Transformational Leadership Summary

The skills and knowledge required to motivate staff nurses were the topics of a study authored by Henderson, Schoonbeek, and Auditore (2013). The authors described the lack of team unity and poor communication found among the staff at a local acute care facility which ultimately lead to poor job satisfaction and less than optimal patient care (Henderson et al., 2013). To change the status quo Henderson et al (2013) focused on using transformational leadership skills such as identifying a common vision, empowering and inspiring the team to own the decision making process and evaluating the efforts and progress made to engage and motivate the staff. In the end, the authors suggested that staff work practices can be modified and improved when leaders model the preferred behaviors. Similarly, the topic of applying transformational leadership skills to motivate nurses to improve the status quo was described in an article by O. Doody and C. M. Doody (2012). In this article the authors focused their attention on four components found within the transformational leadership skills: model the behaviors desired, motivate the staff to achieve their goals and objectives, challenge the way things are currently done, and empower the staff to take ownership in the unit (Doody & Doody, 2012). The belief that a truly great leader must

The Manager at the time worked tirelessly to change these behaviors using some of the transformational leadership skills described above. She inspired and encouraged our team to put others above ourselves and modeled the behaviors in her everyday interactions with the staff and others. After six months of educating the staff and modeling the change expected, the survey results were back and both the employee engagement and quality indicator scores showed positive change; the result of an accomplished transformational