A leader provides direction to the workers. Workers, organizations and even the community always crave for strong and transformative leaders. Workers working under bad leadership will always believe that they can be better than their current leaders. However, few are strong enough to confront such issues and determine how good or proficient can they be when chosen to lead? Scholars believe that it is the high time for nurses to engage in leadership and policymaking to transform the health sector.
However, several scholars claim that most of the nurses fail to engage in leadership and political issues due to their inefficiency in leadership skills and decision-making processes (Deyo, Swartwout & Drenkard, 2016). These issues resulted in the added urge to undertake the nursing skills inventory rating. The questions were quite simple but enabled critical thinking and personal evaluation on issues that most people take for granted or do not consider as important in their nursing careers (AONE, 2018). Therefore, this study is a reflection after undergoing the process and determining my strengths and weakness. The results may have been shocking for some issues I believed that I was better than rated but it provided the best way to evaluate myself. This reflection paper includes analysis of different personality, goals, leadership skills and their roles in advocating for change in the workplace.
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Strengths and Weaknesses
The strengths and weaknesses discussed in this section under four subsections namely; personality and professional accountability, career planning, personal journey disciplines, and reflective practice.
Personality and Professional Accountability
The reference for nursing as a calling is due to the workload that tends to force working for long hours, the inadequate number of workers thus recurring sacrifices to enhance patient-oriented health care. Qualifications are necessary but the ability to improve individual skills by enrolling in advanced studies is a challenge for most nurses. The rating of 3.0 is competent but shows that I have to continue learning and improving to achieve perfection. Practice ethical behavior was my strongest value as I scored a value of 4.0 (AONE, 2018). Achieving certification and engagement in professional associations are requirements for performing and enhancing my experience in nursing.
The score of 3.0 is competent in these two but means that there is the need for enhancing one’s skills and commitment in professional associations (Baxter & Warshawsky, 2014). Similar to most nurses who are committed to their profession and work in hospitals that have inadequate employees, the workload tends to overwhelm people like us thus making it difficult to enhance personal growth and development through continued education. The score of 2.0 demonstrated that failure to manage my time makes it difficult to enhance my education and engage in self-assessment. The over-concentration of one’s profession can deprive the individual of relaxing and self-assessments thus hindering their career progress.
Career Planning
The famous quote, failure to plan is planning to fail plays a key role in every career. The self-evaluation demonstrated that knowing individual roles, having a career path and position oneself for future scenarios is essential in advancing in the nursing profession (Deyo, Swartwout & Drenkard, 2016). This section was quite challenging for me. However, knowing my role in the current working situation and taking responsibility to enhance patient-satisfaction dominate my daily activities. Although I have a plan for my career, the workload and my dedication to serving the patients have hindered my progress.
Undertaking this course means that I am making amends for time lost and appreciate that even without advancing my education sooner than I had planned, I have gained experience in the real-world situation that I would not have gained. The rigidity of my plan and schedule demonstrated that lack of flexibility has been my weakness. The evaluation demonstrates that enhancing my time and positioning myself in a flexible manner will enhance my career planning and abilities to improve my skills.
Personal Journey Disciplines
The experienced gained have demonstrated the value of using the knowledge and experience learned in solving problems in the workplace. Therefore, the willingness to face a challenge while having an idea of the best possible solution has improved my abilities to solve problems among my colleagues. However, experience and personal issues may hinder the realization of the different minor issues that vary with a previous incident leading to biased decision-making (Dubé & Ducharme, 2015). Participation in leadership and engagement in reflection is one of my weaknesses, which needs to be addressed to enhance my leadership skills.
Reflective Practice
Reflection enables a person to realize the policies, decisions, and alternatives that would yield better results than the existing policies and decisions. The progressive nature of nursing leadership needs constant reflection on the issues facing the workers, and always trying to improve. However, a wrong decision that results in loss of life of a patient or faces much opposition from colleagues may result in stress and lower one’s self-esteem. However, my open-minded and association with my colleagues results in engagement of conversations about the workplace. According to Dube and Ducharme (2015), reflection is a contentious process with scholars arguing on their importance. The stressing issues where there are mistakes but it is important to note that failure to reflect on the experiences can hinder progress and improvement (Dubé & Ducharme, 2015).
Personal Goal
The results demonstrated that leadership comprises of personal, professional and social aspects. I believe that transformative leaders are the best suited to transform the health sector thus would like to enhance my ability to influence people and change their behaviors and support change in strategies and objectives. I believe that my social and integration with my colleagues is positive but I need to influence them to support the changes I advocate. Therefore, I intend to embrace flexibility and improve my participation in the professional and leadership associations to gain knowledge and skills to improve my personal leadership skills. These associations provide nurses in my state acquire mentors that will influence my ability to achieve transformative abilities.
References
AONE. (2018). Competencies Assessment. Retrieved July 24, 2018, from http://www.aone.org/resources/nurse-manager-skills-inventory.pdf
Baxter, C., & Warshawsky, N. (2014). Exploring the Acquisition of Nurse Manager Competence. Nurse Leader , 12 (1), 46-59.
Deyo, P., Swartwout, E., & Drenkard, K. (2016). Nurse Manager Competencies Supporting Patient Engagement. JONA: The Journal of Nursing Administration , 46 (Supplement), S19-S26.
Dubé, V., & Ducharme, F. (2015). Nursing reflective practice: An empirical literature review. Journal of Nursing Education And Practice , 5 (7).
