By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, FAAN
“Our ability as leaders will not be measured by the buildings we built, the institutions we established, or what our team accomplished during our tenure. You and I will be judged by how well the people we invested in carried on after we are gone”. – John Maxwell
This week, my colleague Dr. Susan Dyess and I are presenting at the American Asssociation Colleges of Nursing Masters’ Education Conference. We are talking about a new initiative that we have begun at our university to develop emerging nurse leaders. Our journey to develop this program began two years ago when we applied for a grant with the US Government Health Services Resources Administration (HRSA). Our goal was to initiate a masters program in nursing administration targeted to nurses early in their careers, and not yet in formal leadership roles. We received funding to begin the program in July of 2011. Our first class of 18 emerging nurse leaders began their coursework this past January 2012.
Driving Factors for the Program
One interesting new trend that we are seeing at our university is that our Generation Y nurses born between 1980 and 2000 are returning to graduate school very early in their careers. A growing number of our graduate students were under the age of 30. For the past ten years, our university has had a fully online nursing administration masters track. The majority of the students in the program are already nursing leaders and we found through interviews that the program was less effective in meeting the need of emerging nurse leaders. It is clear from the literature that leadership succession planning is a major challenge in nursing today, and many organizations are not doing an effective job of planning for the future. We did a leadership age profile of nurse leaders in 15 healthcare agencies in our area. We found that in most organizations 50% or more of their leaders were over the age of 50. We could have a serious shortage of nurse leaders as early as the end of this decade.
The Moses Challenge
As we looked at designing the curriculum for this program, we knew that we wanted to do something very innovative. We also wanted nurse leaders in practice to help us. Too often, educators design programs without input from those in practice. We recruited a community advisory board with 24 nurse leader members from throughout our community, and were fortunate to have Dr. Tim Porter O’Grady serve as our consultant. Dr. Porter-O’Grady is an internationally known nurse leader and futurist. One of the interesting challenges that Dr. Porter-O’Grady discussed with us was the reality that we were preparing nurses to lead in a health care environment that would be considerably different than the one that we currently live in. He described it as the Moses Challenge.
Key Qualities for Future Nurse Leaders
Our Advisory Board participated in an all day workshop to do curriculum design. But before we began our design, we discussed what key qualities would be needed for future nurse leaders. Here are some the qualities that they identified emerging nurse leaders would need to be successful:
- Courage to take action
- Technologically savvy
- Willingness to take risks
- Confidence in their abilities
- Willingness to adapt to a changing environment
- Great communicator
- Humbleness
- Life-long learner
- Interdisciplinary focused
- Conflict embracing
- Visionary
- Systems thinking
Our Journey So Far
The support of our current nurse leaders is critical to this project in both designing the curriculum and recruiting the first class. We urged them to look at succession planning as part of their leadership legacy. We were excited to recruit 18 emerging nurse leaders who were anxious to begin their leadership journey. Their curriculum is 39 credits and includes a practicum each semester with an experienced nurse leader who serves as their mentor. We are in the early stages this program and our long-term outcomes are at this point uncertain but we do feel that we are on the right track. We will be carefully measuring our success on a variety of evaluation measures. What we know for sure is that there has been real value in making this an academic-service partnership. Our practice partners have given us such great ideas to make this program truly unique. We also know that ff we wait until we are in crisis to try to recruit our young into leadership which could come as early as the end of this decade – it will be too late.
Read to Lead
Sherman, R. & Dyess, S. (March 2nd, 2012). Presentation at the American Association of Colleges of Nursing Conference – An Emerging Nurse Leader Master’s Degree Track. Click Here for Video Presentation
Sherman, R. (2011). Where have all the Nurse Leaders Gone?
© emergingrnleader.com 2012
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