It’s quite common in healthcare for registered nurses to take on management and leadership roles within an organization. However, often, their RN training falls short when it comes to developing business acumen.
To help nurses in these roles or those who aspire to hold them better hone these skills, Connie Curran, EdD, RN, and Therese Fitzpatrick, PhD, RN, wrote the newly released book, “Claiming the Corner Office: Executive Leadership Lessons for Nurses.”
Dr. Curran and Dr. Fitzpatrick recently sat down with Becker’s Hospital Review to discuss the book and best practices for nurses headed toward leadership.
Question: The promotion of a nurse to nurse manager is very common in healthcare organizations, but can be difficult because nursing requires a very different skillset. How have you seen this transition best (or worst) be handled by various organizations you’ve observed?
Dr. Curran: Clinical skills and management skills are not the same. The nursing process is an approach to assessing, planning, implementing and evaluating situations. This process is effective in both care delivery and managerial situations and can provide an effective approach in transitioning from care delivery to management.
The best employers have formal programs for leadership development and succession planning. These employers identify “high potential” employees and invest in developing their management/leadership skills. Some organizations create their own educational programs, often a type of “mini-MBA,” while others use educational institutions and faculty.
The worst organizations wait until there is a vacancy and place an unprepared individual into the role. The unprepared individual often has a very difficult transition moving from a clinical position to a managerial position. The individual, her team and the organization suffer from the failure of the employer to development talented employees.
Q: What were some of the reasons the two of you decided to write this book and to do so together?
Dr. Curran: Therese and I have known each other for many years. She was a student of mine many years ago. We are both entrepreneurs, members of hospital boards, board chairpersons, etc.
We shared concerns about the scarcity of nurses in executive roles. The Institute of Medicine had issued a report recommending that nurses move into leadership roles in all aspects of healthcare.
Sigma Theta Tau focuses on developing nurse leaders, and they were the perfect publisher for our work.
We used an approach that combines the personal stories of nurse CEOs and our knowledge of leadership development. The nurses in our book are college presidents, hospital CEOs, entrepreneurs, and corporate presidents. Their stories are very compelling.
Our goal is to inform and inspire nurses to move into leadership positions.
Q: Your book devotes a chapter to guiding nurse executives in developing a “personal brand”. Why is this so important?
Dr. Fitzpatrick: The notion of re-branding has very recently come to be applied to individuals as a strategy to position them for the next big opportunity. We are certainly aware of companies re-branding themselves or their products; just think about McDonalds and their successful efforts to change their brand to one of healthy foods or the near bankrupted Apple Computers ruling the technology world or J. Crew becoming the choice in sensible wedding attire — of course the First Lady helped re-position their image leading to an 8 percent bump in stock price! Since we all started our careers as clinical nurses, we are frequently promoted into clinical leadership roles — nurse manager, director, CNO. Many nurse leaders constrain their thinking that these are the pinnacle positions for an executive nurse. We are suggesting that those skills and experiences which contribute to the success of the nurse manager can be leveraged as a differentiator when considering a corner office position.
People reinvent themselves all the time to take on a new challenge or shift into more meaningful work and this process is even more important for the nurse looking for the promotion within her own organization. We may need to re-boot our personal brand to avoid being pigeon-holed in a less strategic position.
Only after you have defined your destination can you then determine how and where to spend your energy in creating the image of the future. Are there additional skills and experiences required?
Nurses with clinical expertise embellished with a repertoire of executive skills make them highly sought after contenders for the corner office in this era of value-based care.
They do however need to develop a narrative around these key differentiators — how does the past fit into the present? Once the narrative has been constructed it can become the basis for your re-introduction to the organization. Those differentiating characteristics can create the opportunity to strategically reeducate the organization (and your network) on the rebranded you.
Q: You both advocate the importance of mentoring. How should nurse executives identify potential individuals to develop these relationships with? And, once they have these relationships, what does “mentoring” actually look like as part of daily or weekly tasks and responsibilities?
Dr. Curran: We believe that mentors can provide great assistance with skill development, coaching and networking. In “Lean-In,” Sheryl Sandburg notes that individuals often mistakenly believe that if they find a mentor they will excel. Sandburg believes that if the individual excels, they are more likely to find a mentor. The mentoring relationship involves time, energy, sharing networks, etc.
Successful individuals are more likely to make those investments as mentors for high achievers.
Mentoring relationships vary significantly. Some relationships are more formal and clearly defined while others are more spontaneous and “situation” based. The best mentoring relationships are reciprocal. The mentor and mentee work on issues that are mutually rewarding. It may not be realistic to expect that a single person can meet all of another person’s mentoring needs. We have seen individuals who identify mentors for specific skills, i.e. if an individual is extremely effective in employee evaluations, that person may serve as a mentor for developing those skills. The mentor/mentee relationship may change over time. One mentor may be right in the early stages of a career and another may be right later.
Q: Your book also recommends developing a culture of constructive skepticism. What do you mean by this and why is it important?
Dr. Fitzpatrick: We believe that the complexity of contemporary organizations and the interdependencies of systems and processes within the enterprise require an evolved decision making perspective. Even the most talented and effective leader has a limited vantage point which makes it difficult to comprehend the highly diverse array of relationships operating with the organization. As leaders we are all hampered by cognitive limits to our understanding of the effects of other’s actions as well as our own. Many leaders believe they can absorb information quickly and as a result may be inclined to make decisions prematurely and without a complete understanding of the consequences for the entire system.
However, over-analysis and diffuse accountability leads to a competitive disadvantage. In these tumultuous times, the astute leader must resist the temptation to cope with complexity by “trusting their gut,” since past experience is an unreliable guide to future outcomes. The most effective way to “see around corners” is to create this culture of healthy skepticism and encourage those highly qualified experts to bring multiple opinions to the discussion without fear of challenging the leader. We think that this will significantly mitigate reductionist thinking and the inclination to look for direct cause and effect relationships with events. Our organizations have become so much more complex, there is rarely a single cause to an outcome.
