A Transformational Leadership Workshop

Background: The rapid evolution of healthcare is adding pressure on leaders to optimize productivity, maximize hospital reimbursements by increasing patient satisfaction and decreasing hospital acquired infections, while aiming to keep staff engaged and satisfied. With this evolution, producing transformational leaders, in both administration and clinical education, is essential in the success of the organization, the leader and the staff. It is a leadership style that has molded leadership competencies and training programs from the most reputable organizations, such as the American Organization of Nurse Executives (AONE), and the National League of Nursing (NLN). Moreover, for hospitals that wish to achieve Magnet designation, transformational leadership is one of the five components of designation that need to be demonstrated before this achievement can be awarded.

Problem: Currently, transformational leadership is the most desired style of leadership across the disciplines, however, at present, there is a lack of formal education on transformational leadership for nurse leader development in most hospital institutions. As a result, implementation of an interactive transformational nurse leader workshop for nurse leaders and nurse educators will be piloted at a 576 licensed bed urban acute care hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Intervention/Methods: The interactive workshop will highlight the four attributes of transformational leadership; individualized consideration, idealized influence, inspirational motivation and intellectual stimulation. The workshop will also include discussion and activities based on Kouzes and Posner’s (2017) five practice of exemplary leadership, which include, modeling the way, inspiring a shared vision, challenging the process, enabling others to act, and encouraging the heart. The 45 item Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ5x) will be used to evaluate the frequency of the participants use of transformational leadership behavioral characteristics.

Results: Following completion of the interactive transformational leadership workshop, pre and post assessment data will be compared to evaluate an increase in use of nurse leaders transformational leadership characteristics.