This paper presents a personal development plan for a nurse functioning in a strategic management role. It begins by examining the personal and professional skills required in modern nursing, including leadership, ethical decision-making, accountability, and compassion. The paper then analyzes the strategic goals of the nurse's institution, addressing patient safety, resource constraints, community needs assessment, and engagement with health policymakers. Personality traits and learning styles are evaluated as foundations for targeted growth. The development plan itself sets short-, medium-, and long-term goals centered on improving team leadership, community assessment, and political liaison, ultimately aiming to secure a policy environment that supports high-quality nursing care for all stakeholders.
The nursing profession has seen a large amount of development over the last century or so. The nursing role has become a multi-faceted one, where a single nurse can play multiple roles or develop a specialized skill set in a specific nursing direction (Mason, Isaacs & Colby, 2011, p. 147). Today's nurses face many challenges, including fatigue, maintaining a sense of professionalism, and upholding ethical standards. For many nurses, the profession has also become one of strategic management, meaning they must develop themselves in ways that maintain both the ethical standards of the profession and the strategic goals of the particular institutions within which they work.
Crossan (2003, p. 334) highlights the need for nurses to become more active in policy development and to function more prominently in the wider world of politics. This is a significant development in terms of the profession and how it has historically related to politics. Nevertheless, the involvement of nurses in this field is logical, since health policies affect their profession on a very direct level. Nurses have a particularly close understanding of the health care needs of individuals and the social groups within which they provide their services. As strategic managers, nurses can therefore focus attention both inward — toward their particular organizations and goals — and outward, toward how their organizations relate to the broader world of health policy and politics.
In this way, a personal development program is useful to help individual nurses and strategic managers identify their position within their organizations and fulfill their goals. Such plans also help nurses broaden their focus toward the outside world of politics and health policy. To create an effective plan, a variety of factors must be considered, including the nurse's personal and professional skills, the strategic goals of the institution, and the nurse's personality traits and learning styles. All of these play a role in the personal assessment that must be performed to create an effective personal development plan.
According to Burton and Ormrod (n.d.), certain professional skills are required to be an adequate nursing professional. The first is to be a leader in care management and care delivery situations. Second, a nurse should maintain standards of care in all situations. The nurse should also be able to make ethical and legal decisions, be accountable, and be able to work effectively in teams. Ultimately, the nursing manager should be able to teach others.
Personally, I feel that I am well on my way to developing these skills. However, they are not static. Skills such as leadership and ethical decision-making are subject to the situations in which they are applied, and only experience can ensure their adequate development. In a personal development plan, specific situations can be set up to develop these skills to a certain extent and to cultivate the critical thinking needed for their ongoing growth.
Personal skills tend to be more stable but can also be developed as experience is built within the nursing field. Heacock (2012), for example, lists eight key skills that nurses need to practice their profession effectively. Among the most important are a sense of humor, professionalism, diligence, and compassion. Personally, my sense of compassion is very strong — it is why I entered the nursing profession in the first place. This compassion must be tempered with a sense of humor, since the health care field is so often infused with tragic situations. Humor helps a nurse keep emotions under control and relieves the stress inherent in the profession. Professionalism and diligence are also qualities that no nurse can be without. The fact that these traits are relatively stable does not mean they cannot be further developed or enhanced. Hence, part of a personal development plan should include enhancing the personality traits most important to the nursing profession.
When thinking about the strategic goals of an institution, it is important to approach the question from more than one angle. On one hand, there is the nursing profession in general, with its particular ethics and standards. On the other, there are the specific strategic efforts of the institution itself and how it relates to its community of clients. Finally, at a still wider angle, the institution and its goals must relate to the broader world of health policy and politics. This last area holds the most potential for strategic development, and nursing leadership is particularly needed there.
The institution where I work has a strategic focus closely related to that of Kona Community Hospital (2008) in Hawaii. For most hospitals, the major priority is patient safety and the quality of care patients receive. Security and safety are also important to insurance companies and the general public — both direct and indirect stakeholders in the quality of care provided by the institution. Insurance companies depend upon care quality to remain financially viable and to continue providing clients with the health security they need. The public depends upon the institution when they or their family members require health care. Hospitals and the quality of care they provide have therefore become an integral part of civilized life.
In recent years, however, there has been increasing strain on the resources available to hospitals and on the quality of care they are able to provide. Many patients, for example, cannot afford health care, making it difficult for hospitals to meet demands in terms of equipment and staff. There has been a dwindling supply of funding and professional nurses while demand for health services from an increasingly aging population has grown. Strategic managers have therefore faced significant challenges in keeping services running adequately while adhering to the ethics of the profession.
By nature, the provision of registered nursing services is to provide "safe, competent and ethical" care (CARNA, 2008). This adheres to the general principles of nursing: delivering the highest quality of care possible while doing as little harm as possible. Concerns such as patient autonomy and freedom of choice — insofar as these minimize potential harm — are also important principles that must be kept in mind.
Strategic management becomes important when it is recognized that not only the profession of nursing but also the nursing environment itself and the community it serves are changing. This creates tension between the ideal of nursing and the reality of what can be provided. Nursing managers must make strategic decisions regarding how nursing will be delivered to communities that need unlimited services when only limited services are available (Burton and Ormrod, n.d.).
As such, one of the strategic goals of my institution is to liaise with both the public and policymakers in order to create strategic approaches to providing as many members of the public as possible with adequate, high-quality nursing services. At the same time, as Burton and Ormrod (n.d.) suggest, specialist services are becoming increasingly regionalized. This is an important area of strategic management: nursing leaders must assess the particular health care needs in their communities and specialize accordingly. A community with a large elderly population, for example, will need a higher concentration of geriatric nursing specialists. Other communities may require mental health nurses or pediatric nursing professionals. While general adult nursing is the most common focus, nursing leaders should recognize the need to specialize beyond this general field.
A further strategic goal of my institution is therefore to conduct regular assessments of the immediate surrounding community to determine specialist needs. More distant communities within the hospital's jurisdiction are assessed as well. It is the strategic manager's task to use these assessments for the professional development of staff. Critical and professional decision-making are essential components of this process, and in my own development as a strategic manager, this area will be one of my major focus points.
"Patience, friendliness, and visual learning preferences"
"Short-, medium-, and long-term goals for growth"
In conclusion, the strengths I can use to build my personal development plan are my professional and personal skills. I can use my learning style to improve my team interaction abilities, since I tend to be a little impatient when working with coworkers — a tendency that does not arise when I work with patients. I will use my visual learning style to observe colleagues whom I consider to be effective leaders in their daily leadership roles, then apply those observations to create a better working environment for the teams who work with me.
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