Nursing is a profession, which is connected with working and communicating with different categories of people. Nurses should know how to work with people effectively and well, therefore, they should learn leadership. To be a leader, it is important to have the following competencies:

· A person should be able to analyze and understand the situation they want to affect;

· Adaptation which helps a person to allow his/her behaviors and other resources to achieve the expected goals;

· Communication. No matter how the previous two competences are developed, if a person cannot communicate effectively, they will hardly achieve their targets.

To be an effective nurse leader means to be able to engage followers to work together effectively in the frames of a common goal.

There are several theories concerning leadership, which propose different viewpoints on who can be a real leader.

Trait theories state that one sort of people is born to be leaders, and others are born to be guided. The qualities of a leader are inherent. However, those who are not born with leader qualities can cultivate them by means of special knowledge.

Behavior theories divide leaders being based on their behavior and manner (leading styles) they use for directing people. There are the following types used for leaders’ classification: autocratic (captures an absolute authority and makes decisions single-handedly without taking into account group’s opinion), democratic (shares leadership, makes a decision with the team’s participation), and permissive (allows everyone to do what they want).

Tasks vs. Relations. According to this theory, a good leader is a person who is able to maintain balance between relations among group members and achieve high productivity of work they do.

Motivation theories support the viewpoint that a person may become a leader if he or she is well-motivated.

Emotional theories state that people become leaders in order to satisfy their emotional need to be a leader and predominate over others.

Transformational Leadership theories stress that a person’s convictions in his/her high mission and striving to complete this mission make a person a leader.

To become an effective leader in nursing, it is important to understand things which make a leader stronger, and those things which weaken a person as a leader.

The following qualities are so-called strengths: significant working experience, advanced education, awareness on products, well-developed communicative skills, computer skills, self-management skills, and litheness. So-called weaknesses include: absence or poorness of communicative skills, inflexibility, absence of further development and training interest, inability to adapt to changes, unavailability to regard healthcare as a business, etc.

It can be stated with certainty that the above mentioned weaknesses will hinder those who want to become the nurse leaders in their future practice. For example, if a person is inflexible and has no communicative skills, they will not be treated as respectable and efficient leaders. Their teams will not perceive them as leaders they want to follow, and finally, such leaders will have to implement tasks on their own, what may lead to failure, because one person is not able to do things which should be done collectively. Also, if a leader is not interested in further development, his or her professional value will be decreased, because in the modern world, science and technologies are permanently developing. Therefore, a person must always raise his/her educational base to be a contemporary and well-aware professional. If a person does not refer to such a kind of professionals, he cannot remain a leader.

In my personal nursing practice, I had faced the situations when I indicated strengths, as well as weaknesses. Let me describe these situations. I and my two colleagues found us at the place of a car crash. Four persons suffered and needed an urgent medical aid. As me and my colleagues were the only who had some medical knowledge and could provide medical assistance, we had to do that. However, my colleagues refused because they stated they were not educated enough to provide medical assistance in such complicated cases. Due to my communicative skills and ability to convince people, they decided not to refuse, and we provided medical aid to sufferers. This aid was very seasonable: if we did not stop an extremely strong bleeding in one of the sufferers instantly, he would die because of essential blood loss. However, I also indicated weaknesses. During the elaboration of a project concerning methods of providing medical aid to people who suffered from a dog biting I refused from my colleague’s assistance being ensured that I would do it better on my own. I failed this project because I refused to include the ideas proposed by my colleague, and these ideas were very essential. Therefore, this experience showed me that inflexibility may lead to failure.

References

Whitebead, D. K., Weiss, S. A., & Tappen, R. M. (2010). Essentials of nursing leadership and management. Philadelphia, PA: F. A. Davis Company

“Why Leadership?” (2013). In Kansas Center for Nursing. Retrieved from