Becoming a Better Nursing Administrator

Nurse Administrator Interaction It is possible to learn from one's own experiences about best practices. By looking at our interactions with others, we can identify behaviors that work and those that do not, through the process of reflection. When I think about my previous work environments, and the experiences that I have had with nurse administrators, there is opportunity for reflection there, both on good behaviors and bad. The Good A good practice environment has the following components.

The nurse administrator needs to build trust with the team, and trust with the other internal stakeholders in the organization, in order to maximize effectiveness (Newhouse & Mills, 2002). There are a number of behaviors that can help to build trust. Communication is perhaps the most important. People need to know in their day-to-day activities what is expected of them, what they will be evaluated on, and where they stand with respect to their duties.

I feel that teaching is also a great trust-building behavior, because it shows a willingness to work with someone in order to make them better, and by extension the entire team better. The nursing administrator definitely needs to be open and available in order to create a positive working environment, and that is something that goes along with trust. It is important for a nursing administrator to also demonstrate that people within the team are going to be evaluated on their merits.

This is critical -- people need to know that their hard work will be noticed and rewarded, and will not work as hard when they sense that there is no point to doing that. Further, another behavior that helps to build a good practice environment is that the nurse administrator undertakes some team-building and has compassion. On the former, it is important that nurses not only work together with each other, but as part of an overall health care team.

But they are not robots, and it is necessary that a nurse administrator recognizes the human side of the staff, in order to provide accommodation and flexibility where needed. The workforce will be a lot more positive and dedicated, creating a win-win situation, under such conditions. The Bad There are also behaviors that do not create a good practice environment. For starters, the opposite of the above will almost always contribute to a bad practice environment.

When people do not have a sense of belonging to a team, when they have no communication from management, or when they only hear from management when they make a mistake, these are the types of situations that work against creating a positive practice environment. So a nurse administrator should not be closed off, closed-minded, unapproachable, unresponsive and they should not have any sort of favoritism in how they run things, as all of this runs counter to creating a positive work environment.

There are other behaviors as well that can create a negative environment. The leader of the team should be the one who takes responsibility, especially when they were deficient in their duties. Things like accountability and a positive organizational culture have to start at the top, because of the leaders are not following such behaviors, nobody else will either. Thus, it is important for the nurse administrator to be the behavioral leader, the one everybody else can model his or her behavior on.

My Personal Leadership Style My personal leadership style would be supportive, and focus on team-building. The big thing all leaders need to understand is that everybody under their charge has a role to play -- the leader cannot perform all those roles, so the leader has to be in a position to empower everybody else and ensure that they have the direction, training and resources that they need in order to do their jobs effectively. This means taking a leadership role in terms of things like communication, and learning.

The nurse administrator needs to set the bar high, in terms of having the best ethics and the best work ethic of anybody in the unit. The others will see that, and they will not only have a lot more respect for the person, but for the position as well. It will be more likely that everybody is pulling in the same direction under such circumstances. Lifelong learning cannot be emphasized enough. The nursing profession changes, and thus the nursing administrator must always learn.

Some learning is functional -- how will the ACA affect the nursing unit? But other learning is more conceptual in nature -- such as how to resolve conflicts, or how to implement something like flextime in order to reduce absenteeism. Adding to one's stock of functional knowledge and conceptual knowledge is the best way to continue to be on top of one's profession at any level, including.