According to the AACN Standards for Establishing and Sustaining Healthy Work Environments, 2nd edition, there are six standard elements to a healthy work environment (HWE); skilled communication, true collaboration, effective decision making, appropriate staffing, meaningful recognition, and authentic leadership (2016). This mentorship program is designed to promote each of these standards and strengthen HWE’s. By offering constructive feedback and encouraging open dialogue, nurses become effective communicators and promote interprofessional collaboration. One of the critical elements of the authentic leadership standard is that the health care organization needs to make a formal mentoring program available for nurse leaders (2016).
Mentoring is a tool that many other disciplines have found invaluable to leadership development; however, nursing seems to be lacking overall in formal mentorship programs (Nickitas, 2014). When studied, mentoring programs prove to be an effective tool for development of leadership skills as well as developing a sense of belonging and well-being, professional growth and providing effective communication skills (Jakubik, Eliades, & Weese, 2016).
The program runs over a year and pairs up chairs of UBC’s randomly. Each pair is asked to meet at least six times a year, attend a UBC meeting of your peer and evaluate for strengths and opportunities for improvement, arrange a meeting between the mentor pairs and their managers, so the four can discuss what UBC means, what is the focus and see if the council is living up to everyone’s expectations. The pairs share ideas and feedback and issues and solutions can be shared at our shared governance council for discussion and brainstorming.
The goals of the program are to build and maintain partnerships between chairs and leaders, strengthen peer relationships, to act as resources for one another and for mutual learning. After our inaugural year of new shared governance councils we considered opportunities for growth among our UBC colleagues. Several leadership skills were identified; ability to communicate, organize, prioritize, motivate and inspire others. In addition to; creating agendas, developing action plans and managing conflict (Player & Burns, 2015). Beyond the UBC chair position, we knew that developing our chairs would not only benefit the success of their UBC’s but also grow rising leaders among our nursing staff. All along the professional spectrum, from new nurse to expert, having mentors and role models are vital for emotional support, knowledge building, networking, and expert guidance (Florczak, Collins & Schmidt, 2014).
While we are in the first year of our mentorship program, feedback from the UBC chairs have been favorable. Mentorship programs have proven to be effective for enhancing leadership skills. By developing and supporting our UBC chairs to mentor one another and become more confident leaders, we anticipate benefits including more effective meetings, successful initiatives, and improving patient outcomes and experience. We have already realized increased staff engagement and involvement. By mentoring our peers we aim to provide each other with the skills, accountability, resources and confidence to ensure excellence in practice.