Nursing Leadership: Rebecca Pena - Research Paper Example

? Nursing Leadership Introduction Leadership is the ability to mobilize people through social influence and initiate necessary efforts to achieve a common goal. The leader has to have an inherent ability to guide and direct and provide cohesiveness and coherence. Attributes associated with leadership include, charisma, extroversion, intelligence, good and fluent communication among others. Rebecca Pena is in a very delicate situation. As a manager what she should first consider, is change in the organization. Change is making something or doing things differently from a certain common style. It can occur in any form, internal motivated or externally motivated, though if change is to take place it should be for the best to improve the status. For change to take place effectively, addressing the problems should be the first point to be considered. When change takes place things have to be done differently depending on what was changed, it could be time, location, the staff or any other measures. Change and addressing problems should be done systematically, considering the most important to the least important (Antrobus, 2001). Why are there no committees representatives from the units, despite having a hospital committee, this is one of the problems that Nurse Pena should address. A committee representative helps and saves the manager to deal with small issues faced by the staff. They do not have to rush to the manager, leading to wastage of time or even recourses. The manager is scheduled to deal with matters that are beyond being dealt with by the committee representative. (Bachrach, 2007) Despite that manager Pena has a hard time and faces many challenges in managing the two different buildings, the committee representatives cooperates with her greatly in that she does not have to attend to all matters personally leading to her, moving from one building to another. As a committee, they should hold meetings to bring rise to issues affecting them as staffs and then can pass them to the manager through the representative, who then discusses them with the hospital committee. These helps the staff to become more out spoken and are courageous and capable of rising up the small problems that they face, since they do not have to meet with their superiors. Rebecca as a leader and manager should have good managerial morals. The staff follows the manager for guides and direction. Nurse Pena is responsible for setting a particular type of leadership that she uses to run the hospital. There are many types of managerial skills, and are used in different fields to operate the many different departments. To be a superior manager among other organizations leaders, she ought to have these strategies or views, Mission: they should understand well what their mission to the organization is and why it does exist. The mission should be put down on paper describing the purpose of the organization. Anyone including the employees and patients should be able to understand it clearly after reading it, since it is not esoteric but rather descriptive (Antrobus, 2001). A vision is also a vital strategy, since is explains where Rebecca is heading the hospital. It should be an abstract to motivate people to imagine it and get encouraged to understand it and be willing to build the imagination to concrete (Graham, 2008). She should also have a set Goal. The goal explains how the organization’s mission and vision are to be achieved and what measure should be taken. A realistic, operational and measurable goal set by a superior leader should give the expected results by the organization. The goal also helps reduce wastage of resources like time, money, equipments and people (Buchan, 2002). Competency is also an important strategy in the sense that she has to be seen by the employees, public, stakeholders and her own advisors as a qualified expert leadership and in her field as a manager. It is difficult for her to earn respect, followed and admired unless the people and the surrounding see her as high-credentialed personnel who got specialized skills and experience or by academic degree. Competency is learned as a leader faces challenges and crises that help them gain more from the job experiences. Quitting is ones sign of saying they have given up. Rebecca should be able to bear with the challenges that come her way, this is also a way of her gaining experience on how to deal with the issues the next time they arises. A strong team is a strategy to be taken seriously (Antrobus, 2001). As a manager, she should be wise to choose her team wisely with no discrimination by race, gender or financial class. The team of credential, experienced and capable people are assembled to help in decision-making, and supplement voids in the leaders skills set. Nurse Rebecca should understand that she has no all-perfect skills and should be willing to go find them in her trusted team of colleagues to fill his deficiencies. Communication skill is also a strategy Pena should apply. It is of no use to have the best mission and vision and even have the best-set goals of the hospital, and then lack effective communication skills by a manager to her employees. As a manager she should be able to easily convey her ideas to the stakeholders in the hospital, its is mandatory to often keep in touch with key stakeholders in and out of the hospital by meeting, e-mails and any other way that is effective. A face-to-face interaction is however the best way to convey and prove a point since it is well explained and understood. Having lunch, bites, drinks or dinners are some of the ways used by leaders to approach their employees and helps create positive contacts. Interpersonal skills, which should make communication between a patient and a nurse easy so that the patient could inform about all his needs and problems in a timely manner, are strategically important for the nurse Rebecca. These skills are the only strategy facilitating a patient’s recovery since they help relate with the employees easily and encourage them positively to feel comfortable with her. Employees feel that their boss or leader is more concerned with them, when the interaction is good, this leads to the employee liking and respecting their manager. The physicians work harder and give their best since they want to impress the manager, and takes the problems they encounter on the job without fearing to later regret for not knowing on how to solve the issues. Inspiration is one character that nurses look for in a good manager (Bass & Bass, 2008). Rebecca as the manager should help them in guidance, directions, and motivations. The staffs need to feel appreciated and that the work they do is recognized, this leads to them wanting to offer more and they feel motivated Unlike the two managers over the two years, Nurse Rebecca has to have apart from her qualification, managerial skills’ including being patient since change takes some time to take place. In order to manage the hospitals health population, Rebecca requires a close relationship with physicians, hospital committees and partnership organizations in the community. This relationship with the physician is important in that it gives hospital a chance to expand their market; this is because physicians are the main source of patient’s referrals (Antrobus, 2001). In a hospital, a nurse is the most important component in the health care hierarchy, since after a doctor has performed his services to a patient, the nurse supervises that the patient is being taken care of according to the doctor’s instructions. This type of care is important in the recovery of a patient (Zurn, Dalpoz, Stilwell & Adams, 2002). When there is a shortage of nurses, a hospital loses its stability, and everything is affected. There are many reasons as to why a shortage of nurses can occur, depending on the situation. Mismanagement can greatly contribute to shortage of nurses; this can be caused by low payment wages, misconducts by the management, over working of nurses and so many other factors (Buchan, 2002). Nurse Rebecca should have managerial skills in order to prevent nurse shortage as a manager. She should organize better pay for the nurses, manage their days-off and leaves in a reasonable and a scheduled way, offer adequate resources and give good condition working premises. Nurse Rebecca Pena as a manager should always have the drive to place the hospital as one of the best hospitals in the area. For this to take place she has to effectively follow the strategies mentioned above, this will help her emerge as a successful manager among many. The hospital after undergoing the changes will definitely rise to a top rank. This will be a top achievement for the hospital and for Rebecca as a nurse and a manager. References Antrobus, S. (2001). ‘Nursing leadership: influencing and shaping health policy and nursing practice.’ Journal of Advanced Nursing. 29(3), 746-753. Bass, B., Bass, R. (2008). The Bass Handbook of Leadership, Theory, Research and Managerial Applications. Simon & Schuster, Inc. New York Buchan, J.(2002). Global nursing shortages. British Medical Journal. 324:751–752. Graham, C (2008). “Changes in nurse education: Delivering the curriculum.” Nursing Education Today: 28(1): 120-127. Retrieved from http://www.nurseeducationtoday.com/article/S0260-6917(07)00053-6/abstract Zurn, P. Dalpoz, M. Stilwell, B. & Adams, O. (2002). Imbalances in the Health Workforce. Geneva: WHO. Read More