Nursing Leadership

Leadership and the Graduate Nursing Role Leadership is a core competency of advanced practice nursing (Hamric, 2014). Unfortunately, there is no magic on how to become a great leader in your practice area. Constantly changing healthcare environment introduces new challenges to health care providers that need adjustment in their leading skills and techniques applicable to any situation. Leadership styles are based on leadership skills. Not all great leaders will be the same. To become a great leader requires hard work and motivation as well as to have an inspiring leader to guide and empower you throughout the nursing career and beyond. There are many different types of leadership styles. Kurt Lewin (1939) called these styles: authoritative,

Participative leaders are cooperative and include other team members when making decisions. The leader maintains the final decision based on specific issue. In this leadership style, the leader acquires advice from all the team members and makes the final decision. This kind of leadership style encourages and motivates group members to brainstorm about an issue, forms relationship. The team members feel acknowledged and their skills are valued. We cannot be experts in all areas and we should value knowledge and expertise from other team members. I feel that collaboration plays an important role in any of the leadership types. We live in times of continuous change. Values, cultures, and societies are changing along with today’s health care organizations. In many ways, change is only constant within the dynamic health care

A graduate nurse acquires valuable education and knowledge to become a nurse leader in her/his profession. According to Hamric (2014), a clinical leader should direct his/her focus on the patients’ needs, safety and provide a high quality of care. Our patients’ safety should be number one concern for any nurse. In order to become a good clinical leader, one has to establish positive relationships through effective communication and building self-confidence. Advanced practice nurses (APN) are mentors and advocates for the patients and families. Mentors should empower and encourage others by providing support and understanding. I also think self-reflection is important to recollect past experiences and learn from own mistakes. Learning is about self-reflection and finding improved ways of doing things (Nash and Govier, 2009). I agree with the study results of D’Addona, Pinto, Oliver, Turcotte, and Lavoie-Tremblay (2015) that nursing leaders recognized themselves as having important roles as educators and having a supportive role by understanding and encouraging others. The most elite attributes for a graduate level nurses are communication and collaboration with other health care providers (D’Addona, et al., 2015). Through collaboration and effective communication nurses can build strong, supportive relationships as well as develop clinical skills. I like the description of a leader by Burns (2009) leaders