Nursing Leadership Principles

The overall aim of this assignment is to critically discuss the key principles of leadership and management.These topics will be explored in the healthcare setting with particular focus on nurse leadership and management in the Irish health system. This will be achieved by discussing leadership in terms of communication and teamwork and management in relation to practice development and decision making. These concepts are integral to effective management and motivation of staff and clients which will help build quality work environments and facilitate positive outcomes for patients and the nursing workforce.

In the Irish healthcare system, nurses should promote and support the development of leaders and leadership competence due to the shortage

Listening is an important element of communication which emphasises that the only way to find out people’s individual wants and needs is to watch what they do and listen to what they tell you (Whitehead et al., 2007). Hence, a successful leader should apply the principles of active listening which include open body language, good eye contact, appropriate questioning, paraphrasing and empathy to communicate appropriately with colleagues. Effective leaders should encourage the exchange of information between staff as many misunderstandings and mistakes occur because people fail to share enough information with each other. Staff should be given the opportunity to show initiative, thus promoting confidence and underpinning knowledge and competence in their own skills (Frankel,

Decision making is an important element of the managers role that is based upon problems or potential issues. Throughout each 24-hour day, nurse managers make countless decisions that impact patient, staff and organisational outcomes (Shirey et al., 2013).These decisions take place in complex work environments often with incomplete information, role overload and frequent interruptions which can affect the decision making process.However, it has been highlighted that a lack of involvement in practice-related decision making is a major source of nurses’ job dissatisfaction (Kramer and Schmalenberg, 2003, cited in MacPhee et al., 2010).The nurse manager should engage staff in unit based decisions and assist them to be part of the solution for the unit based issues so they can become the leaders of change. This shared decision making strategy can also be referred to as a structural empowerment strategy.Structural empowerment refers to employees’ access to information, resources, supports and opportunities through formal or informal lines of power (MacPhee et al, 2010). The results of this approach predict nurse job satisfaction, decision involvement and trust and respect in