Nursing Journal:formal and informal authority - Essay Example

Nursing Journal: Formal and Informal ity Patronella Blue Dr. Nicolette Estrada Grand Canyon NUR 670 – Leadership Health Care Organizations Practicum December 21, 2011 As the Medical Service Line Director, my given authority is to ensure our nursing staff provides safe patient care by following the practice guidelines and policies within the organization. I also have the authority to hire, terminate, demote and promote nurses, nursing assistants and techs within the organization. My organization has been preparing for CMS and Joint Commission inspections.

 When it comes to these types of surveys, one of the goals of my organization is being on a position of readiness. The surveyors for CMS entered the building on this past Monday. We were informed that they would be with us for 4 days during the entrance interview. Fortunately, the top 100 leaders of the organization worked throughout the weekend preparing for the survey. Most part of the preparation, involved ensuring that the nursing staff education, competencies files, ACLS and BLS were current.

 I have been meeting frequently with my managers and their leadership teams to discuss our readiness. I spoke privately with one of my managers making him aware of the concerns I had regarding his clinical educator. During our meetings, the clinical educator never looked engaged. When questioned if her employees’ files were complete, her answer was always “yes”. Our organization has formed what we call a “blitz team”, which inspects the units and employees’ files. I specifically requested the “blitz team” to inspect this unit because of the concerns I had.

 Upon their review of nursing competencies, they found out that the staff files were severely incomplete. As a result, of these findings, the manager and I had to demote the clinical educator from her role. The decision was made after multiple consultations along with a previous written counseling on this employee detailing the expected improvement. I exercised my formal authority after further consultations with our human resources department. The informal aspect of my decision came into play with my manager.

While he is a novice manager, he trusted my judgment on what was needed to be done with this employee. The employee did not view the situation as positive; while difficult in the end, I felt that it would help my manager be successful.   My management style is to be very visible in my areas of responsibility. I purposefully round on all of my units twice a day. Rounding on a daily basis allows me to know the staff better and vice versa, but more importantly this allows me to gain a sense of how the managers are running their units.

Today, I received several calls from one of my novice managers, overwhelmed with dealing with an employee. Unfortunately, this particular employee had recently returned from a three (3) day suspension for failing to perform her duties. I had firsthand knowledge on the issues at hand because of several conversations I had with the manager over this employee. I have even spent time alone with this employee discussing on ways, which she can follow to improve her job performance. This manager has been in her role as a manager for less than a year.

Sometimes when counseling staff she becomes frustrated, which in turn leads to her failure on making the best decisions. As I stated earlier, this week we have CMS on site. While this manager has gone through several surveys, this is the first as the manager of her unit. I mention this issue because these were the mitigating factors that could have led her leaving a staff member bruised. My experience as a leader has led me to try keeping the staff members intact and avoid issues of bruising and battering.

With this said, this manager called to inform me that she was about to terminate one of her monitor techs. I called the manager to my office for two reasons. The first was temporal change of the scenery, and the second was to get the manager think of alternates for the staff member. I was successful in getting the manager see my view, which was while this employee was failing in her current role she was not a failure. We were able to call human resources to get a list of jobs in which this employee could potentially be successful.

After getting the list, the manager and I role played her discussion with the staff member. In the end, we settled on a win-win situation. The manager and the employee were able to get what they all wanted out of a bad situation. This week I used my positive influence to help my manager and an employee. I was able to move from formal authority to informal authority, they both trusted me to guide them through a difficult situation. The scenarios from the video include both formal and informal authority.

Formal authority is the right of making sound decisions. On the other hand, the informal authority is a situation created when a staff purposefully seeks for the guidance of a medical director. This usually happens because they trust the leadership of the medical director. Thus, a service line director should be regarded as servant leader whose position transforms from formal authority into informal authority. This week I feel as though I have demonstrated both formal and informal authority.