The Practice of Leadership and Management as a Nurse

Management is an economic resource to meet objective. It is a social process entailing responsibility for the effective and economical planning and regulations of the operations of an enterprise in fulfillment of the given purpose. Leadership on the other hand is the process of influencing individuals or groups towards achievement of a goal in a given situation. The purpose of this paper is mainly to synthesize differing leadership and management concepts and to apply principles of leadership and management, team building concepts, and organizational theory to nursing clinical practice. This is to ensure quality improvement, ensuring that the financial data is up to date, to ensure minimal risks occur at the health centers and avoid recurrent clinical problems. It is therefore important as a nurse to apply leadership and management concepts to ensure that there is motivation for the good operation under the hospitals.

Nursing management is the performance of the leadership functions whilst ensuring the leadership powers are kept in place. This leadership powers include: coercive, reward, legitimate, expert, reference, information and should make sure they are all wrapped and exercised. Nursing management includes all the main functions of management namely:

Planning; this includes the forecasting and the selection of objectives with the policies, programs and procedures for achieving them. Nurses should therefore be in a position to plan with clear focus

Organizing; this is concerned with decision of work and the allocation of duties, authority and responsibility. This will enable nurses to avoid reoccurring of previous errors.

Directing/leading; it involves the guiding and supervising subordinates. The nurses must make sure the subordinates are oriented into the understanding why, guided towards improved performance and motivated to work effectively towards the hospitals goals

Controlling; it is the process involved in setting up of standards, the regular comparison of physical events with standards and then taking up the corrective actions.

The nursing management is therefore applying this functions and leadership roles especially at the nursing unit. They also have other primary responsibilities of staffing, motivating, communicating, commanding and budgeting among others.

Importance of Management and Leadership to Nurse Managers

Firstly, it ensure quality improvement by incorporating unity of direction, unity of command, stability of staff which will lead to a sense of belonging and ensures patients are well taken care of. Also it helps by ensuring that the financial data is up to date by employing the principle of authority and responsibility which calls for accountability and prevents misuse of authority. In addition it minimizes risks at the health centers by making sure there are order and a scalar chain of command and conclusively, avoids recurrent clinical problems.

Difference between Leaders and Managers

leaders generally innovate and develop while managers administer and maintain

Leaders focus on people inspiring trust and openness while managers focus on systems and structures and make staffs rely on control

Leaders do the right things and keep an eye on the horizon while managers do things right and keep an eye on the bottom line

Leaders originate things whereas managers imitate things

Leaders change the status quo while managers accept the status quo

Management Style and Leadership style

The contingency approach or situational approach suggests that there is no one best way to manage and organize but rather, successful managerial decisions options depends upon the situations and circumstances in which such decisions are made.

Autocratic leadership style is considered as a classical approach to leadership or dictatorship. It is one in which the managers retain as much decision making authority as possible.

Bureaucratic leadership is where the managers manage by the book that is; everything must be done according to procedure or policy.

Laissez fair is the one in which the leader provides little or no direction and gives employees as much freedom as possible. All authorities are given to employees and they must determine their goals, make decision and resolve problems on their own.

Democratic leadership style encourages employees to perform part of their decisions. Democratic manager keeps his or her employees informed about everything that affect their work and shares decision making and problem solving responsibility.

I would therefore apply the democratic leadership style since it will ensure that I consider the subordinates that unit’s for the benefit of the health care and the society at large.

II. Application of leadership and management of nursing practice

Case Scenario

A health care that envisages providing the best and competitive health care facilities must have staff example the charge nurse, sister nurse who are excellent in their chosen disciplines, have strong leadership capabilities, and are comfortable working in the environment. Top managers of the unit should therefore posses’ distinct characteristics of great leaders, thus being a boon to the health unit and society especially as patients. Also strategic management is believed to spread the realization of organizational objectives. The intensity of global competitiveness in best service requires managers to adopt strategic management and be well versed with the characteristics associated with strategic decisions.

Problem

Being the nurse in charge of advanced health care institute, there has been problems as a result of poor management and leadership skills. Firstly the employees turnover is high that is the numbers of employees under various department employed per year is almost 100%.Secondly the health care members usually receive orders from various supervisors bringing forth a lot of confusion, the division of labor is poorly done such that some patients may be attended by more than one nurse and the others may fail to be attended. The problems that were previously done are reoccurred therefore making the number of patients to get services to other health care unit .In addition there are a lot of complains from other staff that their remuneration is not fair enough and that the level of job satisfaction is quite low.

Plan action

Behavioral approach to management; this is based on the perception that those involved in the organization are the predetermining of organizational and managerial effectiveness. It is concerned with understanding of the individual workers with emphasis on motivation, needs, interpersonal relationships and group dynamics. For instance, Douglas Mc Greggor-Theory X and Theory Y .Douglas MC Greggor believed that employees are lazy beings hence managers should use ‘carrot and stick’ in motivating employees in theory X assumption. In theory Y assumptions Douglar MC Greggor believed that work is like a play and if a play is not interesting the employees will not be interested in the play. With this kind of a system and applying Henri Fayol’s principles of management that are relevant to principles management, I will ensure that there is fair remuneration, that also there is stability of staff, the principle of unity of command will also be useful by ensuring that members receive orders from only one supervisor.

The most appropriate leadership style to succumb the problem is democratic leadership style which requires a leader to be a couch that has the final say but gathers information from the staffs before making a decision

Steps in resolving this problem

Problem recognition

Problem definition

Planning and design

Solve the problem

Implement the problem

Strategies of leading and managing people

Motivation is the process that accounts for an individual intensity, directions and persistence of efforts towards attaining a goal. It is the reasons why employees would want to work hard and work effectively for the organization. To motivate those involved towards a solution requires the elements of motivation which are; ability, level of skills, knowledge about how to complete the task, attitude, fillings and beliefs. By applying the motivation that is content theory and process theory, managers will be able to increase their motivation capacity. To gain effective support, the managers should ensure that they guide and supervise the subordinates accordingly and by way of example. The transfer of information between different people in a business should have a unit of direction to avoid conflict and confusion in authority.

Change Theory

Change is making things different or doing things in different ways. In most organization, change activities are activated. The modern approach to changes requires organization to be proactive to changes. In nursing management, for instance there are stimulants to changes. The emergence of newly created or reregulation’s of existing laws, increased in the number of accidents and errors, high level of labour turnover, changes in the legal system governing labour and other general areas. The change process includes;

Initial problem identification where the initial problem is identified

Obtaining data relating to the problem through different methods of data collection

Problem diagnosis to understand the roots of the problem

Action planning; this involves strategically having plans for solving the problem

Implementation which involves application of the problem solving techniques to the problem

Assessment of the consequences and learning from the process and giving feedback to other interconnected individuals and steps

Organizational Environment

Management environment refers to forces influencing organizational activity and management policies from within and outside the organization. The internal environment refers to the internal resources, activities and events of the organizational members. The stakeholders depending if it is a profitable or non profitable organization have a direct and specific impact upon organizational operation, the general environment especially the patients affect the organization. My strategy to solve the problem will have a social, cultural, economic, political impact on the agency.

III. Evaluation

Today the notion of total quality management means that the total organization is committed to quality. Total quality management means a total effort towards meeting customer needs and ensures selection by planning for quality. This can be easily evaluated by the outcomes of the staff members in accordance to the expected results. My plan would have work if the results are as per my plans and all the other problems are resolved. This is by ensuring there are no recurrent clinical problems and the clinic operates efficiently.

Barriers

Staff resistance to change is as a result of selective perception, fear of unknown, organizational culture and custom, anticipated inconveniences and probably economic factors. In addition the cost of analyses and making these changes is high and the organization may consider the cost outweighing the benefits. Also, the time required to solve the problems, making changes and coming up with a new plan may be too much and the organization may decide to ignore the problems. Furthermore there may be circumstances where the project will fail land this may lead to abandoning the project that was to incorporate change. In addition there can be changing priority and another plan has to be developed.

IV. Summary

In summary a leader should employ aspects of a good and effective leader. By applying the different leadership style that is autocratic, bureaucratic, and democratic and laissez fair, a leader should ensure that he is competent enough. Management is a social process entailing responsibility for the effective and economical planning and regulations of the operations of the enterprise, in fulfillment of the given purpose. Also the manager should ensure that he applies the principle of management especially scientific management and art management. There is still a sense of art in all management and in intuition is a very useful guide. Nobody will say that book learning will make successful manager. The importance fear of human relations with its psychological contacts is often a matter of personality more than procedure .Nursing management will thus involve incorporating all the principles and functions of management in order to ensure effective work is done and incorporating leadership style to motivate and cooperate with other staffs.

Conclusion