Dispelling an Outdated Leadership Tenet

By Rose O. Sherman, Ed.D, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN

Like many of you, throughout my leadership career, I was taught that nurses don’t leave organizations – they leave leaders. This leadership tenet may have been true at one time, but not today. Nurses are leaving their jobs for many reasons, and on most surveys today, their immediate manager is not even in the top five. Yet I find that nurse managers feel tremendous personal guilt when looking at their turnover. One manager described a recent experience with two nurses who resigned the same week:

Last week was a tough week. Two nurses on my unit resigned within a day of each other. One had decided to take a travel position. The second told me that she had taken a position in a dermatologist’s office and would be administering Botox. These nurses worked with me for less than two years and will be huge losses. They assured me they loved working with me but needed a career change to improve their well-being and personal lives. There was no talking them out of it. I left the door open for them to come back. I went home on Friday and felt so depressed. I did everything possible, but that did not change my feeling that I was a lousy manager.

I discuss this point with leaders on our leadership development webinars because many frontline leaders say they are burned out and exhausted from all their efforts to retain staff. In one organization I worked with, the leaders were placed on performance plans for their turnover and lack of staff engagement. You can’t force retention, and you can’t move engagement, so these efforts are misguided. You can build cultures and environments that promote retention and engagement, but decisions about leaving and engagement are ones nurses are making for themselves.

A challenge I see with some executive teams today is that they don’t accept that their workforce is different. This week, data was published in the Wall Street Journal indicating that those between 20 and 24 years of age are not participating in the labor force at the same rates as previous generations. Frontline nurse leaders have reported this trend to me for months- new grads cutting back their hours and going part-time or per diem. They tell their managers that the work is exhausting and impacts their mental health and well-being. Generation Z is hyper-focused on their finances and will leave units and organizations if they determine that there is something better out there. Earlier this week, in the blog A CNO Goes Incognito   a CNO who took a travel assignment and spoke directly with nurses observed that retaining staff will be very challenging in the future because the mindset of nurses has changed

My recommendation is that leaders can control the controllable and make it harder to leave by using strategies we have discussed in other blogs, such as:

Promote connections and friendships at work

Be accommodating with scheduling to the extent possible.  

Promote teamwork and a teamwork mindset

Become a nurse leader coach

Talk about well-being and self-care

A question leaders often ask me about the turmoil and turbulence is about the endpoint because the current trajectory is unsustainable. I don’t have the answer to the questions because, as Buffalo Springfield sang in the late 60s – something is happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear. What we know about change is that it is iterative, and then suddenly, there is a tipping point, and things seem to shift quickly. So, for now, we try small bets and control what we can control in our environments.