Taking Risks in Your Leadership Career

By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, FAAN

The late Eleanor Roosevelt once recommended that we do something every day that scares us. This is good advice if we truly want to grow and learn. I was recently talking with a colleague who observed that so many nurse leaders today are risk adverse. New ideas that are out of the box quickly get squashed without much discussion. Overcoming our willingness to take risks can be challenging. We have grown up in a healthcare environment that emphasizes safety and evidence-based decision making. It is probably a big part of the reason why health care organizations have been so slow to innovate even in this time of tremendous change. Taking risks, however, doesn’t mean taking actions without thinking about consequences. Taking calculated risks and risky behavior are two different things. Having the courage in leadership to take the risks can be difficult but it plays a key role in how effective we will be in managing an uncertain future.

Some Key Leadership Behaviors in Risk Taking

The following behaviors are adapted from ideas of John Childress at N2 Growth on how to build your risk taking muscle:

Calling out bad behavior or practice instead of ignoring it.
A willingness to address the “elephant in the room” and open up those difficult conversations.
Promoting the best person for the job, not the person considered “right” by others.
Standing up for the mission, vision and values of the organization when things are veering off course.
Doing what is “right” in situations and not what is easy or expedient.
Encouraging and embracing an innovation that looks promising when others won’t.
Putting the patient first above profits.
Protecting those are “truth tellers” from retaliatory managers.
Challenging poor decisions instead of simply accepting them.

Courage is a learned skill and all of us have the capacity to be courageous. To be courageous means stepping our of your comfort zone and taking the risk. – See more at: https://emergingrnleader.com/taking-a-courageous-nursing-leadership-stand/#sthash.8aGJbvOf.dpuf

Fear plays a big role in why we are often unwilling to take risks. We are afraid of appearing too aggressive; we are afraid of looking like an outlier in the group; we are afraid that we will be seen as ignorant or we may be afraid that we will be wrong and fail. It is important to pace yourself as you take risks. Risk taking is a learned skill and all of us have the capacity to build it by exercising the behaviors outlined above. To be courageous means stepping our of your comfort zone and taking the risk. As you build your risk muscles, you’ll find yourself getting into a cycle in which your sense of self-confidence and power will be continually expanding.

Read to Lead

Childress, John (June 14th, 2014 Blog) The Most Important Leadership Trait.

Tull, M. (July 7th, 2016 Blog) How Risk Taking Evokes Leadership Success.