Nurse Managers are the Linchpins - Emerging Nurse Leader

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

By definition, linchpins are the essential building blocks of organizations. They have the potential of making a huge difference in the success of any organizational effort. All the current evidence points to the reality that frontline nurse managers are the linchpins to organizational success in achieving healthy work environments, retaining staff and improving patient outcomes. What they do matters far more than what happens in the C-Suite.

The evidence is in the AACN 2018 Healthy Work Environment Research on leader impact which will be published in the April edition of Nurse Leader. It is also in the Press Gainey Whitepaper on Nurse Manager Impact published in 2017 where the findings indicated statistically significant relationships between the rating of the nurse manager and the 8 work environment mediators across all but one type of unit – rehabilitation. Most recently in the February 2019 issue of JONA, researchers Tyndall, Scott, Jones, and Cook found that nurse manager support was critical to new graduate retention when Versant data was examined. Gallup will soon be publishing their data on managers in a new book coming out in May titled Its the Manager. Their goal in publishing the book is to alert organizational leadership that managers today matter more than ever. Millennials and Generation Z want supportive leaders and if they don’t get that support – they leave.

Sadly, we are not paying enough attention in nursing to these linchpins who are keys to staff retention, satisfaction and ultimately great patient outcomes. In today’s environment, many of our managers have relatively little experience, huge spans of control and virtually no development. This is not a recipe for leadership success. I hear from so many new managers that they have been handed the keys to an office and were told to call for help if they need it. One new manager recently told me that, ” she did not know what she did not know until she started making mistakes.”

The nurse manager role is clearly too critical not to focus on their development and support. Yet in nursing today, we are more intentional with the onboarding of new graduates than we are with the managers expected to support them. We can no longer deny the evidence. If our leadership is evidence-based, we have a responsibility to recognize the linchpin role that nurse managers play in the delivery of care and provide them with the development and support that they need.

Read Rose Sherman’s new book available now – The Nurse Leader Coach: Become the Boss No One Wants to Leave