement evidence-based practices. Being deliberative in leadership strength makes me mindful of the changes I want to implement, ensuring that a thorough risk analysis has been done to evaluate the pros and cons of the change. Some barriers that I might encounter include an overreliance on history, overanalyzing/overthinking, and the constant pursuit of knowledge, which might slow down the decisions that need to be made in a timely (or urgent) manner.
Conflict, Confrontations, Complexity of Health Care
In the book written by Patterson et al. (2013), confrontations I typically avoid are bad behavior. I find it hard to deal with, and it often stirs up fiery emotions that impact relationships and the work environment. I choose not to speak up because of the fear of negative reactions that most often stem from rationalizing that the issue is not a big deal. From there, it snowballs into the thought that nothing will change, so the conversation that needs to happen becomes delayed. Unbundling or deconstructing the issue/circumstance is something I am happy to do as a context and intellection thinker. The most challenging to put into practice would be the actions/solutions that I have come up with because the action would involve having to sit down and talk to the person with whom I am having an issue. To break the cycle of silence-to-violence habit would be to frequently check in on my mental chatter and see the other person as a person: faulty and can commit infractions but is human at the heart of it.
Adding the behavioral aspect in the healthcare setting is challenging in leadership and management. In an ideal world, co-workers get along. Still, given the high-stress nature of healthcare and the differing styles in leadership coupled with resource limitations – it is the perfect setting for disputes and miscommunications to happen, and what suffers is the quality-of-care delivery to the patients.
How does one handle this? Enter systemic thinking – which involves the understanding of interconnectedness with a global perspective on both the healthcare side and the sociopolitical environment (Broome & Marshall, 2021). In practice, systemic thinking is critical to transformational leadership as leaders who utilize systemic thinking can develop patient care protocols that account for interdependencies between departments, address staffing shortages by considering the entire nursing pipeline involved (e.g., education, training, job satisfaction), and promote policy changes that ensure long-term improvement in patient outcomes by addressing the underlying issues rather than short-term fixes
References
Broome, M. E., & Marshall, E. S. (2021). Transformational leadership in nursing (3rd ed.). Springer.
Mrayyan, M. T., & Al-Rjoub, S. (2024). Does nursing leaders’ humility leadership associate with nursing team members’ psychological safety? A cross-sectional online survey. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 80(9), 3666–3678. https://doi-org.proxy.library.maryville.edu/10.1111/jan.16117Links to an external site.
Patterson, K., Grenny, J., McMillan, R., & Switzler, A. (2013). Crucial accountability: Tools for resolving violated expectations, broken commitments, and bad behavior (2nd ed.). McGraw-Hill.
Rath, T. (2007). StrengthsFinder 2.0. Gallup Press.
Welch, V. A. (2024). A Descriptive Study Examining the Correlation of Emotional Intelligence and Leadership Styles to Conflict Management Styles of Nursing School Administrators. Nursing Education Perspectives, 45(2), 87–92. https://doi-org.proxy.library.maryville.edu/10.1097/01.NEP.0000000000001198
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