Leadership In Advance Practice Nursing Nursing Essay

The quiz which was part of the assignment 3 resulted that this author is a participative leader. It explains that the participative leaders involve the group in decision making. However they make the final say on decisions. This author agrees with the quiz result. This author believes that a leader should be more participative and less delegative and authoritative. When leaders are more authoritative than participative, the group may get offensive or dishonest to the leader. The participative leadership style can bring up better outcomes from the group.

There are many attributes of leadership needed for graduate level nurses. The leaders should have a vision of the future and be able to communicate it with the group. Enacting at the right time is another attributes of leadership. The leaders should have self-confidence and willingness to take risk and fail at times. They should be able to build good relationship with their group and other professionals through effective communication, and make or guard boundaries in the profession. Another important leadership attribute that graduate level nurses possess is self-reflection. Self-reflection helps the leaders to look back to their experiences and learn from it. They should be able to understand and respect the diverse culture of their patients and the group members. They also have to find a balance in personal and professional life (Spross & Charlene (2005).

This author has very strong understanding of cultural diversity which is one of the main leadership attributes. Cultural competence is a continuing process which includes setting one’s beliefs on the side, and accepts and respects the cultural differences of others (Giger et al., 2007). Since this author is coming from a different culture than the main stream culture, it is easier for her to understand and respect the other cultures. This background will help this author to provide effective care to her patients from diverse culture, and to lead a culturally diverse group without hurting their cultural believes.

This author believes that she needs to develop self-confidence and risk taking attributes of leadership. According to Spross & Hanson (2005) a true leader should be willing to take chance, try it out and fail occasionally. This author used to work only in comfortable zones. However, she understands that in graduate nursing role in order to achieve certain outcome, she needs to be more self-confident and risk taking. Even after failing a few times, the leader has to repeatedly try to accomplish a desired goal through negotiation and collaboration with others (Spross & Hanson (2005).

Leadership is a core competency of graduate nursing. The characteristics of APN leaderships are “mentoring and empowerment, innovation and change agency, and activism” (Spross & Hanson (2005). As a part of advanced practice nurses’ job, they have to teach their patients, nurses and other nurse practitioners. They also have to speak up, negotiate and intervene with policy makers, insurance companies and other organizations to provide adequate care to their patients, and to attain better working conditions. Therefore, leadership is an inevitable role of graduate nursing.

According to Spross and Hanson graduate nurses practice leadership in four domains, which are clinical practice, nursing profession, system level and health policy (Spross & Hanson (2005). This author needs to develop her leadership skills in the health policy arena. Since there is an increase in rules and regulations influencing APN role, it is important to know about health policies as an APN leader. The leaders in this domain should be able to evaluate health care systems, understand their own leadership qualities and use them at the right time. The APNs can develop their leadership skills in health policy arena by becoming a political activist, using professional organizations and political action committees, being part of internships, fellowships and special interest groups, raising awareness through communication, and educating policymakers, legislators and public (Spross & Hanson (2005).

Empowerment is one of the characteristics of the advance practice nurse leadership. It is a developmental process that the leader acquire over time to encourage others, giving power to them, and letting them to work their own. In order to empower others the leaders need to give them adequate education, inspiration, encouragement, protection, security, support, direction, and resource to act their own appropriately (Spross & Hanson (2005). In health policy arena the APN leaders should empower others by using all above methods, so that they can build up future APN leaders who can speak up and act on at the right time.

Leadership as a competency helps clarify graduate nursing in this author’s mind. This author understands that leadership is correlated in every aspects of advanced practice nursing role. She recognizes that leadership is not an option; rather it is a daily practice to be an effective graduate nurse. “Effective nursing leadership is key in providing quality patient care. Widespread changes in the healthcare delivery system have prompted nurses to develop leadership skills to manage the challenges of shorter hospital stays, high patient acuity, and reduced nurse staffing. Advance practice nurses (APNs) are in a unique position to influence practice and implement change as intervention nurses” (Monturo, 2003).