NR 447 Week 2 Leadership Practices Self-Assessment Example

Enabling Others Until Seven in the Evening: A Leadership Self-Assessment Tested Against a Short-Staffed Shift

Student Name

College of Nursing, Chamberlain University

NR 447: Collaborative Leadership in Healthcare

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Enabling Others Until Seven in the Evening: A Leadership Self-Assessment Tested Against a Short-Staffed Shift

The Result

I completed the self version of the Leadership Practices Inventory, which rates how often a leader shows five behaviors that Kouzes and Posner (2017) derived from thousands of personal-best leadership stories: setting an example, building a common picture of the future, questioning how things are done, strengthening others by sharing power and trust, and recognizing contributions. My highest score was on strengthening others, the practice the authors call enabling others to act, and my lowest was on questioning how things are done. In the inventory's terms, I describe myself as a leader who builds trust, involves others in decisions and shares power, and who is less likely to push against established routines.

The Hour the Unit Went Short

The result describes me on an ordinary day, and on ordinary days I think it is accurate. As charge nurse on our 30-bed cardiac step-down unit, I usually build the assignment with the oncoming nurses rather than for them, and I ask before I move a patient. The shift that tests the result is a Friday in the third week of this course. At 1845, the night charge nurse called in sick, and I agreed to stay as charge until 2300. At 1900 we had two admissions pending from the emergency department, one nurse short for nights, and a nurse on my day team in the medication room in tears because a patient she had cared for all week had died that afternoon.

What I did for the next hour was not enabling others to act. I stopped asking. I built the night assignment alone in about four minutes and read it out at the 1900 huddle without inviting changes. When a night nurse said she had never taken an intra-aortic balloon pump patient, I said she would be fine and I would help. I told the day nurse in the medication room that I was sorry and that she could go home once she finished report, and I walked away to call the house supervisor. I did not consult the charge nurse from the neighboring unit, who had offered help, because explaining the problem would have taken longer than solving it myself. By 2000 the assignment was covered and both admissions were placed. By my own standard, the unit was safe. By the standard of the inventory, I was a different leader from 1845 to 2000.

Which One I Believe

When the inventory and my memory of that Friday disagree, I believe the Friday. The inventory asks how often I engage in a behavior, and I answered with my typical shift in mind. Typical shifts do not test leadership very much. The behavior I showed under load, deciding alone, reassuring instead of listening, choosing speed over involvement, is closer to the directive style that Hersey et al. (2013) describe as appropriate when followers are unable or unwilling and time is short. It may have been the right style for that hour. But it is not the style I reported, and I suspect it is the style my night colleagues remember most, because they meet me when the unit is short far more often than day staff do.

The low score on challenge the process also looks different after that Friday. I did not question anything that evening, including the house supervisor's decision not to hold the second admission until 2100, which would have given the night team an hour to settle. I accepted it because questioning it would have been one more conversation. That fits the inventory's finding, and it had a cost that night.

A Second Reading

I asked the night nurse who took the balloon pump patient how she would describe me as charge that evening. She said I was calm and got everything covered, but that she felt she could not say no to the assignment, and that when I said she would be fine it did not feel like help, it felt like the end of the conversation. She added that I did come to her room twice before 2300, which she appreciated. Her account matches mine closely and adds the part I could not see from the desk: my speed read to her as a closed door.

I also asked the nursing assistant who worked nights that Friday. Her account was shorter and less comfortable. She said that when I am charge on a good day I ask her what she thinks of the assignment, and that on that night I did not look up from the computer when she asked whether she could take her break before the admissions arrived. I have no memory of her asking. That gap, between what I remember doing and what someone standing three feet away saw, is the most useful thing this assignment produced, because I could not have found it with any instrument I fill out about myself.

The Trait That Shows Under Load

The trait the inventory did not return is that under pressure I stop sharing decisions and start absorbing them. I would rather carry a problem alone for an hour than spend ten minutes involving someone else, and I call that efficiency. Eggenberger (2012) found that charge nurses describe themselves as holding the frontline for their teams, often by taking on problems themselves, and that this can leave them isolated and their staff less developed. That describes my Friday.

A Change Sized to a Shift

My goal is one behavior that I can practice on my next charge shift. When a short-staffed assignment has to be built quickly, I will still build it alone, because there is not time to do otherwise, but I will read it out at the huddle and then ask one question and wait for an answer: which of these assignments worries you most? And when a nurse tells me she has never cared for a type of patient, I will replace you'll be fine with a specific offer: I will be in the room for the first hour of the pump check at 2000. I will know whether I did it by asking the night charge nurse, after my next three short-staffed shifts, whether she heard me ask the question at the huddle.

References

Eggenberger, T. (2012). Exploring the charge nurse role: Holding the frontline. Journal of Nursing Administration, 42(11), 502-506. https://doi.org/10.1097/NNA.0b013e3182714495

Hersey, P., Blanchard, K. H., & Johnson, D. E. (2013). Management of organizational behavior: Leading human resources (10th ed.). Pearson.

Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2017). The leadership challenge: How to make extraordinary things happen in organizations (6th ed.). Wiley.