Effective Leadership in Nursing Health Care

A transactional leader is that who has only management and positional authority over others. He’s positional wise superior to the employees and all other working under him. There are no necessary skills needed to lead people. He’s in charge of their salaries and other finances.
Transformational leadership involves motivating and encouraging employees to do their best in their performance. Employees must maximize their potential. The leaders strive to transform the organization structure for higher morals and high goals. Transactional leader (positional leadership) has simply managerial and administrative tasks, a positional authority. A transformational leader (influential) gets associated with his employees, and motivates them to transform and give better output, possessing specific leadership skills.
Effective leadership is an important part of an organization and facilitates for advancing their goals. His leadership qualities let him to transform the organizational culture, politics and structure to a new form in order to complete future goals and become competitive advanced organization.

The Components of Leadership
An effective leadership will set a vision for an organization for some future goals
It will mobilize and motivate others to perform best course of actions to achieve those goals
It involves effective communication with employees to clearly show them vision of an organization and to influence them to work for the desired goals
A charismatic personality that becomes an ideal for others
Challenges to leadership development in nursing healthcare
Effective nursing leadership in healthcare is mandatory for health care reform, patient care, health promotion and development of policies. It involves broad range of capabilities, activities and goals for the development this leadership in healthcare sector.
Effective communication has always been important in nurse-patient and nurse-physician relationship. Nurses are always in a situation dealing with patients and their emotions, where illness has already made patients upset. In spite of their deteriorating health, patients need hope and encouragement for every minute they are breathing and for every day of the life they are living.
As James Forrest Calland, MD, of University of Virginia stresses on the role of team communication in the operating room (Calland, 2001). He pointed to the fact that surgical errors are more common than medication errors. In operating room only trained staff with learned communication skills must be employed because surgeon alone is not responsible for the successful surgery, the role of nurses in maintaining the environment is important, where non-verbal communication sometimes compounds the problem. In critical care, team work has always been found to be productive. Hence, it is important for nurses and other staff to adapt to the environment and they must be trained with other staff in every discipline. Different educational programs for developing communication skills and to work collaboratively must be developed.
Impact of Different Leadership Traits And Styles In Today’s Health Care Organization
Different models of change have been proposed. Methods and approaches used for change can be adopted in healthcare as well. The empirical-rational model is based on the fact that “individuals are rational and will follow their rational self-esteem. A good change will be adopted by only those who have good intentions.” This method stresses on fixing the part, that is the communication itself and making new ways for developing communication skills to bring the change. However, this method does not seem to be suitable for healthcare arena. The power-coercive method of change would also not be suitable for change in communication in healthcare as it uses power or force to make change. In this method individuals are forced to adopt change.
In this method the rules and regulations will be imposed on the staff, “that’s how they have to communicate and behave” to make a change in the healthcare environment. However, this method has brought very few changes as seen from the history and is very less productive.
The most appropriate and long last change can be brought through normative-re-educative approach. Everything that is accepted does not come passively but individual struggles to get it. Changes are brought through actions of people who are in charge of it by improving their thinking at personal level. The individuals who are in charge of it are educated, trained, and guided. In addition, individuals adopt change by understanding and re-educating themselves. In this method the work is done collaboratively with clients, agents and other team workers to bring a change. As discussed earlier that in healthcare collaborative work is much more important than individual efforts. Though, physicians are directly involved in patients’ diagnosis, prognosis and treatment, the environment in healthcare is maintained by nurses. Nurses are usually in charge of patients’ care and are in direct touch and contact with patients.
Physicians has stressed that “clear communication with patients is important for establishing trust in them” (Slovik, 2001) also not making them disappointed about their health but still sticking to the real and factual information.
Most physicians regard many surgical and medical errors due to lack of effective communication, as stated by Richard I. Cook, MD, of the University of Chicago, “There is a tendency to be very narrowly focused on communication. There is actually a dense web of communications among nurses, residents, pharmacists, surgeons and other members of the health care team.” (Cook, 2001)
Communication is largely affected by other factors at workplace including stress, tension and fatigue. When nurses and physicians fail to collaborate there is an often report of an erroneous event. Many errors in healthcare reporting can simply be avoided through effective collaboration “where sharing of information and cross-checking accuracy is important.” Speaks Marta L. Render, MD, of the VA Midwest Patient Safety. Stressing the key points in effective communication, she states “honesty, openness, consistency and respect are keys to effective communication.” (Render, 2001) It is “a bridging activity” (Render, 2001) among various co-workers and staff. “Managing change is critical for a safe health care system. So is managing competing interests and conflicting goals.” (Render, 2001)
References
Calland, J. F. (2001) Addressing errors in the operating room. Let’s Talk: Communicating Risk and Safety in Healthcare, 2001. The 3rd Annenberg Conference on Patient’s Safety. The Summary of Conference Proceedings. St. Paul MN. Retrieved from World Wide Web: http://www.npsf.org/congress_archive/2001/summary.html
Cook, R.I. (2001) Plenary Session I: Communicating in the Midst of Complexity. Let’s Talk: Communicating Risk and Safety in Healthcare, 2001. The 3rd Annenberg Conference on Patient’s Safety. The Summary of Conference Proceedings. St. Paul MN. Retrieved from World Wide Web: http://www.npsf.org/congress_archive/2001/summary.html
Render, M.L. (2001) Speaker at Plenary Session I: Communicating in the Midst of Complexity. Let’s Talk: Communicating Risk and Safety in Healthcare, 2001. The 3rd Annenberg Conference on Patient’s Safety. The Summary of Conference Proceedings. St. Paul MN. Retrieved from World Wide Web: http://www.npsf.org/congress_archive/2001/summary.html
Slovik, P. (2001) Emotion, Reason and Risk Lessons for Risk Communication from Cognitive Science. Let’s Talk: Communicating Risk and Safety in Healthcare, 2001. The 3rd Annenberg Conference on Patient’s Safety. The Summary of Conference Proceedings. St. Paul MN. Retrieved from World Wide Web: http://www.npsf.org/congress_archive/2001/summary.html
Nursing leadership development in Canada. Retrieved from http://www.cna-nurses.ca/CNA/documents/pdf/publications/Nursing_Leadership_Development_Canada_e.pdf
Kutz, M.R. Necessity of Leadership Development in Allied Health Education Programs Retrieved http://ijahsp.nova.edu/articles/Vol2num2/Kutz_Leadership.htm