N496 Module 8 assignment: signature assignment: what makes a good leader, a full sample

What Makes a Good Leader? Seven Lessons From a Course in Nursing Leadership, Tested Against Four Nursing Roles

Student Name

RN to BSN Program, Aspen University

N496: Nursing Leadership and Management

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

What Makes a Good Leader? Seven Lessons From a Course in Nursing Leadership, Tested Against Four Nursing Roles

Leadership in nursing is often discussed as if it belonged to managers and executives. This course has argued something broader: that every nurse leads, whether at the bedside, at the charge desk, in an office, or in a classroom, and that the qualities that make leadership effective are the same across those roles even when the scope differs. This paper answers the question "What makes a good leader?" by synthesizing seven lessons from the course, testing each against four nursing roles, and closing with a plan for my own growth. The backdrop is a national call for nurses to lead change as full partners with physicians and other professionals (Institute of Medicine, 2011): the question is not whether nurses will lead but how well.

Lesson One: A Good Leader Manages and Leads

Leadership and management are different functions, one coping with change and the other with complexity, and organizations need both (Kotter, 1990). A good leader knows which one a moment requires. For a staff nurse, that may mean organizing a heavy assignment efficiently while taking a few minutes to reassure a frightened patient's family. For a charge nurse, it means running the assignment board and also coaching the new graduate who is struggling. For a manager, it means meeting the budget and also articulating why the unit's work matters. The failure in each role is the same: doing only one.

Lesson Two: A Good Leader Is Relational

Two large reviews tie leaders who attend to relationships to more satisfied nurses, healthier units, and patients who fare better, with lower mortality and fewer medication errors among the outcomes reported, while task-focused styles are associated with worse outcomes (Cummings et al., 2018; Wong et al., 2013). Relational leadership is not softness; it is attention to people as the means by which work gets done well. The four components of transformational leadership, being a trusted role model, communicating a shared purpose, inviting others to question and solve problems, and attending to each person's needs (Bass & Riggio, 2006), describe what I watched in the nurse manager I shadowed, who knew her patients' families by name and asked her staff every morning what was worrying them.

Lesson Three: A Good Leader Acts From Clear Values

Ethical leadership begins with knowing what one stands for. Developing a professional platform in Module 2 showed me that my values of honesty, dignity, and fairness can conflict under pressure, and that moral courage, including the willingness to accept personal risk, is what turns values into action. The Code of Ethics for Nurses asks all nurses to protect patients' rights and safety and to preserve their own integrity (American Nurses Association, 2015). For a staff nurse, that means speaking to a colleague about a falsely charted reassessment; for a manager, it means admitting a mistake to staff; for an educator, it means grading honestly even when a student is struggling. The role changes the stakes, not the principle.

Lesson Four: A Good Leader Uses Power Well

Staff nurses hold considerable expert power even when they lack formal authority, and structures such as shared governance convert that expertise into legitimate power over practice. Hospitals with higher nurse engagement in shared governance have nurses who report better job outcomes and patients who report better experiences (Kutney-Lee et al., 2016). A good leader in a formal role shares power by giving councils real authority; a good leader without a formal role uses expert power constructively by joining those councils rather than resisting decisions made without them.

Using power well also means noticing when it is being used badly. Bullying and incivility, which the course discussed as sources of stress and turnover, are abuses of informal power, often by experienced nurses toward newer ones. A good leader in any role names such behavior when it appears and refuses to treat it as a rite of passage, because a unit where power is used to intimidate cannot also be a unit where people speak up about safety.

Lesson Five: A Good Leader Communicates Clearly and Invites Others to Speak

Communication failures contribute to many adverse events, and structured tools help. SBAR orders a clinical message so the listener hears the problem at once and the ask at the end, and a systematic review found moderate evidence that it improves safety, particularly in telephone calls between nurses and physicians (Müller et al., 2018). Just as important is the climate that makes people willing to speak. A good leader models assertive, respectful communication and responds well when staff raise concerns, especially concerns that turn out to be unfounded, because every response teaches the team whether speaking up is safe.

Lesson Six: A Good Leader Delegates and Follows Up

Delegation extends what a team can accomplish, but accountability for nursing care stays with the nurse. National guidelines describe delegation as shared among the employer, the nurse, and the delegatee and organize the decision around five rights, including the right supervision and evaluation (National Council of State Boards of Nursing, 2016). A good leader delegates tasks that fit the circumstance, gives clear directions about what to report, and follows up. That discipline is the same whether a staff nurse is working with a nursing assistant or a manager is assigning a project to a charge nurse.

Lesson Seven: A Good Leader Builds a Culture of Safety

Safety depends as much on culture as on systems. When staff fear punishment, near misses go unreported and hazards remain. A just culture that supports honest error, coaches at-risk behavior, and reserves discipline for recklessness encourages reporting, and interventions to improve safety culture show promise although the evidence is still limited (Weaver et al., 2013). Change frameworks such as Lewin's help leaders unfreeze fearful habits before introducing new practices. For every nurse, the leadership act is the same: report, and respond to reports in a way that makes the next one more likely.

Leadership Across Four Roles

Taken together, the lessons suggest that leadership looks different by role but rests on the same foundations. The staff nurse leads through clinical judgment, advocacy, and the example set for peers. The charge nurse leads the shift, balancing management of flow with coaching and support. The nurse manager leads the unit's culture and resources, translating between staff and the organization. The nurse educator or advanced practice nurse leads through knowledge, shaping how others practice. Healthy work environments at the unit level depend on developing leaders at each of these levels rather than waiting for them to emerge (Sherman & Pross, 2010).

The differences between roles are mostly differences of reach. A staff nurse's leadership touches the patients on one assignment and the colleagues on one shift, but it sets the tone that newer nurses copy. A charge nurse's decisions shape the experience of every nurse and patient for twelve hours. A manager's choices about scheduling, hiring, and how to respond to errors shape the unit for years. An educator's influence travels furthest, into the practice of every student or new hire they teach. Because reach grows with each role, the cost of weak leadership grows too, which is one reason to practice the foundations early, when mistakes are small and easy to learn from.

Leadership as an Expression of Caring

Nursing is often described as a caring profession, and the course suggested that good leadership is caring expressed at a different scale. A nurse cares for a patient by noticing pain, explaining a procedure, and advocating when something is wrong. A leader cares for a team in parallel ways: noticing when a nurse is overwhelmed, explaining decisions honestly, and advocating for resources the team needs. The manager I shadowed made this explicit when she described her job as clearing the way so nurses could practice the way their training prepared them to. Seen this way, relational leadership is not a management technique borrowed from business but a natural extension of nursing's own values. The best nurse leaders I have met did not stop being nurses when they took on leadership roles; they applied the same attention they once gave patients to the people who now care for those patients.

My Growth as a Leader

The course changed my answer to the title question. I began thinking of a good leader as someone decisive and organized. I now think of a good leader as someone relational, principled, clear, and consistent, whose everyday behavior makes it safe for others to speak and do their best work. My emotional intelligence self-assessment showed that I am strong in empathy and weaker in self-regulation, especially on chaotic mornings, and my ethics platform showed that my weakest point is accepting personal risk.

My growth plan addresses both. Over the next year I will serve as relief charge nurse at least twice a month, use a brief pause and a team question before making assignments on difficult mornings, and ask a trusted colleague for feedback on my tone. I will raise concerns with colleagues directly within one shift, join my unit's practice council, and seek a mentor among our nurse managers. After completing my baccalaureate degree, I will decide whether a formal leadership role or advanced clinical practice fits me better, but either path will require the same foundations this course described.

I will judge my progress by evidence rather than impressions. At six and twelve months I will repeat the emotional intelligence self-assessment, ask the same two colleagues whether they see a difference in how I handle difficult mornings, and review a simple log of the concerns I raised and the ones I let pass. If the log shows that I still stay silent when the colleague is senior, I will ask my mentor to help me rehearse those conversations. Treating my own development the way the course taught me to treat a practice change, with a baseline, an intervention, and a measure, is the most practical lesson I am taking with me.

Conclusion

A good nurse leader, in any role, manages and leads, relates to people, acts from clear values, uses power to share rather than hoard, communicates clearly and invites others to speak, delegates with follow-up, and builds a culture where errors become lessons. Research ties these qualities to how nurses feel about their work and to how their patients fare. The most important lesson of this course is that leadership is not a position to wait for; it is a practice every nurse can begin on the next shift.

References

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

Bass, B. M., & Riggio, R. E. (2006). Transformational leadership (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Cummings, G. G., Tate, K., Lee, S., Wong, C. A., Paananen, T., Micaroni, S. P. M., & Chatterjee, G. E. (2018). Leadership styles and outcome patterns for the nursing workforce and work environment: A systematic review. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 85, 19-60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2018.04.016

Institute of Medicine. (2011). The future of nursing: Leading change, advancing health. The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/12956

Kotter, J. P. (1990). What leaders really do. Harvard Business Review, 68(3), 103-111.

Kutney-Lee, A., Germack, H., Hatfield, L., Kelly, S., Maguire, P., Dierkes, A., Del Guidice, M., & Aiken, L. H. (2016). Nurse engagement in shared governance and patient and nurse outcomes. Journal of Nursing Administration, 46(11), 605-612. https://doi.org/10.1097/NNA.0000000000000412

Müller, M., Jürgens, J., Redaèlli, M., Klingberg, K., Hautz, W. E., & Stock, S. (2018). Impact of the communication and patient hand-off tool SBAR on patient safety: A systematic review. BMJ Open, 8(8), Article e022202. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2018-022202

National Council of State Boards of Nursing. (2016). National guidelines for nursing delegation. Journal of Nursing Regulation, 7(1), 5-14. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2155-8256(16)31035-3

Sherman, R., & Pross, E. (2010). Growing future nurse leaders to build and sustain healthy work environments at the unit level. OJIN: The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 15(1), Manuscript 1. https://doi.org/10.3912/OJIN.Vol15No01Man01

Weaver, S. J., Lubomski, L. H., Wilson, R. F., Pfoh, E. R., Martinez, K. A., & Dy, S. M. (2013). Promoting a culture of safety as a patient safety strategy: A systematic review. Annals of Internal Medicine, 158(5, Pt. 2), 369-374. https://doi.org/10.7326/0003-4819-158-5-201303051-00002

Wong, C. A., Cummings, G. G., & Ducharme, L. (2013). The relationship between nursing leadership and patient outcomes: A systematic review update. Journal of Nursing Management, 21(5), 709-724. https://doi.org/10.1111/jonm.12116