Five Crucial Leadership Skills You Need To Motivate New Nurses
Healthcare organizations require nurse leaders to supervise the staff members and motivate them to deliver the highest-quality care. However, as the healthcare sector continually evolves, today, nurse leaders encounter a series of challenges. At the same time, despite several warnings about the shortage of nursing professionals over the past few years, cultivating new nurse leaders has still been on the back burner for organizations.
As of now, there are three matters of growing concern for the nurse leaders. These include the aging baby boomer population, rising medical services demands of this specific group, and mass exodus of nurses.
Given this and more, it’s crucial now more than ever to develop nursing leadership skills. As important as it is for you to be caring and being patient, it’s equally important, if not more, to showcase leadership skills to encourage the new nurses.
Nursing leadership skills and qualities refer to unique characteristics and personality traits demonstrated by the nursing executives. When you possess the right set of leadership qualities, you can address the challenges that may crop up in the future.
However, before equipping yourself with leadership skills, let’s shed light on a very crucial aspect. Today, all the more so, organizations are in quest of nurses who possess high levels of formal education. Such nurses can anticipate the emerging trends and have expert decision-making skills essential for patient care.
Five Crucial Leadership Skills You Need To Motivate New Nurses
Also, at times, employees take shortcuts and skimp on duties when they get too comfortable with their job roles. In cases like these, nurse educators must step up and educate their teams regarding all professional protocols.
For this reason, DNP for nurse educators is an excellent way for nurses with experience in education to increase their earning potential. In addition, the additional educational credential fortifies their career foundation, ensuring that the self-complacency of nurses does not lead to poor delivery of healthcare services.
Now, let’s flesh out some of the vital skills you must acquire to motivate fellow nurses and cultivate leadership talent:
- Effective communication
The quality of care delivered to patients mainly depends on effective communication. Therefore, excellent communication skills are indispensable for nurses at all levels. However, for leadership roles, it takes on a different dimension.
Nurses are the only healthcare practitioners that spend relatively more time with patients and serve as mediators between families and other healthcare members. Therefore, you should have the ability to convey instructions clearly and concisely.
Besides, nurses often work 8 hours shifts, or sometimes, even more. And it’s easier for the patient information to get misplaced during the back and forth of the nursing shifts. Therefore, to avoid this problem, as a nurse leader, you should have a firm grip on written communication and prepare accurate documents and reports.
Adaptability to change
Today, the healthcare system continually encounters change, whether quality enhancement, organizational restructuring, or employee retention. Therefore, it’s paramount for you as a nurse to take a pragmatic stance and get acclimatized to the change. Not only this, but you should step forward, guide, and provide support to the nursing teams to adapt to the altering work environments.
The whole process of change adaptability and management requires transparency. So try to come up with a transparent plan to respond to the changes. That way, your team members can participate and share their concerns as well. And since every individual has a different way of responding to the changes, you need to be patient.
Also, being a nurse leader, you should be capable enough to recognize the early change adopters, as these professionals can help the other team members understand the significance of the change.
Conflict Resolution
The main objective of nurse leaders is to keep the morale of team members high and ensure optimum care delivery to the patients. But, unfortunately, there are times when the employees get involved in clashes, and you might have to deal with difficult situations and resolve conflicts.
However, before you intervene, first determine the extent of the conflicts. If it’s just a minor issue, let the involved individuals settle their dispute. But if the conflict tends to harm the organization or handicap the healthcare services, you must find out the nature of the problem, and act as a liaison between both parties, understand their points of view, and propose a neutral solution.
Empathy
Empathy has always been a crucial skill for this profession, and you might have developed it from the beginning of your career. However, now is the time to be empathetic and compassionate with your team members for smooth communication.
You have been in the same boat in the past. Therefore, you should be well aware of the stress and the emotional toll this job takes on a person. Try to be understanding when a fellow nurse comes to you with a problem. When you view issues from another person’s perspective, you can build healthy workplace relationships.
Also, if you wish to seek leadership roles, try to figure out the underlying causes of team members’ failures. That way, you can provide practical solutions, improve their performance, and ultimately earn the respect of your fellow nurses.
- Delegation
Some, if not many, leaders consider delegation as a symbol of weakness. And they take it upon themselves to tackle every task and challenge. As a result, it becomes pretty challenging to get work done, and at the end of the day, they feel overwhelmed. While giving the reins to others might be hard for some nurse leaders. However, it’s essential to realize the importance of teamwork.
Therefore, instead of hampering the performance of the entire team, try to develop delegation skills. Nurse leaders should spend time with their fellow nurses to determine their skills, expertise level, strengths, and weaknesses. Once they are well aware of their personalities, it will be possible to delegate tasks accordingly.
You don’t have to assign complete responsibility. Instead, delegation is more about ingraining trust in team members. That way, staff members will feel motivated and contribute more for better healthcare services.
Final Words
The healthcare industry has continually been in flux. However, one fact always remains constant – the nursing leadership directly influences a healthcare organization’s performance and people (both staff and the patients). And as the increasing number of patients builds more pressure on healthcare facilities to improve patient care, the demand for nursing professionals in leadership roles also soar upwards.
Effective nurse leadership is critically important to bring about a positive change in the healthcare systems. Therefore, it’s imperative, time and again, to appraise your leadership strengths and look for opportunities to broaden your advanced skillset. That way, you can build a conducive work environment and become a role model for freshly-minted nursing graduates.
Five Crucial Leadership Skills You Need To Motivate New Nurses