What Successful Nurse Leaders Never Do Again

By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, FAAN

The late Peter Drucker, an internationally known leadership expert, frequently noted that we spend a great deal of time telling our leaders what to do but far less time advising them what not to do. This is because we are so focused on what will lead to our success that we spend little time talking about potential problems. Yet, all of us have ups and downs in our leadership careers. The important thing is to reflect on those things that don’t work and stop doing them. The following are 10 things that I have learned to not do again in my own leadership journey:

Take a job that requires you to be something that you are not. I am a big believer in taking jobs that play to your strengths. Early in my career, I took a leadership role that clearly did not and learned from that experience. We may sometimes believe we can be successful in any situation but the reality is that context matters.
Believe you can change another person. When young managers ask me how they can motivate their staff to change, my answer is always the same – you can’t – they have to change themselves. You can set the stage and provide the coaching to help make it happen but you can’t change another person.
Fail to trust your instincts about a person or situation. I sometimes even today have a gut instinct or see something that indicates there is a problem but ignore it. Like many nurse leaders, I have made a bad hiring decision because I failed to pay attention to what should have been some obvious red flags.
Return to something that did not work in the past expecting different results. Whether it be a relationship or work situation, you need to ask yourself before returning the situation – what has changed. I recently had a colleague who returned to an organization she had left a number of years ago. It was a great opportunity from a career standpoint. Several months into it, she confessed she was miserable. She observed that nothing had really changed from what led her to leave the job the last time.
Try to please everyone. Most nurses are natural people pleasers. It is a strong drive to help others that led to their career choice. Yet in leadership, you can’t and won’t please everyone with your decisions. Leaders need to learn to live with this reality.
Choose short-term comfort over long-term gains. Success is a combination of hard work and some luck. There are always sacrifices and tradeoffs. For long-term gain, you often do have to give up short-term comfort whether it be returning to school or taking a job on the night shift because that is all that is available.
Fail to do due diligence before making a decision My dad always told me that if it looks too good to be true – it probably is. With the internet today, it is so much easier to do due diligence on organizations, people and products.
Recognize that all organizations have internal politics. Whether you like it or not, organizations have cultures and are inherently political. The politics of an organization drive how decisions are made and by who. As a leader, you need to be astute about this when seeking support.
Being naïve about the reality that situations and organizations can change. Nothing stays static forever. Organizations are like fluid organisms that change over time. A mistake that many leaders including myself often make is not seeing the signposts on this early enough.
Forget that work is not the whole of life but just part of it and transient at that. When I used to worry about work, my Irish mother would tell me to walk through a cemetery because everyone there had worried about similar things in their lives. We can easily forget that work is just a transient part of our lives and we should not build our life around it because someday it will be no more.

Read to Lead

Cloud, H. (June 24th, 2014). Ten things successful people never do again. Success Blog.