By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN
How do we get nurses at every level of the organization to see themselves as leaders? It is a question nurse executives often ask me. I have found from my own experience in teaching classes of nurses that many don’t identify themselves as leaders. I think a big part of the challenge is the confusion between leadership as a role designation and leadership as a mindset. John Maxwell once wisely observed that all a leadership position does is to buy you time. Ultimately, leadership is about influence and not position. Changing the narrative that nurses have about themselves as leaders involves changing mindsets. Mindsets are powerful in every aspect of our life. They determine how we see our work, our relationships, and our world.
So how do we infuse this leadership mindset, so all nurses feel empowered to lead? The first and most challenging step is to move nurses from the “fixed” mindset of seeing leadership as a role to a “growth” mindset of seeing leadership as the power to influence others. Dr. Carol Dweck, a researcher and professor at Stanford University, has been a pioneer in studying how transformative a growth mindset can be for individuals that apply to this discussion of leadership mindset. A mindset, according to Dweck, is a self-perception or “self-theory” that people hold about themselves. Mindsets can either be growth-oriented or fixed. In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities, such as self-empowerment to influence others, can be developed. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.
A growth mindset results in a powerful belief that anyone can be a leader if he or she decides to learn, work, and develop influencing skills and characteristics. Even when you fail — and you’re human, so you’ll fail from time to time — you won’t be defeated. Instead of giving up and going home, you’ll begin to look at every situation as a learning experience. When you fail, you’ll figure out what went wrong and work on making sure it doesn’t happen next time. You don’t write yourself off and are willing to step outside your comfort zone. This is congruent with the way that we would like nurses to view their roles. It fits nicely with shared governance and ideas about empowerment.
To cultivate a leadership mindset, you must recognize that you are a work in progress. What you can influence as a new graduate might be different than the influence that you can wield with years of experience BUT you still have influence. A leadership mindset starts with small steps and thoughtful coaching. We need to talk about leadership as a mindset during professional education and then continue the discussion with the transition into practice. When nurses say, “I have no influence over this situation because I am not in a leadership role” – we need to challenge that fixed mindset with the idea that you may not have the influence YET but with the right approach and some new influencing tools – you could develop it.
The concept of leadership is nebulous even to those of us that have spent years studying it. Why then would we expect that nurses would see themselves as leaders? We need to shift our language to the idea of a leadership mindset with a focus on developing powerful influencing behaviors. It is a focus that nurses would understand and one that could lead to better organizational outcomes.
References
Dweck, C.S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Penguin Publishers.
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Read Rose Sherman’s new book available now – The Nurse Leader Coach: Become the Boss No One Wants to Leave
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