Developing Leaders From Within

For those institutions with a shared governance structure, finding staff willing to tackle the challenge of chairing or co-chairing a council or committee can be frustrating. Those willing seem to be the same nurses who volunteer for everything, are members of every committee, and are active in every hospital initiative. The difficulty is getting more staff involved, getting them to realize how much they have to offer and what a huge impact they can make on patient care and employee growth and satisfaction through chairing or co-chairing a council or committee.

For the staff member, council leadership training consists of more than just higher-level management and leadership skills. It starts with the basic computer skills of e-mail attachments for communication, creation of an agenda, minutes taking, etc. These may seem like skills everyone should already have, but within their job duties, the staff nurse has little need for these skills. We have found that the lack of these skills act as a barrier to council/committee participation and leadership.

In the beginning of the leadership transition, the new leader is typically focused so intently on learning the technical aspects of the position, he or she is hard pressed to also acquire management and leadership skills; to be able to contemplate, develop, and effectively convey a vision to the council. New leaders attempting to learn both technical and management/leadership skills during the leadership transition period are often overloaded, unable to process it all. They are most comfortable with and drawn to learning the concrete technical skills, like computer skills, minutes taking, and agenda preparation; ignoring the less tangible but equally, if not more important, management and leadership skills. This may leave a lag in the leadership of the council or committee, squandering time and losing the momentum, motivation, and morale of council/committee members.

Many institutions utilize a mentorship model as their primary means of council leadership training. Not denying its benefits, mentorship also has its limitations. It may suffer from the same stagnation of skills and information as clinical practice prior to the evidence-based practice movement, recycling ineffective anecdotal information that only frustrates the mentor and the mentee. It is also not an appropriate model to use to instruct technical skills such as computer use, transcribing meeting minutes, creating meeting agendas, etc. These skills are better learned in a classroom/tutoring type environment. Skills need to be taught; that means utilizing the education process: providing information, re-enforcing through exercises, clarifying and reviewing material, and testing to verify learning (Kurtus, 2001).

Developing the higher order skills needed to chair or co-chair a committee is where mentorship produces its best effects. Mentorship lends itself more to learning management and leadership techniques through transferring the council or committee-specific experiential knowledge of the outgoing chair to the incoming chair while the new leader tweaks the information to fit his or her management/leadership style.

References

Kurtus, R. (2001). The education process. Retrieved November 19, 2007, from http://www.school-for-champions.com/education/process.htm