Essay on Nurse Executive Leader Strengths

Assessing one’s strengths, understanding limitations, and identifying gaps in professional experience is a major step towards growing into a professional nurse executive leader. Such insights assist professionals in growing their ability to lead others. I use this paper to discuss my leadership strengths, and how I can use them to build effective teams, as well as some of the leadership and professional experience gaps.

My Strengths

Consistency is one of my major strengths. Am always mindful of how I treat other persons and have the requisite ability to determine what is fair or unfair. My desire in the nursing practice is to treat everyone in a fair manner and avoid any form of injustice. I always want people to feel appreciated and recognized regardless of their race, ethnicity, or gender differences. To me, every person has equal rights which should be respected at any given time.

Throughout my professional experience, I try to be as much responsible as I can. It is my routine to take a psychological ownership of every project that I commit myself to. In such projects, I try the best that I can to give the best quality that is required. I believe in building good reputation and leaving an exemplary legacy wherever I commit myself to. If something is the correct thing to do, it needs to be done, and in the right way.

I am deliberative. All through my life, both as a student and non-student, am always vigilant and take great care before I make and settle on a particular decision. It is my tendency before making a choice to analyze and identify the various risks associated with the decision and try as much as possible to reduce such risks. Moreover, I always try to avoid the regular mistakes and missteps by evaluating alternative methods of working out problems other than the ones people are used to.

In addition, I practice high level of discipline. I always know what is expected of me and respect that. Surprises and the unexpected occurrences are not my flavors. Anytime I settle on something, i try to come up with a systematic method of working it out. In addition, I like accurate timelines and deadlines and always try much to adhere to them. I am never shy to expose disorganized and unstructured projects.

As an added advantage for the executing role, I am restorative. It is always my pleasure to identify challenges, analyze them and come up with a viable and long-lasting solution. I am never discouraged when something fails to work. I take such circumstances as an invitation for me to find a solution. In addition, I have the habit of guiding people into rediscovering their strengths and weaknesses and determining what they can or cannot do.

My domain

From my identified strengths, I best fit in the domain of executing. Judging from StrengthsFinder analysis, I have the ability to make thing happen. I can help any time an organization needs someone to implement a solution. Moreover, I am capable of coming up with a viable idea in the workplace and make it a reality by coming up with a concrete plan of doing it and involving the necessary persons.

How I Can Leverage On My Strengths in the Nurse Executive Leader Role

I can leverage on my strengths in the nurse executive role to impact on the nursing practice. One way I can do this is by remaining passionate in my job. Passion will help me in inspiring others, specifically workmates and clients. In addition, it will enable me to remain focused, thoughtful, and creative in the leadership role.

I will focus on my team members’ strengths to bring out the best in them and make the most out of their talents. As an executive, I need to emphasize much on helping my subjects in realizing their full potentials and work towards actualizing them. Being a consistent leader, one who is mindful of other persons, I will use this strength towards enabling group work and objectivity in the organization by significantly focusing on other peoples’ strengths.

In addition, I will enlist other workers in a shared view of my future and the future of the nursing practice. Being a deliberative leader, I should be vigilant while making decisions and major choices. As part of this, I should share my vision and work collaboratively with my subjects to effectively create and achieve organizational goals. Involving other members will make them feel like they are an integral part of the business and consequently maximize their contribution.

Effective leadership requires flexibility. My strength in discipline enables me to adapt, change, and dismiss leadership strategies that I feel are not effective at the moment or will be ineffective in future. I can use the discipline to avoid getting stuck in holding things that are merely stepping stones. Afterward, I can establish new stepping stones and move forward.

Another important way I can leverage on my strengths in the executive leadership role is by putting other peoples’ interest first. Consistency allows me to treat persons in a fair manner regardless of their gender, race or ethnicity. Through them, I can learn and gain more experience in my nursing practice. Additionally, this will be a good opportunity for me to interact with people who are smarter than me and learn from them.

Using My Strengths to Meet Followers Needs and Build Effective Teams

Followers who trust their leaders are much more likely to remain around. To meet their trust, I will need to ensure that my behavior and attitude towards them is welcoming. I will nurture relationships among the team members and always offer the best advice that I can to them. In addition, I will strive to ensure that there is a good mode of communication by for instance by avoiding boilerplates questions and adopting a more friendly inquiry approach. For instance, instead of asking an employee a question like, “How are things going?” I would ask something like, “Do you need any support?”

People want their leaders to care for them. I will use my strengths to build a culture of friendship, caring, and happiness in healthcare workplaces. When times are bad, I would come up with a better and humane way of giving out the news. Moreover, I will show appreciation to my teammates for whoever they are and seek to encourage them in times of problems.

One way of maintaining objectivity in the workplace is to avoid constant chaos, threats, and crisis. To ensure this, I will try to be as transparent as I can. I would make both my actions and thoughts to be in accordance with purposes and values that aim towards promoting stability. For instance, I will ensure that financial statements and the procedures for making them are laid bare to the organization members.

While employees want a stable leadership and working environment, they want to hope in future. One way I would use my strengths to achieve this is by basing things on facts and not fiction. Some of the ways to achieve this are by leading through example and sharing my deep commitment to creating a positive workplace with employees.

Leadership Gaps and Ways of Facilitating Growth

One of the leadership gaps is the inability to inspire employees’ commitment (“Bridging the Leadership Gap,” n.d.). Making employees to remain committed and offer their best in terms of services proves to be a difficult process in leadership. To rectify this and facilitate growth, I would take specific steps to identify and recruit competent employees. On the other side, I would help the existing employees to develop their talents and work on them.

Managing and implementing change proves to be a challenging task in leadership experience (“The Leadership Gap,” n.d.). To bridge this gap and promote growth, Change in an organization should be clearly defined and aligned with the objectives of the organization. A proper communication strategy needs to be put in place and members should be provided with the necessary training. The training should be aimed towards raising change awareness and why it is necessary.

Embracing participative form of organizational leadership is another observable gap (“The Leadership Gap,” n.d.). In most cases, employees are excluded from decision making and are only notified of already made decisions which they are required to comply with. This, however, can be corrected by coming up with an inclusive management process. Employees should be given an opportunity to make suggestions and come up with ideas that they think are beneficial to the organization.

Consistencies with My Personal Perception

Before StrengthFinder assessment, I was aware that I had the leadership strength of arranging. One of my talents is planning and developing a long-term strategy and being able to deliver on it by getting the right people and organizing them to accomplish the mission. I was not surprised when I later saw this in the StrenthFinder results as I expected it.

Secondly, I knew focus would most probably show up in the results. Before embarking on any projects, I always ensure that I have a clear and well-defined destination of thinking. This acts as the guiding force that gives me the life direction, meaning, and purpose. I always prioritize my goals, take all the necessary actions, and ensure that I am always on track. Most importantly, I pay great attention to details. Focus was among the strength results a got from StrenthFinder.

I, however, did not expect the leadership belief strength to show up in my results. Most of the times, I doubt my core values and the extent of my influence on relationships and work. Moreover, some of my beliefs keep changing, and a rarely apply most of them in life. My beliefs do not at most times ignite excitements or enthusiasm. This type of leadership strength appeared in StrengthFinder results as a surprise to me.

As highlighted above, leadership domains can be either, executing, influencing, relationship building, or strategic thinking. StrengthsFinder tool enables one to assess his or her strengths and make a decision on which leadership domain they belong to. For executing, some of the strengths include responsibility, belief, consistency, and experience. These strengths can be leveraged upon to achieve leadership objectives. When taken advantage of, leadership strengths can help in bridging the professional experience and leadership gaps.

References

Bridging the Leadership Gap: Are We Any Closer?. Center for Creative Leadership. Retrieved March 29, 2018, from https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/bridging-leadership-gap-closer/

The Leadership Gap: How to Fix What Your Organization Lacks – Center for Creative Leadership. Center for Creative Leadership. Retrieved March 29, 2018, from https://www.ccl.org/articles/white-papers/leadership-gap-what-you-still-need/