Leadership is essential for success in practicing change and overcoming challenges in providing high-quality care. Indeed, a person in charge with a strong vision, responsibility, open-mindedness, and well-developed problem-solving skills can manage all the involved to complete their tasks and keep improving (Dang et al., 2021). At my practicum site, East Orange General Hospital Clinic, the issue of impoverished patients skipping their follow-up visits occurred, and a team to intervene was formed to address it. Personnel involved in the practice change implementation is diverse: practitioners, physicians, and administrators participate, and managing them in an equal manner is inappropriate. Furthermore, as a nursing leader, I must maintain my team’s motivation and help utilize their best characteristics. This paper aims to discuss the leadership styles, their application, and their adjustment to efficiently address the practicum site’s issue with the impoverished beneficiaries.
Leadership styles can be selected based on the goals, people involved, and managers’ authority in an organization or team. The choice also depends on the time a team has for implementing practice change because, for example, autocratic leadership with strict instructions is more time-efficient than a transformational one (Cummings et al., 2021). Diverse human recourses involved require unique leadership styles, such as transformational for physicians, visionary for nurses, and autocratic for administrators. As the intervention began, I understood the importance of developing a mixture of leadership approaches to achieve sustainable team cooperation and maintain their motivation to participate. The leadership qualities necessary to implement a program that influences patients’ attitudes towards attending follow-up visits should reflect my willingness to communicate with the team openly. Furthermore, as a nursing leader, I should be ready to address emergencies, gather and process feedback, and encourage others to be supportive and collaborative.
The change in the impoverished beneficiaries’ behavior can only be achieved through simultaneously influencing them from multiple sides, such as patient education, communication, and notification. Consequently, the different leadership styles I apply in managing the project help me disseminate results based on a selected part of the team’s performance. The autocratic leadership style would be beneficial for administrators to change their follow-up notifications or switch by following the new instructions. Transformational relationships between the executors and physicians would allow the doctors to create individualized tactics to reach patients, such as telemedicine recently adopted in several East Orange General Hospital units (Välimäki et al., 2018). Lastly, the visionary leadership style applied to nursing practitioners will help them keep trying to impact their beneficiaries.
The experience and results we already achieved in addressing the issue revealed that my leadership style is unique, and it is difficult to tie it to specific terms such as “autocratic” or “visionary.” However, the transformational one is the most relevant to my approaches and the best practices we developed while executing the project. I have the qualities necessary for managing our intervention, such as well-developed communication, active listening, open-mindedness, and the ability to behave as a role model (Lumbers, 2018). However, many of my team members are older and more experienced than me, and situations occurred multiple times when I was not perceived as a person of authority. This gap revealed that I need the preceptor’s support in explaining and implementing specific instructions, such as the integration of updated patient education protocols for practitioners.
Leadership is a crucial aspect of working at a healthcare organization regardless of position; thus, appropriate management strategies should be learned and trained. The practice change to address the problem of the impoverished beneficiaries skipping their follow-up visits required me to use diverse styles depending on the team members’ roles, objectives, and time. I developed a mixture of autocratic, visionary, and transformational approaches, where the former was prevalent as the participants could make effective decisions without the leader’s assistance.
References
Cummings, G. G., Lee, S., Tate, K., Penconek, T., Micaroni, S. P., Paananen, T., & Chatterjee, G. E. (2021). The essentials of nursing leadership: A systematic review of factors and educational interventions influencing nursing leadership. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 115, 103842.
Dang, D., Dearholt, S. L., Bissett, K., Ascenzi, J., & Whalen, M. (2021). Johns Hopkins evidence-based practice for nurses and healthcare professionals: Model and guidelines (4th ed.). Sigma Theta Tau International.
Lumbers, M. (2018). Approaches to leadership and managing change in the NHS. British Journal of Nursing, 27(10), 554-558.
Välimäki, T., Partanen, P., & Häggman-Laitila, A. (2018). An integrative review of interventions for enhancing leadership in the implementation of evidence-based nursing. Worldviews on Evidence-Based Nursing, 15(6), 424–431.