APA Assignment: Leadership Style Reflective Essay

Sample Answer for APA Assignment: Leadership Style Reflective Essay

APA Assignment: Leadership Style Reflective Essay

Self-awareness and effective leadership are critical attributes for nurse practitioners. Nurses and nurse leaders require reflective approaches to understand their leadership attributes and improve self-awareness. Self-awareness allows nurse leaders and nurses to recognize their strengths, weaknesses, and values. Understanding one’s emotional intelligence level and leadership style helps in developing effective leadership for nurse practitioners in different settings (Cummings et al., 2021). The purpose of this paper is to reflect on leadership style based on self-awareness tests. The paper explores the different self-assessment tests and their results, leadership style closely aligning with the nursing philosophy, characteristics of an effective professional nurse leader, and a leadership theory that supports professional nurse leaders in different ways like collaboration and conflict resolution.

Rationale and Summary of Self-Assessment Tests

Self-assessment tests like personality assessment and learning styles assessment allow nurses and nurse leaders to enhance their skills by understanding their personalities and values. As a critical part of healthcare delivery, nurses must have sufficient skills based on their values and attributes to influence patients and attain quality outcomes (Grossman et al., 2021). The three self-assessment tests that I took include the VARK learning style questionnaire, the values profile assessment, and the Big 5 personality test. These tools while presenting diverse outcomes illustrated my exceptional nursing leadership skills and abilities to influence others in practice. The rationale for deploying these tools was to ascertain the various leadership attributes that I possess and ways to improve them in the nursing practice context.

The VARK learning assessment showed that I am a robust kinesthetic learner with effective coordination abilities and a sense of body timing. The trait is essential as it ensures that patients’ needs and healthcare workers’ concerns are a priority for nurse leaders (Cummings et al., 2021). The value profile assessment showed that my personality is based on dominant values that include caring followed by social attributes and realistic values. These values are essential when dealing with patients and subordinates as one listens to them. The values also imply that I can negotiate policies that benefit patients. The Big 5 personality test showed that I am extroverted implying that I relate easily with patients and healthcare workers. This trait is essential for transformational and servant leaders in nursing who seek the best of patients and even providers, especially fellow nurses, and other healthcare workers.

Leadership Style Aligning with Philosophy of Care

Nurses and nurse leaders develop their philosophy of care to guide their interaction with patients and care delivery. Such philosophies entail values and attributes that make one unique and focused on their role as a nurse in different specialty areas. In this case, my nursing philosophy is developing an innovative and transformative health environment to care for patients from diverse backgrounds based on inherent values and the dignity of human beings. As such, the leadership style that aligns with the philosophy is transformation which emphasizes openness to work and enables leaders to seek innovative ideas from the team. Transformational leaders encourage innovative team thinking and diversity of ideas. They embrace divergent views and integrate them to offer quality care through models like evidence-based practice (EBP) (Brunt et al., 2023). Transformational leadership aligns with this philosophy as it implores nurse leaders to work with all stakeholders to deliver quality care by considering emerging aspects and concepts based on innovative models (Stanley et al., 2021). What appeals to me about this leadership style is its futuristic perspective and helping others grow for the greater common good. The implication is that transformational leaders nurture their subordinates to deliver quality care to patients.

Integration of Elements of Transformational Leadership in Health Care Setting

Transformational leadership is a critical leadership model in nursing because of its attributes or components. These include individualized or personalized consideration, intellectual stimulation, idealized influence, and inspirational motivation. These factors are essential in healthcare settings where leaders influence subordinates through their interactive work. For instance, individualized consideration entails a leader attending to the individual needs of each follower and mentors, coaches, and guides (Rasheed et al., 2021). Nurse leaders are mentors, especially for new nurses joining the profession. Individualized consideration allows leaders to know the unique talents of every follower and support them as required to acquire nursing skills.

Inspirational motivation allows leaders to articulate and advance an appealing vision that inspires and motivates others to perform and deliver quality care. Transformational nurse leaders are optimistic about the abilities of their followers. Transformational nurse leaders also demonstrate idealized influence because they are role models and mentors for their followers (Stanley et al., 2021). Through intellectual stimulation, transformational leaders challenge assumptions, take risks, and seek ideas from their followers to advance better approaches to care. Therefore, all these components are integral to nursing practice due to the role that transformational leaders play in their workplaces to improve quality care delivery.

Areas of Improvement Based on the Assessment Results

The results of the three assessments demonstrate weak areas that require improvement to be effective as a leader. Transformational leaders inspire and motivate followers through idealized influence and individual consideration (Grossman et al., 2021). However, the results from the three assessments show areas for improvement that include decision-making, enhancing mentorship, and better approaches to conflicts in the organization. These areas are vital and implore one to reflect occasionally to understand their weaknesses and build on their strengths. As a leader, one needs to appreciate expectations from the subordinates and meet them. Therefore, effective interactive skills and communication are essential. Leaders should improve team approach and individualized consideration to enhance their comprehension of all team members in organizations (Specchia et al., 2022). Reflection is essential and helps transformational leaders enhance their skills, competencies, and abilities. The implication is that nurse leaders should have complex skills and abilities to help team members.

Characteristics of an Effective Nurse Leader

Nurse leaders are critical because of their influence; both implied and real, based on their positions. As such, nurse leaders possess certain characteristics or attributes that set them apart from others. These include integrity, social and emotional intelligence, accessibility, and motivation of others. Effective nurse leaders should be transparent and approachable (Specchia et al., 2022). They should support and empower others, be team builders, have passion for their work, and clear vision. They should also possess a strategic focus, demonstrate empathy, and be caring and committed to developing their staff to meet patient demands (Magbity et al., 2020). They must also possess skills like effective communication, create a healthy work environment, and embrace collaboration, shared decision-making, and delegation. For instance, shared decision-making practices allow active and full participation and engagement of stakeholders. By serving as role models through idealized influence, leaders motivate and empower others with appropriate tools and resources to attain set goals and objectives. Leaders motivate others when they recognize their worth, contributions, and services. Delegation is essential to nurture others and ensure they possess sufficient skills to steer the nursing facility in the right direction.

Selected Leadership Theory and Style

Different leadership theories and styles explain how individuals advance and practice certain approaches as leaders. The servant leadership theory and style is one of the most significant and emerging among providers, especially in nursing practice. The servant leadership theory advances that leaders are humble and protective while striving to serve their followers (Grossman et al., 2021). Under this leadership style and theory, leaders are servants and serve others by putting their interests first. The theory and style support professional nurse leaders through its principles like listening, building a team, empowering others, continuous improvement, effective communication, and integrity, and demonstrating authenticity. Servant leaders prioritize their followers before considering themselves. The theory shapes the nurse leader in different aspects like collaboration, resolution of conflicts, making decisions, and negotiation (Robbins et al., 2020). For instance, by building teams and listening, nurse leaders collaborate with followers to attain set goals and objectives in healthcare settings. Further, teams reduce conflicts while being authentic allows nurse leaders to demonstrate integrity.

Conclusion

Reflective practice through self-assessment tests related to leadership attributes is essential for nurses and nurse leaders to deliver quality care. Self-assessment allows nurses to understand their weak areas and develop strategies to overcome them and offer quality care to diverse patients and health populations. As such, transformational and servant leadership theories and styles enable nurses to model better leadership and mentor subordinates to deliver quality care.

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