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Leadership is fundamental to the creation of a caring work environment that fosters the right patient safety culture and quality of care practice for achieving optimal patient outcomes. However, the existence of different leadership theories means that aspiring healthcare leaders must determine the most appropriate principles from these frameworks to integrate into their styles for leading teams to success (Westbrook et al., 2022). In this regard, a review of the insights from some selected scholarly resources highlighted some of the behaviors and skills that represent the ideal leadership style for dealing with patient care situations or administrative issues that could impact the quality of care. As a result, the purpose of this paper is to describe a leader that exemplifies some of these behaviors and skills and the impacts of their application to different workplace situations on the people, practices, and culture of the organization.

Two Key Insights

One of the major insights that I derived from the selected scholarly sources is that leaders who demonstrate compassion and authenticity and are committed to meeting the needs of their teams or advocate for ways to do so by superior authorities are most effective in building strong relationships and promoting collaborations that result in expected performance outcomes. According to Best (2020), effective leaders are not only interested in achieving this image from their followers but are willing to utilize their compassion, altruism, empathy, humility, and authenticity to serve their followers and model behaviors and practices that they must demonstrate when serving others. The other key insight is that despite organizations' exposure to known and unknown crises in their industry, the leader's ability to direct, coach, support, and the delegate is vital to making the right decisions on the best solutions to the situation. As Harsono, Indrawati, and Jus' at (2021) noted in their study of the effect of leadership style on doctor's performance, this type of leader is focused on making the work environment comfortable during the crisis, motivating the followers, generating high performance from them. These lessons imply that leaders must demonstrate the quality of services to customers through their leadership practices and behaviors and possess the competencies to handle both bad and good times effectively. Hence, these resources provided valuable insights into the leaders' behaviors and skills that contribute to the excellent employee and organizational performance and practices that sustain the culture for delivering them.

A Leader who Demonstrates the Behaviors and Skills

My preceptor during my clinical rotation at a group medical practice is a leader that demonstrated the behaviors and skills that were discussed in these scholarly resources. He uses his role, power, and authority to cultivate the right attitude in every member of the interdisciplinary care team and support them to achieve their greatest potential. As the nurse leader of the organization, he holds these short meetings where nurses and other members of the clinical teams can express or describe the level of support that they need to handle challenging patient care issues and achieve personal growth. Similarly, the instances during the meetings when he seeks help from other nurses on the use of new patient care technologies is an example of the level of humility or authenticity that he expects all unit nurses to demonstrate when handling patients. Aside from these behaviors, I observed that all his interactions with patients are laced with compassion, and advocacy, and designed to give them the best experience from their care. Also, his crisis-handling skills were demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic through his sharing of updated information on the pandemic with all staff and the level of coaching and support that he gave them, especially the unit managers whom he delegated some of the duties to ensure patient and staff safety. Therefore, I believe the limited number of infected nursing staff and efficient utilization of organizational resources were due to his applications of these effective situational leadership competencies.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the review of the preceptor's application of these skills and behaviors to team management during normal crises showed that it impacted the staff and workplace positively. Specifically, the level of job satisfaction among the nurses is high and the quality and safety of patient care continue to contribute to positive outcomes. Also, the staff shares knowledge easily and supports each other during crises such as the death of a patient or when they make unintentional errors during patient care. Lastly, the quality of training and education that I got from the clinical and non-clinical staff during my clinical rotation at this medical group practice was due to my preceptor's display of commitment to my professional growth.

 

 

References

Best, C. (2020). Is there a place for servant leadership in nursing?.  Practice Nursing,  31(3), 128-132. https://doi.org/10.12968/pnur.2020.31.3.128

Harsono, A. D., Indrawati, R., & Jus' at, I. (2021). Situational Leadership Style Supports the Performance of Doctors in the Military Based Hospital.  European Journal of Business and Management Research,  6(2), 118-126. DOI: 10.24018/ejbmr.2021.6.2.780

Westbrook, K. W., Nicol, D., Nicol, J. K., & Orr, D. T. (2022). Effects of servant leadership style on hindrance stressors, burnout, job satisfaction, turnover intentions, and individual performance in a nursing unit.  Journal of Health Management. https://doi.org/10.1177/09720634221128100