N496 Module 2 assignment: professional platform for ethics and leadership essay, a full sample

Where I Stand: A Professional Platform for Ethics and Leadership, Tested on One Hard Night on an Orthopedic Unit

Student Name

RN to BSN Program, Aspen University

N496: Nursing Leadership and Management

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Where I Stand: A Professional Platform for Ethics and Leadership, Tested on One Hard Night on an Orthopedic Unit

A professional platform is a public statement of the values and principles a nurse will act on, especially when acting on them is costly. Writing one forces a question most of us avoid: which of our values would survive pressure? This essay describes the personal values that shape my practice, the ethical principles and professional code that give those values structure, and the kind of leader I intend to become. It then tests the platform against a composite situation of the kind every nurse eventually faces, and ends with a plan for developing the moral courage the situation demanded.

Personal Values

Three values sit at the center of my practice. The first is honesty. I was raised by a father who repaired cars and who would tell a customer when a repair was not worth doing, even though it cost him the job; I learned from him that trust is built by telling people things they may not want to hear. The second is dignity. Before nursing I worked as an aide in a nursing home, where I saw residents treated as tasks on busy days, and I promised myself that I would never talk over a patient or leave one exposed. The third is fairness, which for me means that the quality of care should not depend on who the patient is, how pleasant they are, or whether they have family watching.

Values are easy to state and harder to rank. When honesty and kindness pull in different directions, as when a patient asks a question whose honest answer will frighten them, I have learned that the choice is usually not between them but about how to be honest kindly. That lesson shapes the rest of this platform.

Ethical Principles and the Code

My values find structure in the four principles that Beauchamp and Childress place at the center of biomedical ethics: respecting autonomy, avoiding harm, doing good, and acting justly (Beauchamp & Childress, 2019). Honesty serves autonomy, because patients cannot make their own decisions without accurate information. Dignity reflects both autonomy and nonmaleficence, since treating a person as an object is itself a harm. Fairness is the practical meaning of justice at the bedside.

The Code of Ethics for Nurses gives these principles a nursing form. Its first provision asks nurses to practice with compassion and to respect each person's dignity and worth, which is my second value restated as a professional duty. Its third provision makes the nurse an advocate who protects each patient's rights, health, and safety, and its fifth extends that duty of care to nurses themselves, including keeping their integrity intact (American Nurses Association [ANA], 2015). Integrity, in the sense the Code uses it, means that what I do matches what I say I value, and that is exactly what a platform is supposed to guarantee.

The Leader I Intend to Become

Of the leadership approaches in this course, authentic leadership fits my values most closely. Authentic leaders are described as self-aware, transparent in their relationships, balanced in how they weigh information, and guided by an internal moral compass rather than by external pressure, and scholars have argued that this style aligns naturally with nursing's ethical foundations (Wong & Cummings, 2009). For a charge nurse or future manager, authenticity means explaining decisions honestly, admitting mistakes, and holding the same standards for oneself as for staff.

In practice, I picture authentic leadership in small, repeated behaviors rather than grand gestures. At the start of a shift it means telling the team plainly what the day's pressures are, including the ones I cannot fix. During the shift it means asking for the technician's or the new nurse's view before deciding, because balanced processing requires information from people who see what I do not. When I make a mistake, such as an assignment that overloads one nurse, it means saying so and correcting it rather than defending it. Each behavior is ordinary, but together they create the trust that lets staff raise concerns early, which is where most patient harm can still be prevented.

Authentic leadership also requires courage. A concept analysis of moral courage in nursing identified seven attributes: true presence, moral integrity, responsibility, honesty, advocacy, commitment and perseverance, and personal risk; its antecedents were ethical sensitivity, conscience, and experience (Numminen et al., 2017). I recognize most of these in myself. The one I recognize least is the willingness to accept personal risk, and the next section shows why.

Testing the Platform: A Hard Night

The following situation is a composite drawn from common experience. On a night shift on an orthopedic unit, I took over a patient two days after hip surgery who was grimacing and rating her pain as 9 of 10. The chart showed a pain reassessment documented by the evening nurse an hour after the last dose of opioid, with a rating of 3. The patient told me that no one had come back to ask about her pain after the dose. The evening nurse was a senior colleague I respected, who had had a very heavy assignment.

Every value in my platform was engaged. Honesty meant I could not treat the charted reassessment as accurate. Dignity and nonmaleficence meant my first obligation was to the patient in pain, so I contacted the provider, obtained an order change, and stayed until her pain began to ease. Fairness meant I could not overlook the documentation simply because the colleague was experienced and well liked. The hard part came in the morning. I wanted to say nothing, and I told myself it had been one busy night. That was the personal risk Numminen and colleagues describe: speaking up might cost a relationship with a respected colleague.

What the Platform Required

In the end I spoke to my colleague privately at the start of her next shift. I described what the patient had told me, avoided accusing her, and asked what had happened. She acknowledged that she had charted the reassessment in advance, intending to return, and never did. She was embarrassed and, to her credit, reported it to our manager herself. Our unit later discussed, without names, how heavy assignments lead to charting shortcuts, and the manager adjusted evening staffing on high-acuity nights.

The situation showed me that the platform's values do not conflict as much as I feared. Honesty toward my colleague was also respect for her as a professional, and advocacy for the patient did not require punishing anyone. It also showed that ethical leadership is not reserved for managers. A staff nurse who raises a concern respectfully shapes the ethical climate of a unit as much as any policy.

I also noticed what made speaking up possible. I had already treated the patient's pain, so the conversation was not about blame for her suffering but about accuracy going forward. I spoke privately, so my colleague did not have to defend herself in front of others. And I asked a question before offering a conclusion, which left room for an explanation I had not considered. Those three conditions, harm already addressed, privacy, and curiosity before judgment, are ones I can create deliberately the next time, rather than hoping a hard conversation happens to go well.

A Plan for Growth

Three commitments follow. First, I will address concerns with colleagues directly and within one shift, using a simple structure: what I observed, what it meant for the patient, and what I am asking for. Second, I will seek a role on my unit's practice council, where I can raise systemic problems such as staffing and charting pressure rather than only individual incidents. Third, I will build ethical sensitivity through our hospital's ethics consultation service by attending its monthly case discussions, since experience is one of the antecedents of moral courage and the safest way to gain it is by learning from others' cases.

I will also measure whether the plan is working. At six months I will ask two colleagues whether they have seen me raise concerns more directly, and I will review my own notes for situations in which I stayed silent and why. If silence still wins most often when the colleague is senior or well liked, that pattern will tell me where to focus next. Moral courage is described as developing through experience, and keeping an honest record of my own choices is the most practical way I know to make that experience count.

Conclusion

My professional platform rests on honesty, dignity, and fairness, structured by the principles of biomedical ethics and the Code of Ethics for Nurses and expressed through authentic leadership. Testing it on one hard night showed that its values hold together under pressure and that its weakest point is my willingness to accept personal risk. Knowing that is the beginning of strengthening it, and the plan I have set out is designed to turn a value I hold into a habit I practice.

References

American Nurses Association. (2015). Code of ethics for nurses with interpretive statements. Nursesbooks.org.

Beauchamp, T. L., & Childress, J. F. (2019). Principles of biomedical ethics (8th ed.). Oxford University Press.

Numminen, O., Repo, H., & Leino-Kilpi, H. (2017). Moral courage in nursing: A concept analysis. Nursing Ethics, 24(8), 878-891. https://doi.org/10.1177/0969733016634155

Wong, C. A., & Cummings, G. G. (2009). Authentic leadership: A new theory for nursing or back to basics? Journal of Health Organization and Management, 23(5), 522-538. https://doi.org/10.1108/14777260910984014