Current Events in Public Health Leadership - Servant Leadership - Assignment Example

Current Events in Public Health Leadership–Servant LeadershipRobert Greenleaf initially defined servant leadership philosophy; in his definition, he referred to servant leaders as those that achieve results by attending to needs of the people they serve (Silvia & McGuire, 2010). In the context of public health leadership, servant leader serves others rather than having others to serve him or her. The event prescribed below depicts an instance of servant leadership:A lady suffering from lung cancer attended hospital for three weeks to receive her chemotherapy.

During her time in the hospital, she received attendance from a chief nurse and junior nurses who worked under her. In the course of treatment, the chief nurse would come and assist the junior nurses to perform their duties. The head nurse was kind and did not mind showing her subjects what to do, and she consistently engaged in offering her assistance to the junior nurses. She also provided them with advice and offered each of them opportunity to consult and get the right instructions. A nurse servant leader often looks at the needs of the staff members and makes inquires of them on the best ways to promote and solve their personal problems.

The instance described above depicts the true qualities of a servant leader who continuously engaged in assisting the junior nurses at the hospital. The leadership techniques used in the case above were effective since it enabled the junior nurses develop the character of servant leader (Anonson et al. 2009). Through the actions of the manager nurse, the junior nurses developed important skills that were effective within their career. Some of the leadership characteristics portrayed by the nurse manager include the ability to listen, in which case she kept listening to the needs of the junior nurses.

After listening and understanding their needs, she empathizes with them and offers them their support (Ayman, Chemers, & Fiedler, 1995). They also promote awareness and healing among the junior servants by attempting to resolve their problems and use high degree of emotional intelligence to help them find solution to their problems. In the above instance, the servant leadership enabled the junior nurses to observe and understand what was needed to be done to enable attainment of perfect results.

The patient who is the narrator of the story also felt satisfied with the manner in which the nurse carried out herself and the manner in which she trained the juniors into attaining proper results. In case other leadership approaches, such as transactional leadership was used, the result could have not been very similar and satisfactory. This is because in transactional leadership the head nurse would rely on supervision and group performance to facilitate attainment of results (Eliyana, 2010).

The junior nurses would therefore be under pressure to achieve results rather than attend to the patient’s psychological and emotional needs. Therefore, despite the transactional leadership model achieving almost similar results, the patient could not have obtained the psychological contentment and satisfaction as in the case servant leadership (Anonson et al. 2009). Similarly, the servant leadership offers the junior nurses opportunities to learn from their leaders. It can therefore, be concluded that servant leadership can be of great significance in public health and can be used to offer valid solutions.

Just like in the case of transformational leadership, the servant leadership aims at improving the life of the junior servants and making them more productive in their performance. This model is therefore of great significance and applicable in many instance within the public health paradigm.ReferencesAnonson, J. M., Ferguson, l., Macdonald, M. B., Kerry, S. F., & Bally, J. M. (2009). The Anatomy Of Inter professional Leadership An Investigation of Leadership Behaviors in Team-Based Health Care.

Journal of Leadership Studies, 3(1), 17 - 25.Ayman, R., Chemers, M. M., & Fiedler, F. (1995). The Contingency Model Of Leadership Effectiveness: Its Levels Of Analysis . The Leadership Quarterly, 6(2), 148 - 167.Eliyana, A. (2010). Impacts of transactional and transformational leaderships upon organizational citizenship behavior. Journal of US-China Public Administration, 7(6), 24 - 30.Silvia, C., & McGuire, M. (2010). Leading public sector networks: An empirical examination of integrative leadership behaviors.

The Leadership Quarterly, 21(5), 264 -277.