Incorporating Leadership in a Nursing Career
When you love to lead but you know that you are interested in being
a nurse, you may want to develop the skills necessary to be a nursing
administrator. A nursing administrator may take an additional
degree, but if it is what you are passionate about it can be well worth
it.
As a nursing administrator you will find that you are not going to be
having much direct interaction with the patients you are responsible
for. Rather, you are going to be responsible for the team of nurses
that is caring for the patients you are ultimately responsible for.
Organization and respect
When you are managing a team of nurses, you have to understand
the importance of organization and respect towards your
employees. Nursing administration will provide you with the
opportunity that you may want to utilize your leadership skills and help others with their job.
As you organize your team, your unit or just the one nurse that you are responsible for, you should be
very clear about your expectations. There are many people that do not understand how to respectfully
discuss their authority with the team that they are managing.
It is important that you understand how to assert your authority while still being respectful of the
autonomy that the nurses have. Finding a balance while you are managing your own team of nurses can
be difficult, but it will be part of your job as a nursing administrator.
Leadership skills
You should understand that you are going to want to be developing your leadership skills throughout the
time that you are in school. If you are pursuing a nursing
administration degree, it will be necessary that you develop these
leadership skills for your classes and for projects within your
classes.
Being a part of the administration often times has its pros and its
cons. Although you may not be able to work directly with
patients as much as you would have been able to had you been a
nurse, you can be sure that you are providing the best possible
care to your patients.
You will still have patients that you are responsible for and it is important to always take ultimate
responsibility for the work that is being done on your team. There are many people that do not understand
how important it is to always remember their own responsibility.
Should something go wrong, it is ultimately going to lead back to you. This is why it is so important that
your team is trained very well and they are provided with the experience that they need to be successful in
diagnosing and properly dealing with the problems that they see.
Take the time that you need to understand how you are going to develop your training schedule so you
have an effective staff that you know you can count on. Then, you can celebrate your successes together
and learn from any failures or mistakes to ensure that they are not going to happen any time in the near
future.
Photo credit: Tampa Band Photos, Meagan