Leadership Style Reflective Essay Example
Leadership Style Reflective Essay Example
Reflection is a critical component in nursing practice. The day-to-day expressions of nursing practices feature entanglement in sophisticated flows of socio-cultural, political, and economic interests (McIntyre, Burton & Holmes, 2020). Reflection is one of the core strategies that can help the nurse review and undertake personal introspection on different facets of nursing practice. Reflective leadership features some critical elements that include self–awareness, careful observation, and adaptive response. These components of reflective leadership allow nurse leaders to navigate through complex healthcare environments. Becoming self-aware is a continuous process that requires introspection. When nursing leaders undertake practice self-reflection, more opportunities arise for understanding their own behaviors and adopting appropriate strategies to work with others in delivering care. Thus, self-reflection in leadership and other facets of healthcare delivery improves one’s and other’s abilities to meet their professional goals. Self-reflection allows nurse leaders to develop self-knowledge and awareness of their strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities and helps them become authentic when delivering care to patients. Leadership Style Reflective Essay Example
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Rationale and summary for choosing self-assessment
Self-assessment is an approach in which individuals reflect on previous experiences to nurture learning, develop and maintain skills and knowledge. The overall purpose of self-assessment is to evaluate whether a nurse’s competencies are aligned with professional expectations and codes of conduct. Self-assessment helps in examining the extent of one’s progress in competence development. A nurse leader can adopt various assessment approaches during self-reflection. First, one can evaluate his work against a set of criteria. This self-assessment method is broad. Given criteria may revolve around relevance, effectiveness, sustainability, efficiency, and outcomes of delivered interventions. For instance, a nurse leader would self-reflect and evaluate her/his performance based on a set criterion such as waiting time for patients, nurse-turnover ratios, mortalities, and other patient outcomes. Second, a nursing leader can undertake self-introspection by tracking one’s learning progress. As a nurse leader or practitioner, one needs to undertake self-continuous assessment process to monitor learning progress and feedback. At every stage of practice, one is assigned diverse roles that require an individual to learn and develop specific competence. Thus, a nurse should assess competence level in learning different concepts at each stage or role. One must critically evaluate the learning progress in terms of knowledge and experience acquisitions. I need to assess the knowledge that I have gained via personal experience and the extent to which such knowledge helps me understand and address the situation Leadership Style Reflective Essay Example.
Finally, identifying one’s areas of strengths and weaknesses in terms of skill set and knowledge is another way of self-reflecting. The ability to reflect on strengths and weaknesses is a part of assessing self-awareness. This assessment approach allows me to receive feedback, apply criticism and improve myself as a nurse leader. Such assessment allows me not to let my weakness affect followers, colleagues, and patients and estimates my ability to manage pressure.
Identify the leadership style that closely aligns with your philosophy of care and explain what appeals to you about that style
My philosophy of nursing practice is aligned more with transformative leadership. I prefer this approach to leadership because it is a practice grounded on trust and respect for colleagues. Thus, it is a model of leadership that promotes motivation and self-directed actions. Transformational leadership positively contributes to the nurses’ job satisfaction and reduces exhaustion and anxiety of nurses (Krepia et al.,2018). Transformative leadership theory is different from other leadership theories because it is inherently anchored on the principles of inclusivity, equity, social justice, and excellence. Its rationale for adoption is drawn from the hypothesis that people who feel respected, trusted, and inclusive would feel more motivated, thereby chive better outcomes (Shields,2020)Leadership Style Reflective Essay Example.
Incorporation of different elements of Transformative leadership in a health institution.
I would draw specific principles from this leadership theory and incorporate them into our health organization. Four primary elements or principles of transformational leadership exist. They include idealized influence, intellectual stimulation, individualized consideration and inspirational motivation (Collins et al.,2020)Leadership Style Reflective Essay Example.
The concept of “Idealized influence” demonstrates a leader’s ability to serve and behave as role model for his/her followers, which leads to admiration, respect, and trust for such a leader. Leaders with “Idealized influence” are often identified and emulated by followers. Intellectual stimulation involves a unique pleasurable sense of being challenged, especially when one finds new innovative ways, insights, or challenges to be exciting and feels motivated to overcome or resolve to address such issues. Inspirational motivation is another crucial component of transformational leadership. As a nurse leader, I need to depict confidence and spirit excellence, supported by virtues of honesty and integrity. A leader must articulate an appealing vision that inspires, encourages, and motivates followers, mentors, and colleagues to carry out their responsibilities beyond expectations. Leaders who use inspirational motivation have high standards and anticipation for their followers. Finally, the concept of individualized consideration refers to the degree to which a transformative leader focuses on his/her follower’s needs, concerns, and issues as a coach, mentor, and leader. As a transformative nurse leader, I need to listen, provide support, and empathize with followers’ circumstances. I will incorporate these significant components of transformative leadership into my healthcare organization Leadership Style Reflective Essay Example.
Discuss areas for improvement in the assessments and some steps for improving leadership capabilities
One of the areas that I need to improve on revolves around the ability to handle pressure. Management of emerging challenges can pose difficulties to anyone. I need to collaborate more with others to find an effective solution to address the regular or emerging critical cases in my work.
Features of an effective professional nurse leader
They are a broad spectrum of features that enable nurse leaders to be effective. A professional nurse leader must have integrity, critical thinking, and communication skills. A nurse leader should be capable of seeing the ‘bigger picture’ while also focusing on smaller groups of individuals. Besides these, an effective nurse leader should be democratic (can share roles), target-oriented (have clear goals/ expectations for members), intellectually stimulating (is a great influencer of members in developing new ideas and innovations), and visionary (can proactively articulate organizational vision (Major, 2019)Leadership Style Reflective Essay Example. All these characteristics are essential for an effective nurse leader.
Integrity in nursing is essential because it allows nurse leaders to handle professional challenges and sophisticated clinical cases by overseeing the execution of professional duties while upholding professional responsibilities to clients and employers. Due to stressful situations in healthcare setups, nurse leaders and their followers need to use emotional intelligence to identify emotions in themselves and others, use emotion to reason, understand emotions, and manage emotions. A nurse leader must have good communication skills to pass information, get feedback, and appropriately interact with others. Effective nurse leaders include being democratic, target-oriented, intellectually stimulating, and visionary, playing a role in various purposes such as increased participation and collaboration, working towards a set of goals, improved critical thinking, and innovation Leadership Style Reflective Essay Example.
Analyze different leadership theories and leadership styles
Various leadership theories are relevant to nursing. One such theory that is different from transformative leadership is the contingency leadership theory. This theory postulates that leaders adapt leadership strategies depending on changing situations. Some leaders adopt a routine strategy of carrying out their responsibilities and achieving success through specific preferred ways, but their success could be limited if such leaders regularly depend on a standard approach. The contingency factors negatively affect standard strategies. The optimal methods of leadership involve the capacity to handle contingency factors by adopting appropriately to changing situations. The contingency leadership theory can allow nurse leaders to navigate complex cases because it provides more flexibility and adaptation in situations that demand collaboration, conflict resolution, decision making, and negotiation. For instance, conflict resolution and decision-making need contextualization of existing circumstances. Thus, a leadership style that values adaptability and flexibility is aligned with contingency theory Leadership Style Reflective Essay Example.
References
Collins, E., Owen, P., Digan, J., & Dunn, F. (2020). Applying transformational leadership in nursing practice. Nurs Stand, 35(5), 59-66.
Krepia, V., Katsaragakis, S., Kaitelidou, D., & Prezerakos, P. (2018). Transformational leadership and its evolution in nursing. Progress in Health Sciences, 8, 185-190.
McIntyre, J. R., Burton, C., & Holmes, D. (2020). From discipline to control in nursing practice: A poststructuralist reflection. Nursing Philosophy, 21(4), e12317.
Major, D. (2019). Developing effective nurse leadership skills. Nursing Standard, 34(6), 61-66.
Shields, C. M. (2020). Transformative leadership. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education Leadership Style Reflective Essay Example.
Becoming self-aware is an ongoing process requiring introspection. The more often people practice self-reflection, the more opportunities they have to understand their own behaviors and adapt their approaches to working with other people, which can improve both your own and other’s abilities to meet their professional goals.
In a 1,000-1,250 word reflective essay, address the following:
Provide a rationale and brief summary for selecting each self-assessment. Summarize the results you obtained on each assessment.
Identify the leadership style that closely aligns to your philosophy of care and explain what appeals to you about that style.
Reflect on how you might incorporate elements of that particular style as you exercise leadership in a practice or health care organization setting.
Discuss any particular areas for improvement the assessments helped you identify and some steps for improving your leadership capabilities.
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Analyze the characteristics of an effective professional nurse leader, or individuals in nursing leadership. Discuss the characteristics and explain why they are effective for leadership in nursing.
Analyze different leadership theories and leadership styles. Select one theory and leadership style, different from your own, and explain how they each support a professional nurse leader or individual in nursing leadership. Consider how the theory shapes the nurse leader in such things as collaboration, conflict resolution, decision making, and negotiation.
You are required to cite three to five sources to complete this assignment. Sources must be published within the last 5 years and appropriate for the assignment criteria and nursing content. Leadership Style Reflective Essay Example