Mount Nittany Medical Center External Experience Essay

External Experience Mount Nittany Medical Center
Introduction
Over sixteen hours, I participated in an external experience for Nursing Leadership and Management in Practice while attending Lock Haven University. I was assigned to choose a facility and an individual to observe and monitor their leadership qualities, style and concepts. During this external experience there were multiple interviews and discussions performed. Observation of several staff members and research was done to fulfill this assignment.
Background on Individual
I have selected Jacqueline Hahn, RN, BS, CPUR, CCM to do my external experience with. She is currently in the position of Administrative Coordinator/ Director of Case Management at Mount Nittany Medical Center,

State College, Pennsylvania. Jacqueline began her education at Lancaster General Hospital School of Nursing where she obtained her Diploma of Nursing. She than furthered her education and obtained a Bachelors of Science degree at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA. Currently, Jacqueline is enrolled in a Master of Science in Nursing program with an anticipated graduation date of June 2016. Jacqueline has obtained several awards and has numerous achievements. In 1993, she completed the Interaction Management Training and was nominated as the Nurse of Excellence for Lancaster Regional Hospital. In 1995, she obtained her National Certification in Board of Pediatric Nurse Practioners, then in 1997 she completed the National Certification in Utilization Management and then in 2000 she obtained her National Certification in Case Management. Jacqueline has been in the healthcare field since 1987 where she began her career at Lancaster Regional Medical Center in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. There she provided twelve years of proven medical experience and responsibilities obtained in the nursing and administrative field. She worked as the weekend and evening nursing supervisor, a staff member in the critical care unit, pediatric unit, and medical surgical unit. Two years before she left LRMC, she began working at Preferred Health Care in Lancaster, PA as the Director of Medical Services. At this facility she coordinated the daily operations of the Medical Services Department including the Utilization Management, Case Management and Disease Management departments. In 2005, her employment changed and she went to Commonwealth Funding in State College, PA as the Director of Human Resources. There she was the department head for the day-to-day Human Resources functions, serving as the primary contact for employees and managers along with several other responsibilities. In 2009, Jacqueline joined Mount Nittany Medical Center’s team and fulfilled a positioned in the Ambulatory Surgical Unit as a Registered Nurse. She than fulfilled a Clinical Supervisor position for several years. Then in 2012 she was offered the Administrative Coordinator for Nursing and Director of Case Management position. In her current position she assures the provisions of nursing care to patients and families serviced by nursing based on the ANS Standards and governing agency guidelines. She also performs the role and functions as Vice President of Nursing. Jacqueline is very well liked at the facility and has a good rapport with her colleagues. I personally selected Jacqueline to observe due to her advancement in her career and my view of her work ethic. I personally have worked with Jacqueline since 2009 on occasion and first hand in the Ambulatory Services Unit and while she was Clinical Supervisor.
My goals as a student have a broad range but some have relation to Jacqueline’s position. The most immediate goal is to obtain my BSN, which Jacqueline has already obtained. I possibly would like to continue for my MSN but that will be with time. Jacqueline has just recently started her MSN and will have that completed in 2016. Further down the road in my career I would like to obtain a leadership position like Jacqueline but would like to wait until I have more experience so I can fulfill that role with a better understanding in all aspects. While doing my external experience Jacqueline had given me a compliment stating that I am the type of person that could be in a leadership position from what she has seen in my nursing career. Besides a leadership position I have also had the goal of becoming a Nurse Practioner or Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists.
Background on Healthcare Agency
Mount Nittany Medical Center is located at 1800 East Park Avenue, State College, Pennsylvania.

Mount Nittany’s mission is: We are here to make people healthier. The facility will treat all patients with dignity and respect, and will accommodate individual responses to stress of illness. MNMC fully supports the principles of Patient Rights and Responsibilities. All patients receive a uniform standard of care throughout all of their facilities, regardless of social, cultural, financial, religious, racial, gender or sexual orientation factors. Mount Nittany Medical Center is part of Mount Nittany Health and within this agency they offer 60 specialties and subspecialties. There are 14 off campus locations within Mount Nittany Health that offer these services. There are several services offered at the Mount Nittany Medical Center, you can view a full list at www.mountnittany.org. To name a few of the services offered, they would include: Emergency services, outpatient services, critical care, surgical services, cardiac services, medical/surgical services, laboratory and pathology services, pediatrics, and OBGYN. The clients Mount Nittany serves range from newborns to

geriatrics.
Leadership and Management Qualities
Qualities that are required for Jacqueline’s position have a wide range but there are some qualities that I believe a person in her position should have or work on attaining. Qualities required for the position that Jacqueline holds would include, approachable, communicative, competent, confident, fair, direct, honest, and visionary. Certain qualities come natural to individuals but other may need some guidance on how to attain these qualities. Approachable, confident and honest are qualities that come natural to Jacqueline. She is approachable by letting the individual talk before she acts and gives them the sense that they can approach her without the fear of being yelled at. Confidence is her best quality in my opinion and this is a difficult quality to maintain at a balanced level. Leaders and their confidence can really signify them in their role. There is a balance that needs to be maintained in confidence because too little of confidence can make them an ineffective leader and too much confidence can be detrimental. Honesty is a priority in any leadership position. A leader would not be successful if their staff members did not trust or respect them. Jacqueline is honest in everything that was observed even to the point where it may cause conflict. Qualities that Jacqueline and I discussed were communicative and visionary. Jacqueline stated that she was not always able to communicate effectively due to her fear of unclear communication and messing up. She voluntarily took extra general education classes to help improve her communication skills while attending school to help advance in this quality. Jacqueline states that she believes vision and attitude are two management qualities that she has attained in her management position. She sees herself working as a team and a winning team is a built through a shared vision and acknowledgement of each teams members contributions.
Leadership and Management Style
There are several different leadership and management styles. The most common styles are autocratic leadership, democratic leadership, laissez-faire leadership, transformational leadership and servant leadership has grown in popularity over the last several years. Autocratic leadership is a style that assumes individuals are motivated by external forces; therefore, the leader makes all the decisions and directs the followers’ behavior (Sullivan, 2005). This could also be known as directive, controlling or authoritarian. Democratic leadership is a style that assumes individuals are motivated by internal forces; leader uses participation and majority rule to get work done (Sullivan, 2005). Laissez-faire leadership style is when the leader assumes individuals are motivated by internal forces and should be left alone to complete work; leader provides no direction or facilitation (Sullivan, 2005), this would be a lack of leadership. Transformational leadership is a style that is focused on effecting revolutionary change in organizations through a commitment to the organization’s vision (Sullivan, 2005). The newly populated leadership style Servant is the premise that leadership originates from a desire to serve; a leader emerges when others’ needs take priority (Sullivan, 2005). Jacqueline identified her leadership and management style as transformational but was working hard on transitioning to the Servant leadership style. After a discussion with Jacqueline’s peers’, boss’s, and colleagues’ about their perception of her individual leadership style, they had an equal number of who thought she was a transformational leader and a Servant leader. During the time spent on the external experience, I also viewed Jacqueline as a Transformational leader but could see the characteristics of her working towards a Servant leadership style. Characteristics that Jacqueline implied towards the Servant leadership style include: the ability to listen on a deep level, to ability to keep an open mind and hear without judgment and seeing things while and sensing relationships and connections (Marquis, 2009).
Leadership and Management Concepts
While observing Jacqueline in a leadership role, there were several concepts that suited her but the most prevalent are time management, communication, delegation, accountable and conflict management. Jacqueline’s colleagues were in agreement with these concepts while discussing her leadership role.
Time management is making optimal use of available time (Marquis, 2009). Time cannot be managed as a resource. It’s one’s self that must be managed in relation to time (Hackworth, 2008). There are some basic techniques that will implement time management and help maintain management of time. The basic techniques include: prioritize, set goals, make a plan, and controlling interruptions. Prioritizing helps you complete important tasks first, with this being said, you need to decide which tasks are most important to least important and complete them in that order. Jacqueline was fantastic at prioritizing and helping her subordinates do so also. She would write down the tasks that she needed to complete and a date they needed to be completed by in her daily schedule and set a reminder to prompt her that a certain task needs completed if it hasn’t already been done so. She could identify which task was more important than another and would help her subordinates identify these tasks also. Jacqueline would identify tasks that needed to be completed and tasks that needed to be completed by others also. Setting goals help you clarify what you want and give you energy, direction and focus (Whitehead, 2007). Jacqueline sets both short and long term goals to help organize her time. Her short term goals consist of her daily schedule and tasks that needed to be completed that day. Each morning, Jacqueline sends an email out to her subordinates to give them an update on tasks that need to be completed and to gather feedback on tasks that have already been completed to see if they have established goals that were set. Long term goals are those that you would like to complete over a longer period of time. Jacqueline’s long term goals consist of completion of an MSN program, gathering statistical data related to staffing activities, and completion of the observation status policy. Once goals and priorities have been established, Jacqueline was able to concentrate on making a plan and concentrate on scheduling activities. Jacqueline makes a plan at the beginning of each week so she can be fully prepared for the week to come. She uses outlook to keep her meetings, interviews, regular events, appointments and daily activities planned. Jacqueline encourages her staff members to do the same and most of them report that they do so; some use a different type of system to make their plan for the week. Controlling interruptions is an essential part of Jacqueline’s job to help her manage her time. An interruption occurs any time the leader/manager is stopped in the middle of one activity to give attention to something else (Sullivan, 2005). Jacqueline stated that telephone calls are one of the greatest interruptions on a daily basis for her; she controls them by screening phone calls and allowing her voicemail to receive messages. Jacqueline encourages email to enhance her time management and to lessen interruptions.
Effective communication involves two distinct aspects: adequately articulating our ideas and understanding the listening audience with whom we’re communicating in order to perceive how they best learn and receive information (Rosenblatt, 2009). Jacqueline does a good job at monitoring her audience to see if she is effectively communicating with them or if she is coming off as defensive. She states that she tries to prevent talking down to individuals or her tone of communication due to the fact that these can impair effective communication. Jacqueline took general education classes to help improve her communication skills due to the fact of always not being able to effectively communicate. When you talk to her boss’s, peers or colleagues they all state that one of Jacqueline’s best quality is her communication. She will always respond to your phone call, voicemail, email or question you have presented to her and if she does not know the answer she will find it and report back to them in a timely manner. Mount Nittany has an open door policy and Jacqueline encourages her staff members to participate in two-way communication. Listening carefully and providing feedback are two of Jacqueline’s best aspects in communication. Good communication is the adhesive that builds and maintains effective work group (Sullivan, 2005). Jacqueline has effective communication with her subordinates and superiors, she is able to confront either with conflicts or concerns as needed.
Delegation can be defined as simply getting work done through others or as directing the performance of one or more people to accomplish organizational goals (Marquis, 2007). Delegation is essential in a leadership/manager role because work assignments that are accomplished are not only done by the leaders/managers own efforts but by those of subordinates. Delegation is not an easy task but is a necessity for a leader to perform; one person cannot complete all the work that is needed. In describing how the process of delegation should take place there is the reference of the “Four Rights” of delegation. These include the right task, the right person, the right communication, and the right feedback (Parkman, 1996). The right task is one that can be delegated, the right person is one who is qualified and competent to do the job, right communication is a clear, concise description of the task, the objective, and expectations, and the right feedback is a timely evaluation of the worker’s performance (Parkman, 1996). Jacqueline was a role model when it came to delegation and was able to determine which tasks were able to be delegated promptly. She would assign the task to an individual whom was qualified and give detailed directions on how to complete this task if needed. Her colleagues and subordinates would have a clear expected outcome communicated with them and then she would provide feedback as she could. While discussing delegation with Jacqueline she stated that she would not assign some specific tasks to every individual in the same position due to the fact that some may not have sufficient training compared to others. She stated that it is important to match the individual’s skill level to the tasks that need to be performed.
Accountability is setting clear expectations of mutually agreed upon goals, objectives, and related time lines (Arob, 2011).

In a leadership role accountability is essential to be an effective leader. A leader should be a mentor in the practice of accountability with principles that include setting expectations, invite commitment, measure results, provide feedback, link to consequences, and evaluate effectiveness (Arob, 2011). Jacqueline’s colleagues and subordinates can always count on her to complete a task or to follow through with something in any case because that is how she is. She completes all tasks in a timely manner and will reach goals and expectations always. Jacqueline encourages her subordinates and is a role model in accountability for them. In Jacqueline’s office they have a whiteboard that has tasks and projects that her department is working on and they have a timeline set up with each staff member whom is accountable written beside the tasks. At first, I thought this was unprofessional and would have thought the staff members should know what they need to do and have done by a certain time, well it turns out, all the staff like this idea because they glance at it each time they are in her office and it reminds them that they need to complete their assigned

project.
Conflict management is an important part of a leader’s role along with all the other many concepts a leader should attain. An individual in a leadership role is often involved in conflict management on several different aspects. To be an effective leader you must be able to recognize and accept the individual differences of staff, be a role model for collaborative negotiation efforts, and to create a work environment that will lessen the conditions for conflict (Marquis, 2007). Jacqueline does a great job at mediating conflict between individuals. She does not blame a problem on an individual, allows open and complete discussion of the problem, maintains equity in the frequency and duration of each individual’s presentation and she encourages positive and negative feelings to be expressed. Confrontation is Jacqueline’s ideal way to resolve conflict; she prefers to bring the problem out in the open between both parties and to resolve it. When she does this she does it in private and prefers to do it as soon as possible after the initial problem occurs. Jacqueline’s subordinates report that sometimes this makes them uncomfortable but yet it helps resolve the issue promptly.
My Leadership and management qualities needed
After completion of this external experience I have several qualities that I need to attain for a leadership position. Advancement in communication and conflict management are a must. I do not do well with communicating in front of a group that I am not familiar with. Conflict management is an issue due to parting with sides and not hearing the whole presentation before resolving. There are certifications that are required in Jacqueline’s position that I would need to attain to advance to this position. These include my BSN, Certification in Case Management and Utilization Management. All around, advancing to a leadership role would be a great deal of change for me due to the fact that I prefer to get my own job done and do my best job at it and not worry about what other individuals are doing.
Conclusion
Over the duration of this external experience I was able to observe a leader in action and view her leadership styles, analyze her position and to witness the strategic planning involved in a leadership role. Realization of what is required in the preparation of a leadership role and how to successfully maintain this role is established was attained. Identification of personal growth and development in my nursing career for future career possibilities was fulfilled during this external experience. Overall, this experience was very beneficial in my nursing career.