NUR 531 Module 3 Project One Example

Project One: How Colleagues See My Leadership, and What I Will Change

[Student Name]

Southern New Hampshire University

NUR 531: Interprofessional Leadership in Healthcare

Project One

[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.

Project One: How Colleagues See My Leadership, and What I Will Change

Most nurse managers can describe their own leadership style, and most of those descriptions are more flattering than accurate. A self-evaluation is useful only if it is checked against the people who experience the leadership every day. This project evaluates my leadership as manager of a 26-bed oncology unit using the four components of authentic leadership and compares my ratings with those of six colleagues. The comparison shows that I lead with clear values and self-awareness, but that I decide faster and explain less than colleagues from other professions need, and my development plan targets those two gaps with measurable goals.

Framework and Method

Authentic leadership rests on the idea that effective leadership starts with a leader who knows and acts on their own values (Avolio & Gardner, 2005). Walumbwa et al. (2008) described and validated four components: self-awareness, relational transparency, an internalized moral perspective and balanced processing, meaning a leader's habit of considering relevant information and opposing views before deciding. I chose this framework because the leadership theories paper for this course concluded that trust is the currency of interprofessional work, and authentic leadership describes the behaviors that produce it.

The published questionnaire for this framework is licensed, so I used a simpler method suited to a course project. I wrote one plain-language question for each component, rated myself from 1 (rarely) to 5 (almost always) and asked six colleagues to rate me on the same four questions anonymously through a short online form: two staff nurses, the oncology pharmacist, a hospitalist, the unit social worker and the facilities supervisor who covers our floor. Each colleague was also asked for one example behind each rating. The results are not a validated measurement, but they give a direct comparison between how I see myself and how others see me.

Results

Table 1 compares my self-ratings with the mean of the six colleague ratings.

Table 1

Self-Ratings Compared With Colleague Ratings on Four Components of Authentic Leadership

Note. Composite data. Scale 1 (rarely) to 5 (almost always); six colleagues rated anonymously.

The ratings agree closely on two components and diverge sharply on two. The gap was widest among raters from outside nursing. The pharmacist and the facilities supervisor both rated balanced processing at 2, while the two staff nurses rated it at 3 and 4. That pattern matters, because it suggests the problem is largest exactly where my authority is smallest.

Strengths

Two strengths are confirmed by colleagues as well as by me. The first is self-awareness. Several comments described me naming my own frustration during difficult shifts rather than letting it leak into how I treated people, which staff said made hard days easier. The second is an internalized moral perspective. Colleagues cited a night when I declined an additional admission because the unit's staffing could not support it safely, despite pressure from the house supervisor. These strengths matter because they give colleagues a predictable leader: people know what I value and that I will act on it under pressure.

Areas to Develop

The first area is balanced processing. Colleagues described a pattern in which I ask for input after I have already decided. The pharmacist wrote that when I proposed moving chemotherapy start times, the meeting felt like a formality. I believed I was consulting; the pharmacist experienced a decision being announced. In a unit that depends on other professions, this habit wastes their expertise and teaches them that their views change nothing.

The second area is relational transparency. My reasons for decisions often reach staff late or not at all. A staff nurse commented that schedule changes arrive without explanation, and the hospitalist said I rarely share the data behind requests to the medical team. Relational leadership behaviors are consistently associated with better outcomes for nurses (Cummings et al., 2018) and, in a review of patient outcomes, with fewer errors and infections (Wong et al., 2013). If colleagues do not see my reasoning, they cannot trust it, and without trust the collaboration those outcomes depend on becomes much harder.

Why the Gaps Matter Most Across Professions

Within nursing, the two gaps are softened by shared training and daily contact. Staff nurses know how I think because they work beside me, and they fill in the reasons I leave out. Colleagues in pharmacy, medicine and facilities have no such context. They see only the decision, often in an email, and they judge my leadership by whether their knowledge shaped it. Authentic leadership theory holds that followers extend trust when they can see a leader's reasoning and watch it respond to evidence (Avolio & Gardner, 2005). My ratings suggest that colleagues outside nursing see neither. If that is not corrected, every future change that depends on them will begin with a deficit of trust.

Development Plan

Table 2 sets out two goals. Each passes the SMART test (Doran, 1981), so each has a single target behavior, a number, a realistic scope, a link to the gaps above and a deadline.

Table 2

Leadership Development Plan

Progress will be checked by repeating the same four-question survey with the same six colleagues at three and six months. I have also asked the oncology pharmacist, whose feedback was the most candid, to tell me directly when a meeting feels like a formality. Finally, I will keep a brief log of decisions affecting other departments, noting when input was sought and whether it changed the outcome, so that the next evaluation rests on a record rather than on memory.

Conclusion

This evaluation confirmed what I hoped about my values and self-awareness and showed me what I had missed about how I decide and explain. The gaps were largest among colleagues outside nursing, which is where an interprofessional leader most needs trust. Over the next six months I will ask before deciding, explain every decision when I announce it and measure whether colleagues notice the difference. The rest of this course will test those habits against a real interprofessional problem.

References

Avolio, B. J., & Gardner, W. L. (2005). Authentic leadership development: Getting to the root of positive forms of leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 16(3), 315-338. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2005.03.001

Cummings, G. G., Tate, K., Lee, S., Wong, C. A., Paananen, T., Micaroni, S. P. M., & Chatterjee, G. E. (2018). Leadership styles and outcome patterns for the nursing workforce and work environment: A systematic review. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 85, 19-60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2018.04.016

Doran, G. T. (1981). There's a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management's goals and objectives. Management Review, 70(11), 35-36.

Walumbwa, F. O., Avolio, B. J., Gardner, W. L., Wernsing, T. S., & Peterson, S. J. (2008). Authentic leadership: Development and validation of a theory-based measure. Journal of Management, 34(1), 89-126. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206307308913

Wong, C. A., Cummings, G. G., & Ducharme, L. (2013). The relationship between nursing leadership and patient outcomes: A systematic review update. Journal of Nursing Management, 21(5), 709-724. https://doi.org/10.1111/jonm.12116