By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN
“I feel like things are spiraling out of control in our health system – we are taking it one shift at a time right now. We have staffing ratios that we would never have assigned in the past. The movement to travel nursing is escalating – new graduates tell us that their preferred nursing specialty is “travel nursing’. The profession has become a “gig,” and nurses are very transactional. It is so turbulent that I don’t know how to be a leader in this situation – the quality of care is suffering, my team is suffering, and I am suffering.”
The above is an interview with a frontline nurse leader. Her story is one I have heard repeated by nurse leaders across the country. The environment is turbulent, and it can be hard to gain traction when you keep losing staff. Things that made you an employer of choice in the past no longer seem to be working. Work environments are not healthy. After 19 months of nursing through a pandemic, many nurses have become very hardened and focused on their well-being, including financial stability. Empathy and compassion are in short supply.
Even the best nurse leaders wonder about the path forward. Some leaders believed that things would stabilize when their COVID census started dropping, but they have not. Patient volumes due to delayed care have escalated throughout the country. Acuity levels are high, and the gap between nurses’ experience and the acuity of patients is painfully apparent. We are in a vicious cycle of churning nursing staff. It is almost impossible to redesign care with other levels of staff support because of the labor shortage in most areas.
Jim Clifton, the Chairman of Gallup, notes that when things in the workplace become this turbulent – “The men and women who will conquer this new world will be the ones who best understand their constituencies state of mind.” Right now, our nursing workforce is rethinking everything about their work, including the following:
- Do I even want to be a nurse?
- Where do I want to work?
- How much do I want to work?
- How much should I get paid for this work?
- How can I best achieve the work-life balance that I need?
So how should leaders be thinking about their current situations? It is critically important to both have and inspire hope that things will get better in 2022. I believe that many of these nurses who are taking travel and agency positions will ultimately seek full or part-time employment. These “gig” jobs are often socially isolating and it can be challenging to achieve a sense of purpose when working in them.
To get nurses back, we will need to provide a level of accommodation and flexibility in work that we have never offered before. Nurse leaders should spend some time thinking about how to rebuild their work teams in 2022 to accommodate the needs and wants of the contemporary workforce. Leaders also cannot go wrong right now if they work on their own development and gain knowledge in some crucial areas such as:
- Developing self-awareness and leadership presence
- Rebuilding team trust as a foundation
- Re-establishing healthier work environments
- Communicating one to one with younger generations
- Learning how to do career coaching
- Displaying compassion and using a trauma-informed leadership approach
The path ahead will not be easy nor predictable. Nurse leaders should be more compassionate with themselves as so many things right now may not be in their control. Setting goals for your own self-improvement as a leader can be not only empowering but puts a focus on the future.
Chaos theory can help inform our thinking now by reminding us that while the present chaos does help determine the future, the future will look different in ways that we may not yet anticipate. It probably won’t be the big new innovations that move us out of the current crisis. Even small bets can start things on a different trajectory, sometimes called the butterfly effect.
As we begin to close out 2021, always remember that resiliency in leadership is built over time. It happens by being exposed to certain difficulties in your work that help you develop that muscle. You are being tested right now but will ultimately emerge from this experience a much better leader. I am sure of that.
© emergingrnleader.com 2021
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