Indifferent Leadership Sample Paper
Leadership and management date back to the ancient days. Leaders are virtually important in all institutions. Managers require not only to be directive and authoritative but also flexible and considerate. They ought to be sensitive because reluctance in accepting change derails all institutions’ activities despite how willing or hardworking their workers are. Leadership is very important in determining the failure or success of an organization.
Leadership involves planning and executing roles, policies, deciding and settling disputes, staffing, directing and budgeting, among many other roles. As such, leaders must be actively involved in an activity for it to succeed (Tanniru, Khuntia, & Weiner, 2018). When working as a critical care nurse in the National Head and Spinal Injury Hospital, we realized that the number of patients suffering from chronic bed sores were rising.
Spinal and head injury patients experience challenges in cognition and body movement (Patek & Stewart, 2020). It is therefore imperative to turn the patients every two hours to avoid bedsores. This can be a hard task considering that the hospital is a busy environment receiving referrals from all over the country, and the numbers were rising each day. The number of nurses was also inadequate to manage the tasks adequately. Some of the patients are also too heavy, and the nurses complained of backaches and burnouts due to work overload.
My colleagues and I wrote a proposal to the hospital management requesting the purchase of patient repositioning systems since the few systems present were not enough. The repositioning systems are designed to turn patients automatically every two hours. These systems are particularly very important and more effective because they are more accurate in terms of time and minimizing injury to the patient during turning (Knibbe et al., 2018). They are very expensive but are worth it. The nurse manager was particularly reluctant to approve our proposal.
She was pessimistic, complaining that the nurses were beginning to be lazy and that we should be hardworking. To her, buying the systems was an unnecessary affair and a waste of resources because she had worked in that hospital for fifteen years, with the manual turning being the order of the day. The nursing manager did not approve the proposal.
The number of patients suffering from bedsores rose exponentially. This was until the hospital CEO, and other managers got concerned. At this time, our proposal gained familiarity and was considered by the hospital’s top management. Automatic patient repositioning systems were bought, and the number of patients suffering from bedsores decreased significantly. My colleagues and I were motivated by this move by the hospital management.
We felt like part of the organization, and we were motivated to work. Diversity in leadership is often valued as important for achieving excellence (Herrin et al., 2018). A study by Garton (2017) further postulates that a leader who listens to workers and considers their ideas act as a source of inspiration and unlocks intrinsic motivation in their workers.
Being open and willing to listen to your workers is more likely to influence workers to share true feelings about any challenges, ideas of change, and motivators. It also creates a sense of belonging in the institution. Leaders must always be ready to adapt to change; a phenomenon often called leading from the front. As seen above, good leadership should involve listening and involving not only the people in decision making positions, but also the workers who handle the daily operations. These acts boost productivity and success in an institution or organization at any level as it makes it easier to design effective problem interventions.
References
- Garton, E. (2017). How to be an inspiring leader. Retrieved from Harvard Business Review: https://hbr. org/2017/04/how-to-be-an-inspiring-leader.
- https://www.proveritas.com.au/downloads/How-To-Be-An-Inspiring-Leader.PDF
- Herrin, J., Harris, K. G., Spatz, E., Cobbs-Lomax, D., Allen, S., & León, T. (2018). Hospital leadership diversity and strategies to advance health equity. The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, 44(9), 545-551.
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1553725017304543
- Knibbe, N. E., Zwaenepoel, E., Knibbe, H. J., & Beeckman, D. (2018). An automatic repositioning system to prevent pressure ulcers: a case series. British Journal of Nursing, 27(6), S16-S22. https://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/abs/10.12968/bjon.2018.27.6.S16
- Patek, M., & Stewart, M. (2020). Spinal cord injury. Anaesthesia & Intensive Care Medicine. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1472029920300989
- Tanniru, M., Khuntia, J., & Weiner, J. (2018). Hospital leadership in support of digital transformation. Pacific Asia Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 10(3), 1. https://aisel.aisnet.org/pajais/vol10/iss3/1/