Understanding The Nurse Leader Shortage

To understand the current shortage crisis of a nurse leader, consider a typical job description for a patient care manager; like the one shown in the graphic below:

This job description provides valuable clues as to the root cause of the constricted pipeline. The typical nursing leader has 40 or more direct reports along responsibility for driving quality patient outcome and efficiency. As if this was not tough enough, many of these leaders enter the job with little to no leadership experience. These jobs place rookie leaders into a role defined by a huge span of control, tremendous responsibility, and need to step back into a non- leadership role whenever staff shortages crop up. It should come as a no surprise, then, that many health facilities are having hard time convincing nurses to become leaders.

It has become incumbent for nurse managers to:

1. Define the leadership behaviour critical to their organizational success and scale out at least 3-5 years strategic plan to meet that target.
2. Align existing leaders around what it means to have leadership potentials. Cultivating the next generational nursing managers with purpose, looking and seeking for latent leadership potentials, spotting it, creating a viable environment to nurture and groom nurse managers.
3. Relentlessly scout for talent and unleash this potential. Nurse Managers must leverage scalable objective assessment tools that can measures leadership potentials.
4. Make leadership development broadly available. We need more scalable options to leadership capacity development including web-based learning, peer learning, self-paced learning via the completion of the on the job activities, social networking, coaching and mentoring.

This will ensure succession planning relative to nursing leadership development. Many nurse managers get their appointment into leadership not knowing what to actually do. No defined job description and no criteria for leadership appointment. Should we be surprised to see them perform abysmally? Of course No.

Leadership and management is a serious business and hence deliberate efforts must be made to develop one's leadership capacity for the position he/she aspires to hold. This may account for most of the challenges within the health sector, how to transition clinicians into managers. This challenge has necessitated and motivated the Global leadership &management consult to come out with interventions through its leadership and management executive coaching activities, aimed at building the leadership capacity of health care mangers. You can make us your leadership and management consultants, and we will help expand your candidness for your organization to rise to its peak.

Your management & Leadership Consultant

Jefferson Agbotro

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