Introduction
Working in the Intensive care unit requires particular professional skills and knowledge, but being a manager in this sphere includes even more responsibilities and a range of qualifications. Personal experience allows one to analyze and determine the weak and strong sides of the current leader and his style of professional communication and managing approaches. The paper focuses on three aspects of the classification based on the manager’s characteristics, his utilized leadership style, and analysis of his communicational methods.
Nurse Manager
The manager in my facility has extensive experience working in the nursing field. He began as a bedside nurse and, in this position, worked for two years in the medical/surgical department and then five years in critical care. He has been holding the position of director in the Intensive care unit since 2018. He gained skills and knowledge working as a manager for two years and as a clinical supervisor after that.
He is mainly accountable for providing a way for patients to receive high-quality and value treatment within his Intensive care unit. However, this position also includes the scope of various responsibilities. First of all, it includes hiring, while other departments search for new candidates for the position, but the director has the final decision on which applicant suits best for the company. The second point of focus is directed toward evaluation competencies. The director is accountable for the level of nurses’ knowledge, skills, abilities, quality, and quantity of their work, initiatives, and inclusiveness in the working team and to the patients. My director secures the fulfillment of this aspect through personal meetings with each employee every quarter. It also includes feedback from the team and self-assessment preparation. And the final element of the director’s responsibilities is meetings organization.
Active participation in the professional organization allows the director to promote effective personal development among workers. He encourages growth by scheduling and allowing employees to attend training such as a Trauma Nursing Core Course (TNCC) and the National Teaching Institute (NTI) for critical care nurses. Additionally, he arranges power training with reps, so employees are able to ask questions and get first-hand information on devices such as intra-aortic balloon pump or impella. It improves the overall competencies of the nurses working with technology. To follow the latest policies and procedures, he organizes skills fairs that allow employees to adapt to contemporary trends and ideas. Thus, the employees always stay informed about the latest perspectives in the scientific community and have an opportunity to develop personal skills through the leader.
There is a list of professional literature that the director reads to maintain relevant knowledge and new studies in the field. The chosen journals include the medical journal of nursing AACN critical care. It allows the manager to stay informed during the rapidly changing tendencies of the area due to the pandemic, new technologies, and phycological challenges (Critical Care Nurse, n.d.). The journal explores not only material development aspects but also mental tactics for maintaining successful performance throughout a career. The director is also interested in the book “Radical Condor,” literature aimed at improving leadership skills and approaches. It helps to utilize various styles of management that can be more efficient in the nursing environment. Therefore, the director constantly develops his professional knowledge to maintain successful managing performance.
Leadership Style Approaches
The choice of working leadership style is the first step to achieving good outcomes from the employees’ management. There are various tactics and methods, but my director uses servant leadership. It presents the complete opposite of the traditional power persuasion in the profession. Because they exhibit humanitarian qualities, servant leaders are unique. My nurse leader expresses his intention to be a strong leader through a set of fundamental, multidimensional managerial skills. They combine such characteristics as authenticity, integrity, good listening skills, compassion, courage in decision-making, and altruism. Servant leader also possesses such competencies as building professional relationships, empowering employees, and having a compelling vision (Best, 2020). Moreover, the central role of the servant leader is to encourage the development of employees’ skills and abilities so nurses are able to achieve their full potential. This style is closely connected with democratic leadership because it includes a high rate of collaborative interactions among workers and management. However, the characteristics directly oppose laissez-faire or autocratic approaches, which are less involved with the team, and are centered around the detached work of managers and employees.
To improve global healthcare, raise health outcomes, and lower costs in the areas where we operate, the director promotes and cares about united health objectives. By building a collaborative approach to handling responsibility, he uses the delegation technique to share leadership tasks with clinical supervisors. Challenges in the modern healthcare system increasingly demand a leader’s ability to delegate to others effectively. Because it preserves accountability while distributing work to staff members, delegation in nursing is crucial. It’s a technique for managing the workload while ensuring patients get the required care. When work is delegated, the manager is still accountable for its execution; in contrast, when a task is assigned, the employee is held responsible for the task’s fulfillment. Therefore, my director combines the practices of several leadership styles to achieve the best working results.
Communication Analysis
Communication is a crucial aspect of management in every professional setting, and nursing is no exception. In my workplace, it is built based on the style of followership. The interaction between the group’s leader, followers, and members is a social relationship. Following is a social position in which followers can have an impact on leaders and help groups and organizations improve and achieve their objectives. It is not passive compliance to instructions or subservience. Instead, it is a system whereby followers think critically but productively, communicate with the leader, and support him. Effective followership is required in health care organizations to enhance clinical team dynamics and communication and maximize patient safety and treatment quality. Clinicians in a hierarchy may have trouble communicating, which compromises patient safety, making it more likely that individuals may make unintended mistakes (Alanazi et al., 2021). As it is still understudied, followership is a crucial position for nurses that must be understood, examined, and encouraged for further research.
Nevertheless, my director utilizes the practices of having crucial conversations with staff and coordinating the decision-making process. The importance of personality type education for nurse leaders is growing in nursing practice. Collaboration and communication within the nursing field and other disciplines can be improved by increased self-awareness and peer appreciation of the effects of personality types. Including nurses in the decision-making process results can help to enhance personal motivation among workers as well as the productivity of the leader. Additionally, the individual approach supports establishing close relationships in the work setting. It is proved by the bonding sessions with staff, which provide psychological empowerment for the nurses. It is effective pattern communication because it offers the opportunity to detect the possible gap in knowledge or professional activity. However, the weakness of the personal approach to communication is that it can erase the lines between the leader’s authority and the staff members. Effective management must establish the clear borderlines of a hierarchical system, which must be present to separate tasks and responsibilities successfully.
Conclusion
Therefore, the analysis of the leadership style and communication tactics of the director of my intensive care unit reflects his successful approach to professional experience improvement. His constant personal growth through professional literature and search for the new trends and tendencies of nursing opens many possibilities for the application of the knowledge in the management of the employees. His main strength includes the determination to serve others and develop skills to secure better performance. It motivates other nurses to follow the strong role model and establishes a followership style in communication and social relationships in the workplace. Additionally, the collaborative method expands the possibilities of all team members. However, the personal approach to communication can decrease the director’s authority level and present the main disadvantage of such an approach. Nevertheless, it must be mentioned that there were no issues in the work process under his leadership; there is only theoretical possibility. Thus, my director is a successful leader that does everything possible to improve and develop the overall condition of the workplace and nurses.
References
Alanazi, S., Wiechula, R., & Foley, D. (2021). Followership in health care clinicians: A scoping review protocol. JBI Evidence Synthesis, 19(12). 3308-3314. Web.
Best, C. (2020). Is there a place for servant leadership in nursing? Practice Nursing, 31(3). 128-132. Web.
Critical Care Nurse (n.d.) About the Journal, AACN Publishing. Web.