NR 718 Week 2 Leadership Self-Assessment Example

Leadership Self-Assessment: What My Leadership Practices Inventory Scores Say, Where They Are Wrong, and the One Habit That Will Cost Me on the Kilograms Change

Student Name

College of Nursing, Chamberlain University

NR 718: Topics in Advanced Practice Leadership I

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Leadership Self-Assessment: What My Leadership Practices Inventory Scores Say, Where They Are Wrong, and the One Habit That Will Cost Me on the Kilograms Change

The Result, Briefly

I took the Leadership Practices Inventory in its self-rated form; it scores five practices from 6 to 60 (Kouzes & Posner, 2017). My scores were: Enable Others to Act 54, Challenge the Process 51, Model the Way 48, Inspire a Shared Vision 39 and Encourage the Heart 36. The ordering is not a surprise. Read quickly, it describes an educator who is good at giving people tools and permission, comfortable questioning how things are done, and less practiced at describing a future or recognizing what others contribute. That reading is partly right. This paper tests three of the findings against things I have actually done, keeps the one that does not flatter me and ends with three concrete changes for the coming twelve weeks.

Finding One: Enable Others to Act, 54

The high score fits one episode well. When our department introduced an electronic sepsis screening prompt in 2024, I trained the triage nurses in pairs, gave each pair the test scenarios to run on each other and let them write the tip sheet that went on the triage desk. Screening completion went from about 70% to 94% and has stayed there. People used the tool because they had shaped how it was taught.

But the score overstates something. That change had a hard stop in the record; nurses could not finish triage without completing the screen. Enabling others is easier when the system has already made the choice for them. The kilograms change will have a forcing function too, a locked field, but the weighing itself will depend on nurses choosing to do it with a crying child, and I have less evidence that I can enable that.

Finding Two: Inspire a Shared Vision, 39

The low score is accurate, and the episode that shows it is recent. When I presented the weight audit at the April staff meeting, I opened with the three safety reports and the 400-record figures. The meeting moved on within five minutes to staffing. Afterward a senior triage nurse told me, kindly, that everyone already knew weights were a problem and that I had not said what would be different. I had described a problem precisely and given nobody a picture of the department after the change. A vision, in the sense the inventory uses, is a picture people want to be part of (Kouzes & Posner, 2017). I offered a deficit.

Finding Three, the One That Stays: How I Act Under Pressure

The inventory does not measure this directly, but the low Encourage the Heart score points toward it, and I can name it without softening. Under pressure, I decide fast and alone, and then I over-explain the decision to people who were not asked. During a winter surge in 2025, I rewrote the pediatric triage reference card over a weekend because the old one had a dosing table error. The new card was correct. It was also a surprise to the night charge nurse, who had been collecting staff comments on the old card for a month and found out from a laminated sheet on the desk. I then sent a long email explaining my reasoning, which made it worse.

This is a real limitation, not a version of dedication. It costs trust with exactly the people whose cooperation I need, and it repeats.

Where It Will Cost Me on This Change

The change itself is not in question; national pediatric readiness guidance already calls for children's weights in kilograms (Remick et al., 2018). The risk is in how I lead it, and my habit will cost me in two places. The night charge nurse is the informal leader of triage practice; nothing about weighing will hold on nights without that person's support, and the history between us is the weekend card. If I move fast and alone again, for instance by asking biomedical engineering to lock the scales before triage has discussed it, I will repeat that episode with higher stakes. The second place is the information technology queue. When a request stalls, my habit is to escalate quickly and explain at length, which tends to move a request once and then cost goodwill with the analyst who will build the next one.

A Correction, Not a Vow

A resolution to communicate better would change nothing. Three specific behaviors will. First, no decision about the change will be final until the night charge nurse and one day triage nurse have seen it, and I will put that rule in the project plan where the manager can see it. Second, before any staff meeting, I will open with a two-sentence description of the department after the change, a child weighed in kilograms at the door and a dose that cannot be off by a factor of 2.2, before showing any data. Third, when a request to the technology team stalls, I will ask the analyst what would help before I go above them, and keep any explanation to five lines.

What the Scores Suggest About the Help I Need

Read together, the scores also say whom I should recruit. A leader strong in enabling and challenging but weak in vision and recognition needs a partner who does the opposite well. On our unit that person is the day charge nurse, keeper of the monthly recognition board, whom new staff seek out. I will ask that nurse to co-lead the staff conversations, open the April-style meeting with the picture of the department after the change and name, publicly, the triage nurses who weigh every child in the first month. Choosing a partner whose strengths cover my gaps is a more reliable correction than trying to become a different kind of leader in twelve weeks.

What the Instrument Cannot Tell Me

A self-rated inventory measures how I see my own behavior. The observer version, completed by five colleagues, would test whether others see the same pattern, and I have asked the manager, the night charge nurse and three triage nurses to complete it by the end of the month. If their scores on Encourage the Heart are lower than mine, the limitation above is larger than I have described. Leadership self-assessment is most useful when it is checked against others' views, because the gap between the two is itself information (Northouse, 2019).

References

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

Northouse, P. G. (2019). Leadership: Theory and practice (8th ed.). SAGE Publications.

Remick, K., Gausche-Hill, M., Joseph, M. M., Brown, K., Snow, S. K., Wright, J. L., American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Pediatric Emergency Medicine and Section on Surgery, American College of Emergency Physicians Pediatric Emergency Medicine Committee, & Emergency Nurses Association Pediatric Committee. (2018). Pediatric readiness in the emergency department. Pediatrics, 142(5), Article e20182459. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2018-2459