The differing approaches of nursing leaders and managers to issues in practice.

Answer

The facet of nursing practice comprises of a number of duties and activities, as much as it is riddled with a myriad of challenges. Managers and leaders are tasked with addressing any such issues and hence they have to come up with the best approaches that will effectively tackle these issues. One of the major issues today is nursing shortage and turnover. This paper will explore the different approaches that nursing managers and leaders are supposed to handle nursing shortage and turnover using the theories, principles, skills, and roles of the leader versus manager and to identify the author’s professional philosophy of nursing and personal leadership style.

Nursing Shortage and Turnover

American Association of Colleges of Nursing (2014) states that the U.S is expected to experience an intensified shortage of nurses as Baby Boomers age and the need for health care grow. Additional difficulties are due to nursing schools all over the country struggling to increase capacity as the country moves toward health care reform. Shortage of nurses is evidenced by fewer nurses entering the workforce, severe shortage in certain geographical areas and a shortage of nurses that are prepared well enough to meet specific areas of patient need especially in the changing health care environment. According to Huber (2010), the percentage of nurses under the age of 30 dropped from 25% in 1980 to 8% in 2004. With the current aging nursing population and the reducing number of nursing professionals, the shortage can only grew serious with time. 

According to a study conducted by Kovner (2007), 13% of newly registered nurses had changed principal jobs after one year and an additional 37% felt ready to change jobs.  The nurse shortage cause the remaining nurses to care for more patients than they can be able to handle increasing their stress levels, impacting job satisfaction and driving many nurses to leave the profession.   Similarly to the projected increase in shortage, the HSM Group (2002) estimates the turnover rate to reach 29% in 2020. In addition to being a waste of money, high turnover rates also affect patient safety and satisfaction. The shortage and turnover rates experienced impacts the quality of patient care.  With the impact nursing shortage and turnover have on patient care; it is imperative that solutions be found. Leaders and managers in nursing therefore have to play a role in reducing this problem. 

Defining Leaders and Managers

Leadership and management are distinct roles although one person can have qualities of both a leader and a manager. Hughes et al. (2014) describe leaders as people who focus on motivating, inspiring and empowering people while managers focus on tasks and work and factors that affect accomplishment of the tasks and work including time, equipments and money. To be an effective leader, a person should be a mentor, have vision, motivate, persuade, inspire, listen, coach and be able to promote teamwork and have an ability to build relationships. On the other hand, an effective manager should be able to plan, organize, control, budget, coordinate, be able to manage time and show an ability to make decisions and solve problems

Role of Managers

Since managers control resources including personnel, they should ensure that nurses get favorable working hours. For instance, since younger nurse are more energetic, they could be given the longer shifts while the older nurses are given shorter shifts. Given that burning out contributes to stress which impacts job satisfaction, such a strategy can prevent burning out. According to Kleinman (2004), managers are also responsible for disciplining and rewarding nurses. As e result, they should create an elaborate system for rewarding good work. Recognizing effort will give the impression that the work the nurse is doing is valued. It will also be a source of motivation.

When a manager is viewed as fair and caring, the nurses are more likely to be satisfied with their job. When asked to name their likes and dislikes, the nurses claimed that their relationship with the manager played a significant role in job satisfaction and the working conditions were optimized by a fair and caring manager (Kleinman, 2004).  Job satisfaction increases retention of nurses and managerial support for nursing is crucial.

Managers should also allow and budget for professional development activities for staff (Kleinman, 2004). The nurse managers should promote the efforts by nurses to develop professionally by providing protected time which they can use to continue with their education, promoting career development by providing contractual arrangement and having an educational plan that provides equitable staff development. Nurses are likely to stay where they feel they have a chance to grow professionally.

Role of Leaders

A leader is a mentor and a coach. As such, he/she should be able to build relationships with the staff. To be able to accomplish this, a leader should have good interpersonal skills. As a coach, a leader should focus on his/her followers to help them give their best performance. The focus should be on the whole person in order to identify ways to help them be more effective. As mentors, leaders should be able to provide the necessary guidance to the nurses. They should be able to show concern for the staff and be involved. Additionally, leaders should be able to have visions. They should be able to have a clear image of where the organization is headed and be able to articulate it to the staff. The staff should be able to believe in the vision and work toward its attainment.

There are different leadership theories. According to Specter (2012), these theories can be classified in four ways; trait approach which is deals with the personal traits that contribute to effective leadership, behavior approach explores leadership as a function of the behavior of the leader, contingency approach proposes that leadership is the interaction between a leader, his/her behavior and the situation and the leader-member exchange approach which explore the relationship between subordinate and supervisor.  Although any of these theories could be employed in leadership, transformational leadership has been suggested to be more effective. According to Curtis et al. (2011), transformational leadership deals with “vision, ability to inspire followers, trust, sharing a bond with followers, and being able to empower others.”

My Approach

Transformational approach to leadership is the best suited approach for me. Nursing is about caring and nurturing. Everyday nurses care for the sick and make sure they are comfortable and receive quality care. As a result, it is only befitting that their leader should also be concerned with the same issues. Transformational leadership not only deals with influencing followers but empowering and inspiring them. As afilliative leadership style is my preferred style, incorporating the aspect of transformational leadership will be easy. With affilative style, creation of emotional bond is important and is also an aspect of transformational leadership.

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