Professional Development of Nurse Leaders

The purpose of this presentation is to describe curriculum innovation using a strengths-based perspective to develop graduate nurse leader talents and emotional intelligence. Health care reform and the resultant complexity require Registered Nurse (RN) leaders to demonstrate transformational skills (Institute of Medicine [IOM], 2011; Trossman, 2010). Challenges in the health care environment include current and future technologic requirements, escalated pay for performance prerequisites, and retention and recruitment of the nursing workforce (Doody & Doody, 2012). Operating in principal leadership roles, leadership students need professional leadership skills and flexibility in order to facilitate nursing care delivery change in morphing health care organizations. Competencies and expectations that leadership students need to meet future health care challenges include being able to identify personal talents, developing emotional intelligence (EI), and expanding transformational leadership skills. Identifying personal talents and EI is foundational to developing transformational leaders (O’Neill, 2013). Supported in the literature, EI and transformational leadership are essential to enhancing organizational productivity (Weberg, 2010). Preparing graduate leadership students (hereafter referred to as leadership students) to guide nursing transformation is critical to the future of health care and to the 3.6 million nurses in the United States delivering care (ANA, 2016). To provide a foundation for nursing leadership transformational skill development, the Nurse Manager Leadership Partnership’s Learning Domain Framework’s (NMLP) was adopted. The three spheres of the NMLP are: the science: managing the business; the art: leading the people; and the internal leader: creating the internal leader (Lee, Peck, Rutherford, & Shannon, 2008). Specifically related to the nursing leadership course content were: relationship management, influencing behaviors (the internal leader), personal and professional accountability, career planning, and personal journey disciplines (the art sphere) (Lee, Peck, Rutherford, & Shannon, 2008). Faculty developed learning activities allowed students to customize and integrate their abilities into nurse leaders’ personal work roles. Since StrengthsFinder and EI assessments provide participants with their baseline strengths and EI, the results of both assessments provide additional information and opportunities for leadership students’ developmental changes (Rath, 2007; Bradberry & Greaves, 2009). Threading self-assessment content into leadership assignments can assist leadership students’ integration of learning into their clinical leadership practice. All leadership students described learning in relation to their strengths and EI and the importance of these talents to the nursing leadership role.