In today’s healthcare environment, nurse leaders must successfully navigate the highly sophisticated and complex healthcare systems in an unprecedented evolution and innovation era. Nurse leaders face increasing pressure to meet the multiple needs and outcomes of the profession and their followers and maintain the organization’s standards of care while protecting the organization from inefficiencies and failure. In this context, nurse leadership assessment and development have never been greater. To meet the rapidly evolving demands of the nursing profession and the healthcare setting, nurse leaders must evaluate their skills, some of which need to be included in the job description, while also developing new skill sets to manage the rapidly evolving healthcare landscape. This paper, therefore, presents my strengths and potential gaps based on the nurse leadership competencies provided.
My Self-assessment in relation to the nurse leadership competencies
With the need for succession planning and effective nurse leadership, each aspiring nurse leader has unique strengths and weaknesses. This explains why my self-assessment was necessary. I assessed myself using three surveys: an 8-question nurse leadership knowledge assessment, a 17-question leadership competency assessment, and a 6-question emotional intelligence self-assessment.
With each assessment, my strengths include strategic thinking, effective communication, and influencing others rather than directing others. These competencies are reflected in the AONL nurse leadership competencies model, which states that functional or technical competencies support each leadership role. As such, the core competencies from the AONL core competencies model that matched my functional and technical skills include foundational thinking, professional accountability, influencing behaviors, and relationship management. Hughes et al. (2022) state that nurse leaders require professionalism, foundation thinking, relationship management, and the ability to influence behaviors to thrive in the rapidly changing professional and healthcare environment.
For me, nursing leadership is all about competent practice specific to the nurse leadership role. Here, communicating with clarity and integrity is crucial for building trust with all the relevant stakeholders in the healthcare sector. The key is enhancing a collaborative working environment to achieve the desired goals and outcomes.
While these skills are important for a well-rounded, effective nurse leader, the emphasis on each skill differs based on the nurse leader’s role. However, reflecting on potential gaps and areas where I can improve to become an effective leader is also essential. Sanford & Janney (2019) suggest that nurse leaders are responsible for being the voice of patients and health practitioners at the highest level of the organization. To fulfill the advocacy requirements, nurse leaders must have a robust skill set in negotiations, networking, and coalition building.
But, it takes courage to question superiors and hold them accountable for their actions or verbalize ideas that may be considered unconventional. In this context, my self-assessment results indicate that I often attempt to complete too many tasks at once, being too self-critical, and have low self-confidence. As a leader with low self-confidence, it may be difficult to influence others to verbalize ideas that may be considered unconventional or remain confident in my decisions. Also, working harder than other people in the workplace could help me earn respect, but instead, this approach makes a leader seem like they don’t understand the importance of teamwork. In fact, this approach would make followers feel like they need to be more trusted or perceived as capable of undertaking a job. Therefore, to lead effectively, I need to address these weaknesses.
My goals for nurse leadership development
Given the strengths and weaknesses from my self-assessment, the four main goals for my nursing leadership development would include:
- Fulfilling continuing education requirements with five years
- Refining my interpersonal skills
- Be adaptable to change and growth
- Building dynamic teams
- Fulfilling continuing education requirements with five years
Successful nurse leaders in an increasingly complex and highly technological healthcare environment must continually expand their education to ensure they are equipped with new knowledge to address the evolving challenges of nursing leadership and the healthcare industry. With this in mind, my objective for continuing education would be to stay up-to-date with the rapidly changing industry practices, enhance my nursing leadership competence, learn about new technology, and to update my clinical nursing skills. In addition, financial and business aspects of leadership are often outside the scope of typical nursing education. This means that undertaking continuous finance and business administration education programs could empower me to become more efficient in resource management and accomplish business tasks related to running healthcare organizations.
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Refining my interpersonal skills
Successful nurse leaders have excellent interpersonal skills. The significant components of interpersonal skills are trust, respect, empathy, professional intimacy, and power (Beenen et al., 2021). These traits would help me in effective communication, influencing behaviors, and relationship management, which are all key elements of effective nurse leadership. Although some nurse leaders are naturally gifted with interpersonal skills, they can still be improved.
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Be adaptable to change and growth.
Instead of assuming that I know everything, I aim to be adaptable and open to learning in this rapidly evolving healthcare industry. Adaptability and openness to change put nurse leaders in a better position to successfully stay abreast with the rapidly changing industry practices, learn about new technology and ideas and update their clinical nursing skills. This is important, especially during periods of health system restructuring or when you need to change practice options to accommodate industry changes. Put, being open-minded to new opportunities and knowledge will help me in my personal and professional growth.
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Building dynamic teams
Dynamic teams can make the difference between a well-run department and a bit more chaotic one. Effective nurse leaders work with diverse and unique individuals to create successful coalitions and teams. If refining my interpersonal skills and being adaptable to change and growth are in my wheelhouse, I can confidently build dynamic teams that are in coherent with each other. In fact, Huynh et al. (2019) suggest that effective nurse leaders invest time and resources into cultivating a culture that supports teamwork.
When teams are dynamic, nurse leaders and organizations benefit. Good team dynamics are all about seamless collaboration, effective communication, and achieving organizational goals. Building good dynamics is about creating a prime environment for creativity and innovation, meaning that the organization can bests meet its customer’s needs and ensure job satisfaction. Building dynamic teams would help me achieve the organization’s goals, ensure alignment of team activities with organizational goals, and ensure accountability and transparency.
With these goals and their impacts on my practice in mind, I also need to take stapes to improve my performance as a nurse leader. This could involve encouraging team members to deliver their goals and improve team performance.
Conclusion
When it comes to effective nurse leadership, just about nothing matters more than strategic thinking, effective communication, and the ability to influence others rather than direct. By understanding our strengths and weaknesses and taking considerable steps to improve our leadership abilities, nurse leaders can excel at positively influencing behavior and team performance and tackling challenges to achieve success.
References
Beenen, G., Pichler, S., Livingston, B., & Riggio, R. (2021). The Good Manager: Development and Validation of the Managerial Interpersonal Skills Scale. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.631390
Hughes, R., Meadows, M. T., & Begley, R. (2022). AONL Nurse Leader Competencies: Core Competencies for Nurse Leadership. Nurse Leader, 20(5), 437–443. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mnl.2022.08.005
Huynh, T., Duong, M. H., Phan, T. T., Do, T. V., Do, T. T. T., & Nguyen, K. T. (2019). Team Dynamics, Leadership, and Employee Proactivity of Vietnamese Firms. Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity, 5(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.3390/joitmc5010016
Sanford, K., & Janney, M. (2019). Preparing the Nurse Executive of the Future. The Journal of Nursing Administration, 49(4), 171–173. https://doi.org/10.1097/NNA.0000000000000732
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