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Leadership in Diversity: A focus on Ethnic and Cultural Diversity

Cultural diversity is increasingly becoming an essential characteristic in healthcare. The nursing workplace is composed of people from different ethnicities and cultural diversity. The nature of worker demographics is an essential factor in the planning and delivery of health services. While it is an opportunity to increase healthcare delivery quality, it poses leadership challenges to nurse professionals (Weech-Maldonado, Dreachslin, Epané, Gail, Gupta & Wainio, 2018). Thus, the front nurse leaders must have relevant knowledge of handling diverse workplaces to enhance quality healthcare services. Cultural diversity influences nurses’ performance in many ways, such as relationship formation, privacy, time management, and worldview. Besides, it determines the performance of nurses and their relationship with supervisors.

Providing leadership in a culturally diverse environment requires nurse leaders to have cultural awareness of various ethnicities forming their teams. Awareness helps assess an individual’s culture and racial biases as means to assess their ability to deliver nursing care. In most cases, nursing leaders are required to lead their teams on training concerning various issues at workplace (Weech-Maldonado, Dreachslin, Epané, Gail, Gupta & Wainio, 2018). Thus, it is important to examine training materials for bias and enhance culturally sensitive materials such as handouts, instruction manuals, and self-care instruments. Besides, the leaders should ensure that conflict and grievance process are linguistically and culturally sensitive, depending on the types of cultures forming the team.

Communication is an important tool in managing diverse nursing teams, and bringing the team members together. Nursing leaders should find means of sharing information that breaks the weaknesses of culture and enhances understanding among nursing (Weech-Maldonado, Dreachslin, Epané, Gail, Gupta & Wainio, 2018). It would be effective to allow team members to solve problems amongst themselves using effective communication rather than leaders helping them with the solution. Healthcare workplace is increasingly becoming diverse and nurse leaders must understand the new trend and use it to enhance delivery of quality healthcare services.