NUR 431 Module 6 Short Paper Example

The Fourth Hour of the Third Night: Emotional Intelligence, Fatigue and Self-Care for a Nurse Leader

[Student Name]

Southern New Hampshire University

NUR 431: Leadership Practices for the Professional Nurse

Module Six Short Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The organization, setting and figures below are a composite written as a model document. No real employer, client, colleague or patient is described.

The Fourth Hour of the Third Night: Emotional Intelligence, Fatigue and Self-Care for a Nurse Leader

Leadership courses tend to describe emotional intelligence as a trait some leaders have and others lack. Night shift suggests something different: that emotional intelligence is a set of abilities that fatigue can wear down in anyone. This paper examines one moment at Ridgeline, the composite rural hospital followed through this course, when the night supervisor responded badly to a colleague at 4 a.m. It argues that the lapse was predictable from the supervisor's sleep debt and the hour, that emotional intelligence can be protected by managing the conditions that erode it, and that self-care is therefore a leadership responsibility rather than a private matter.

The Moment

It was the third consecutive night shift. The supervisor had slept about five hours each day, had covered a trauma in the emergency department at 1 a.m. and had just finished a long video admission with the tele-hospitalist. At 4 a.m., a nursing assistant reported that an older patient's blood sugar reading was low, two hours after it had been taken. The supervisor said, in front of the patient and the patient's daughter, that two hours was unacceptable and that the assistant should know better. The assistant apologized and left the room. The patient was treated and recovered quickly. The supervisor felt immediate regret, and the daughter looked uneasy for the rest of the visit.

Emotional Intelligence as a Lens

Goleman (1998) broke workplace emotional intelligence into five capacities, beginning with knowing one's own emotional state and managing it, and extending to drive, sensitivity to others' feelings and skill in handling relationships. The 4 a.m. exchange shows failures in three of them. Self-awareness was low: the supervisor did not notice how depleted and irritable the night had become until after speaking. Self-regulation failed: frustration with a real safety lapse came out as public criticism. Empathy was missing: the assistant had been covering eleven patients alone while the supervisor was in the emergency department, and the delay likely reflected that workload more than carelessness. The supervisor's concern about the delayed report was valid; the delivery was not.

Emotional intelligence matters for safety as well as for relationships. Codier and Codier (2017) reviewed research showing that emotional intelligence abilities are associated with better communication, more constructive conflict resolution and stronger individual and team performance, and they argued that these abilities may therefore support patient safety, while noting that more research is needed. An assistant who is criticized publicly is less likely to report the next late or abnormal finding quickly, which is the opposite of what the supervisor wanted.

Fatigue as a Cause

The supervisor's lapse did not happen at 8 p.m. on the first night; it happened at 4 a.m. on the third. Geiger-Brown et al. (2012) fitted 80 hospital nurses with wrist activity monitors across a run of three twelve-hour shifts and found that sleep between shifts averaged only 5.5 hours, that nurses became progressively sleepier across consecutive shifts, that night nurses were sleepier toward the end of the shift and that fatigue was high in about one third of nurses, especially not feeling recovered from the previous shift. The supervisor's pattern matched those findings closely. Fatigue does not excuse the remark, but it explains why self-regulation, which requires effort, failed at the point in the week and night when effort was hardest to find.

Repair

Emotional intelligence also shows in what happens after a mistake. Before the end of the shift, the supervisor found the assistant, apologized for the public criticism, acknowledged the workload that night and explained the concern about delayed blood sugar reports. The two agreed that the assistant would call the supervisor directly for any reading outside set limits, even if the supervisor was in the emergency department. The supervisor also stopped by the patient's room to apologize to the daughter for the tone of the exchange. These steps did not erase the moment, but they restored trust and turned the underlying safety concern into a clearer process.

A Self-Care and Leadership Plan

The plan has four parts. First, scheduling: the supervisor will request no more than three consecutive night shifts and protect at least seven hours of sleep opportunity between shifts by darkening the bedroom and silencing the phone except for the hospital's emergency line. Second, a 3 a.m. check-in: a two-minute pause to notice mood, hunger and fatigue before the hardest hours, with a planned snack and a short walk outside the unit. Third, a communication rule: concerns about performance are raised privately, never in front of patients or families, unless immediate safety requires it. Fourth, measurement: for the next eight weeks, the supervisor will record hours slept before each shift and a one-line reflection on any interaction that went poorly, and review the log with a trusted colleague every two weeks.

What the Organization Owes Its Night Leaders

Self-care is not only an individual task. The same fatigue that affected the supervisor affects every nurse on a run of night shifts, and an organization that schedules supervisors for four or five nights in a row, with no one to cover breaks, is creating the conditions for lapses. The supervisor raised three requests with the director of nursing: a limit on consecutive night shifts for supervisors, a relief arrangement so the supervisor can take a real break when the building is quiet, and a short debrief option after major events such as a trauma or a death. The director agreed to the first two. Treating fatigue as a shared responsibility makes it easier for leaders to admit when they are depleted, which is itself a form of self-awareness the team can learn from.

Conclusion

The 4 a.m. remark was a failure of self-awareness, self-regulation and empathy, and it was predictable from three nights of short sleep. Seen that way, emotional intelligence is not simply a quality a leader has or lacks; it is a set of abilities that depend partly on the conditions of the leader's work. Protecting sleep, pausing before the hardest hours and keeping criticism private are small practices, but they help a night leader stay the kind of leader the team can report to at any hour.

References

Codier, E., & Codier, D. D. (2017). Could emotional intelligence make patients safer? AJN, American Journal of Nursing, 117(7), 58-62. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.NAJ.0000520946.39224.db

Geiger-Brown, J., Rogers, V. E., Trinkoff, A. M., Kane, R. L., Bausell, R. B., & Scharf, S. M. (2012). Sleep, sleepiness, fatigue, and performance of 12-hour-shift nurses. Chronobiology International, 29(2), 211-219. https://doi.org/10.3109/07420528.2011.645752

Goleman, D. (1998). Working with emotional intelligence. Bantam Books.