What Is The Role Of Leading Change In Nursing

American Association of College of Nursing (2012).White Paper on The Role of the Clinical Nurse Leader Retrived from: http://www.aacn.nche.edu/publications/white-papers/cnl

In today’s healthcare system, effective leadership is essential to improving and reaching organizational outcomes. A leader is someone with the ability to influence others but, an effective leader uses positive strategies to inspire employees to work towards the same goal. Leadership in nursing requires a constant effort to motivate others to become part of the organizational transformation. This can be achieved using a transformational leadership style with a focus on communication, motivation, and empowerment.

Nursing leaders are crucial to any nursing organization. They motivate, empower, influence, and communicate the organization’s vision to create change within the organization. Great nursing leadership depends on great nursing leaders. This paper will define nursing leadership and describe leadership characteristics. It will further depict the democratic style and transformational theory of nursing leadership. While exploring leadership in action, this paper will illustrate the aspects of nursing.

The Health Care System 's purpose is to meet the physical and mental health needs of the communities in which they serve, these systems operate using people working within heal care facilities as well as other health delivery resources. One group of individual that help with facility operations are nursing administrators. Nursing Administrators contribute in managing along with directing the nursing care delivery system. Their leadership style, characteristics, communication strategies, including the way that they negotiate as well as manage conflicts can determine the quality of the healthcare services treat the facility provide as well as help to develop a set of guidelines to standardize the type and quality of the nursing services. (Cipriano, 2011) Together the Nurse Mangers work toward the same goals along with guiding nurses in their practice and contribute to the facilities successes. (Frankel, 2011) The nursing leaders are advocates who directly affect the quality of the nursing care along with also having a positive impact on healthcare through leadership.

Implementing a change in practice within these environments can produce anxiety or fear of failure in nurses, leading to a resistance to change. Several studies (Bozak, 2003; Lehman, 2008; Spetz, Burgess & Phibbs, 2012) expounded the need for a concise plan and clear communication between nurses and management when implementing a change of this nature. The use of Lewin’s Change Management theory can support nurses through the transitions and identify areas of strengths and resistances prior to implementing change. Without a framework for guidance, it can be difficult to keep on track.

Nurse leaders are the background to the nursing care. Effective nurse leaders can promote a positive workforce and a healthy work place for other nurses. Workplace dynamics is an essential part of how each nurse functions. Nurses, being mentally and physically stressed, need to have support and guidance from a nurse leader to feel confident about performance. The impact of nursing leaders can be a positive and guiding force for the younger or more inexperienced nurse. Having strong relationships with solid leaders can instill values in the beginning stages of a newer nurses’ career. Gaining insight and core concepts from a more experienced leader can make a world of difference in the way a new nurse performs, provides patient care, and sets future goals for themselves. A newer nurse with a positive role model and nurse leader can model themselves to become a leader for future nurses.

In healthcare it is very important to have strong leaders, especially in the nursing profession. A nurse leader typically uses several styles of leadership depending on the situation presented; this is known as situational leadership. It is important that the professional nurse choose the right style of leadership for any given situation to ensure their employees are performing at their highest potential. Depending on which leadership style a nurse leader uses, it can affect staff retention and the morale of the employees as well as nurse job satisfaction (Azaare & Gross, 2011.) “Nursing leaders have the responsibility to create and maintain a work environment which not only promotes positive patient outcomes but also

By looking back at our past, not only are we are able to determine what has worked and what hasn’t worked, but we can also derive inspiration from the key figures who have influenced positive change in the field of nursing. Knowing that change begins with one person, but can easily develop momentum, inspires me to become a leader and look for ways in which I can facilitate positive

Not all nurses go into the profession with leadership ideas. The nursing profession must produce leaders throughout the health care system. Leaders must function as workers, and administrators with leadership qualities, while still meeting their budgets and running effective units with high functioning and happy staff members. They need to trouble shoot necessary and work with the medical faculty while pleasing their staff and the administers.

Nurse leaders are faced with issues or problems on a daily basis that are often expected and sometimes unexpected. It “comes with the territory” so to speak. If there were no issues to solve or hurdles to overcome the necessity of designating a leader would not seem quite as important. Nurse leaders can tackle issues that occur in their work environment using nursing theory to guide them. Nursing theory provides a framework that nurse leaders can use to implement interventions or changes to positively impact the staff they lead. This framework of the theory will set the standards for achieving the desired outcomes and is based on knowledge that is gleaned from practice and/or research.

Leadership traits associated with nurse executives are honesty, credibility, supportiveness, visibility, and flexibility. Nurse executives analyze nursing functions and empower nurses through participatory decision making, shared governance, and employee involvement. Nurse executives share the vision and goals of the hospital and promote application of a nursing theory into the nursing care delivery system. They anticipate the future of health care and nursing and serve as monitor, role model, and preceptor to lower level management (Upeniecks, 2003). Nurse executives in the Magnet program are required to have advance practice degrees with certification in their specialty (ANCC). Understanding evidence-based management and enabling the use of evidence-based knowledge provides the nurse executive with the tools to improve patient outcomes. The transformational leader will remove barriers to improvement and encourage outcome based thinking. While nurse leaders are charged with questioning the status quo, nurse managers in the transformational approach to leadership are charged with maintaining the status quo.

Leadership may mean different things to different people, the consensus opinion of experts in this field is that leadership is using power to direct and influence activities of people to achieve set goals or targets. Nursing leadership is all about every nurse providing, facilitating and promoting the best healthcare services to client and to the public. Leadership is a shared responsibility. (CNO 2012). The nursing profession need leaders that can build the capacity of nurses through mentoring, coaching, supporting, developing the expertise and management skills of nurses to make a difference to the quality of patient care at all levels of the profession ( McIntyre & McDonald, 2014 ). At the core of every leadership either political or managerial is power and how the leader uses it. While it is practically impossible to lead without power, how the nurse leader uses this power not only determine the leadership style but also the results or outcomes of what is achieved through the process.

In the healthcare field, nursing leaders and managers face consistent issues in their respective practices that force them to alter the way they work and the way they think. In taking on a role as a leader within the field, nursing leaders and managers also take on the role of ensuring that work within an organization runs smoothly regardless of new issues that may arise in the healthcare arena. For instance, in today's healthcare environment, the issues of nurse shortage and nurse turnover have the capacity to alter the healthcare field and many of its respective branches and organizations should these problems not be managed properly by the leaders in the field. In viewing the issue at hand and in discovering how nursing leaders and managers are expected to act, and do act, in order to approach this issues, along with pinpointing the best approach possible to aid this issue, one can better understand which leadership styles are necessary for leaders to function.

The main focus of the theory is motivation, inspiration and empowerment to create changes. It is based on the idea of empowering others to facilitate overall goal. Bennis and Nanus (1985) describe this new leader as a leader who “commits people to action, who converts leaders into leaders, and who converts leaders into agents of change” (p.3).177. According to processes to engage and motivate staff article “Transformational leadership is important for high quality care delivery, and behaviors that nurse leaders inspire, role model and reinforce are instrumental in creating work practice that deliver optimum care”.

Without competent leadership change can have negative impact on both the employees and the patients. According to Wright (2010), lack of leadership in change management could lead to adverse outcomes such as resentment, rebellious attitudes, and could end up damaging the same people it intended to make better (p.20). Therefore, experts warned that it is very important to have competent leadership at the helm of change management (p.20). As the focus of providing leadership shifts to nurse administrators who are often in the frontline of change management, nurse administrator should use essential tools such as the American Organization of Nurse Executives (AONE) five domain of competence as a framework in change management.