16
Brendalynn Ens; Susan Bazylewski; and Judy Boychuk Duchscher
A leader these days needs to be a host—one who convenes diversity; who convenes all viewpoints in creative processes where our mutual intelligence can come forth.
—Margaret Wheatley
Introduction
Health care in all sectors is changing at a rapid pace. As nursing leadership and nursing management evolve with this change, the need for new leadership approaches, strategies, and ideas to be actioned becomes more evident. This evolution includes two broad critical aspects:
- responsiveness, responsibility, accountability, and engagement of all nurses (regardless of position) within the health care system; and
- proactive and strategic, collaborative actions to be taken by nurse managers and others in formal leadership roles to ensure changing health care priorities are managed.
Learning Objectives
- Recognize rapidly changing approaches to nursing management and leadership within unit-level environments in Saskatchewan, in Canada, and around the world.
- Assess changing care priorities and turbulent issues within our current health system, and approaches to managing them.
- Identify the importance of business acumen skills and concepts as expectations for administrative roles.
- Recognize the importance of, and approaches for, client- and family-centred care and shared decision making as critical concepts for collaborative and effective care management.
- Determine the importance of the manager or leader’s personal journey planning for fruitful and fulfilling career development and professional growth.
- Recognize transition shock.
- Describe the five foundational elements of professional role transition for new nurses.
16.1 Transformational Leadership and Change: The Nursing Management Landscape
The rate of change is not going to slow down anytime soon. If anything, competition in most industries will probably speed up even more in the next few decades.
—John P. Kotter (1995)
An Evolving National and Provincial Landscape
Health care environments have evolved over the years to become highly complex with less predictability; they are constantly undergoing change and restructuring. This has been a result of many factors. The most crucial are changes in the health of populations served and their subsequent health needs paired with available resources and capacity of the health system to meet these needs. Additional factors impacting health care over the past two decades include: increases in the use of technology, a rapidly changing multigenerational workforce, changing requirements of management accountabilities, a greater emphasis on performance measurement, the challenge of managing with scarce resources, rapid growth in inter- and intra-professional teams with changes in scope of practice, and higher consumer expectations. These many factors have influenced and impacted the roles of nurse managers and leaders in ways that have not traditionally been experienced in organizations.
In July o