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By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN

One of the challenges that new leaders have in their roles is establishing leadership boundaries. The problem has become even more challenging over the past four years. Nurse leaders now oversee more staff who need increased coaching due to inexperience. New managers often want staff to visibly see they are supported and tend to work long hours, including getting involved in direct care activities. Emails and texts from staff 24/7 are no longer that unusual.

Many leaders tell me they started 2025 with a resolution to establish tighter leadership boundaries around their work. Yet, they find themselves in the same patterns they had before resolving to change. In his new book Shift, Ethan Kross discusses why we often fail at our goals: we don’t link our goals with the obstacles to constructively achieving them. He recommends using the WOOP (Wish-Outcome-Obstacle-Plan) framework to manage our emotions during the change process more effectively. I will use the case example below to illustrate how to use it.

Sonia has been in her critical care director role for almost six months. While she enjoys being a leader, she works so many hours that she feels emotionally burned out and exhausted. She has two young children at home and often does not come home until 8:00 PM, shortly before their bedtime. Her husband has been very understanding but has told Sonia that the pace she has set for herself in the role is not sustainable. It is not good for her mental health and is short-changing her family. Her attempts to set tighter boundaries between work and home have not succeeded. 

Wish – Sonia wants to leave her ICU by 5:00 PM each day.

Outcome: By spending time with her children in the evening, Sonia wants to feel less burned out in her role and be a better parent and spouse.

Obstacles—Sonia is a people-pleaser. She wants her staff to feel that she is visible and supports them. She sets a goal of leaving by 5:00 PM but finds herself helping staff with their care and waiting until the night shift arrives so she can check in with them. The staff loves her visibility, and she is getting positive reinforcement from them about her leadership effectiveness. She has been reluctant to ask her mentor for help with her problem but knows her current pace is unsustainable.

Plan – Sonia needs to build her plan around her obstacles. She will need to plan a hard stop to her day, establish a going home ritual, and discuss it with her staff. She can plan to come in later and stay later once or twice each month to check in with her night staff. Sonia would also benefit from using her mentor as an accountability partner to check in with her daily (until her plan becomes her routine) at 5:00 PM to ensure she has left. When she seems to be drifting back to her old behavior, her accountability partner can remind her that saying yes to staying late is saying no to quality time with her children.

Sonia is in a difficult situation right now. Nursing administration research shows that when managers reach the point of exhaustion and burnout, they often decide that the only way out of the problem is to leave the position. That does not have to happen here, but Sonia needs a more effective plan to change. The WOOP framework has been widely research and found to be effective. It is worth trying as a strategy.

Read to Lead

Kross, E. (2025). Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don’t Manage You. New York: Crown Publishing.

© emergingrnleader.com 2025

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By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN

In their 2023 book Culture Shock, Gallup researchers identified a significant threat to employers in the future: a workforce that will increasingly want gig or contract work. Nurse leaders began talking with me about this trend a few years ago. New graduates were entering practice, finishing residency programs, asking to convert to part-time, seeking travel assignments, or working per diem. The trend has continued with broad implications for continuity of care, teamwork, and skyrocketing onboarding costs.

I am often asked whether this is just a life stage for Generation Z nurses or a permanent change in how nurses view their work and careers. While we can’t be sure this trend will continue, most workforce experts believe it will. From the work of Jean Twenge and others, we know that younger staff today are more entrepreneurial, less loyal to organizations, and want flexibility in their work. The current government workforce job cuts and corporate downsizing are likely to fuel the beliefs of Generation Z that they need to take personal responsibility for their careers.

New data from Hallmark-Pulse-Survey-Results-2025 indicates that most health system leaders now see this trend and are beginning to design employment strategies (albeit challenging) to respond to it. Consider the following from their survey of 1200 leaders looking at emerging workforce trends:

• 97% planned to increase the use of flexible work options (float pool, gig style, per diem, contract) in the next year, with almost 50% planning a 30% increase.
• 92% have an internal resource pool or float pool.
• A growing percentage have 50% or fewer full-time staff.
• 67% indicated burnout was the top challenge they face in 24/7 staffing.
• 89% are under pressure to reduce staffing costs.
• 94% use a platform to manage their gig or flexible staffing.
• 50% indicate that implementing flexible staffing is either difficult or extremely difficult.
• The number of unfilled shifts due to lack of available staff ranges from 10+% to 25+%.
• 95% worry about staffing shortages and the impact of mandated ratios on the care of patients.
• 95% understand that providing nurses with more work-life balance would improve the quality of care.
• 98% see the relationship between nurse engagement and patient satisfaction.
• Leaders believe more than 50% of their workforce would prefer gig or flexible work.
• 98% see increased requests over the past two years from nurses for gig or flexible work arrangements.
• 78% believe that gig or flexible work arrangements are very important or extremely important to improving nurse engagement, and 96% see them as a key workforce strategy moving into the future.

Nurses are clearly communicating their preferred work arrangements, and employers are listening. Many leaders are having challenges embracing this trend because it impacts teamwork and patient care continuity. Units and departments will struggle to maintain core teams, and most will move into a teaming environment. The manager’s role becomes even more important as they provide critical ballast for the team. Whether you agree or disagree with the changes in how nurses now view their careers, to future-proof your leadership, you will need to learn to accept it.

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New Book – Click Here to Buy

By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN

I am proud to announce the publication of my newest book, Nursing Leadership in the New World of Work: New Strategies and Tools for Success. This book provides a new roadmap for navigating the changes in our work, workforce, and workplaces. In an easy-to-read format, each chapter in this book includes stories of challenges and successes that thousands of nurse leaders in health systems across the country have shared with me in workshops and focus groups as they navigate this new world of work. You will learn from their experiences and insights and acquire new evidence-based leadership strategies, tools, and tactics to improve your leadership effectiveness and tackle today’s toughest leadership challenges, including:

• Changing strategies for recruiting and retaining nursing talent
• Understanding new workforce expectations
• Promoting staff engagement
• Building a culture of professional accountability
• Providing feedback without resistance
• Communicating with a diverse workforce
• Helping staff with the social navigation of conflict
• Finding your new leadership voice in a time of change
• Supporting nurse and nurse leader well-being

This book is a must-read for any nurse leader who wants to drive positive change. The author’s trademark, pragmatism, and insight will inspire you to think differently and act more strategically.

This is an excellent selection for nursing leadership book clubs. A Book Club Discussion Guide is available. Bulk orders of over 50 copies or if books are bought in conjunction with a workshop are eligible for the author discount.

ISBN: 978-1-9329127-3-1

Available at Amazon and all major booksellers at an affordable price of $19.95.

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By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN

Peter Drucker, considered the father of modern management theory, frequently talked about the problem leaders have in making decisions to stop doing things. The default in healthcare is to keep adding more. Addition addiction is a real problem today that frontline nurse leaders frequently discuss. Professionals are often asked to pick up more tasks and responsibilities. These incremental changes add up over time. When new staff assume roles, they do not have the luxury of assuming role responsibilities gradually. The outcome is that new staff feel overwhelmed with what they are expected to learn and do.

When preparing my keynote for last year’s AONL conference, I conducted five focus groups with frontline nurse leaders nationwide. They repeatedly talked about the scope creep in their roles and those of the staff. The default always seems to be that nurses are there with the patients, so add it to their role. Jeff Mills, a CNO who worked with me on conducting focus groups with frontline leaders, noted that a great question in response is – well, if nursing were not the solution to this problem, how would we get this done?

So, how do we stop this addiction? I think the answer is to require that when something is added, something else is subtracted. But to do that, you need to discuss with staff what could be eliminated. The following are some good discussion points to have with nurses today:

1. What parts of our care could we eliminate or reduce and lose little value to the patient?
2. What aspects of our nursing role could a staff member with less expertise do?
3. What are your role’s five most consuming parts, and how can we streamline or eliminate them?
4. What redundancies in our current processes could we eliminate to save staff time?
5. Are the emerging technologies that we are using consuming or saving time? Can we start demanding that all new technologies we purchase integrate seamlessly and put data into the EMR?
6. Are we leveraging our electronic health records to their fullest potential, or are we slaves to documentation?
7. What can we do to streamline communication in our system?
8. Are our processes too complicated? How could they be streamlined without compromising safety?

Today, we know that the burden of documentation on clinicians is one of the most serious problems in healthcare. Those present during the introduction of electronic medical records probably remember all the promises about how these records would save time. Instead, they have become a prime example of addition addiction.

Several nurse leaders recently discussed their unhappiness with EPIC’s (the largest EHR provider in the US) failure to take responsibility for reducing the documentation burden on staff in conversations with me. The solution they report is always purchasing another product—why should that be, and why don’t they take a page from the Apple playbook? We need to have these conversations in healthcare today as resources become tighter and clinician workforce shortages grow.

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By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN

When I conduct focus groups with young nurses for organizations, I repeatedly hear a theme: They don’t see any loops being closed on problems and challenges. It is one reason why many pull back from shared governance efforts. It is critical today that nurse leaders have a bias for action.

When a problem or challenge is within a leader’s circle of influence, nurses today expect you to act decisively and close the loop quickly. When you think about today’s fast-paced world, your nurses can order something from Amazon and see it delivered within hours in some areas. Yet, repairing equipment on units essential for care can take weeks. Decision-making in healthcare organizations is notoriously slow, and even simple policy or practice changes can take a long time to wind through multiple committees for approval. Too often, the loop on a decision is never closed. Baby boomers and Generation X tolerated attending meetings where you might see the same agenda item for discussion month after month, but younger staff will not. As one young nurse recently told me in a focus group – why should I waste my time when nothing happens with our input? He makes a good point.

Not all decisions leaders make have the same consequences, so they may not need the same level of contemplation. In Jeff Bezos’s book Invent and Wander, he points out that sometimes people think about all their decisions in the same way when they are not. He divides decisions into two categories. The first category is one-way-door decisions. These are critical decisions that are highly consequential and usually irreversible. To change one’s mind after the fact can lead to disaster. Bezos thinks these decisions should be thoroughly debated and analyzed from multiple angles.

There is a second type of decision, which Bezos calls a two-way-door decision. These decisions are reversible. If the decision proves to be wrong – you change. Two-way-door decisions require less debate because they are reversible. Most daily decisions that we make in nursing would fall into this category. Nurse leaders today should work to have a bias for action. If the decision can be easily undone, move quickly and make the decision. If the decision cannot easily be undone, take your time. In either case, the key action is to keep staff informed and close decision loops even if the decision is no. Remember that no decision is a decision, and indecisive leaders frustrate staff.

© emergingrnleader.com 2025

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Coming March 17th, 2025