Page 29 - Essentials of Nursing Leadership and Management, 5th Edition

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16 unit 1 | Professional Considerations CikguOnline
The effective nurse manager possesses a combi-
nation of qualities: leadership, clinical expertise, and Informational
business sense. None of these alone is enough; it is
the combination that prepares an individual for the Representing employees
complex task of managing a unit or team of health- Representing the organization
care providers. Consider each of these briefly: Public relations monitoring

■ Leadership. All of the people skills of the leader
are essential to the effective manager. They are
skills needed to function as a manager. Interpersonal
■ Clinical expertise. It is very difficult to help
others develop their skills and evaluate how well Networking
they have done so without possessing clinical Conflict negotiation and resolution
expertise oneself. It is probably not necessary
Employee development and coaching
(or even possible) to know everything all other
Rewards and punishment
professionals on the team know, but it is impor-
tant to be able to assess the effectiveness of their
work in terms of patient outcomes. Decisional
■ Business sense. Nurse managers also need to
be concerned with the “bottom line,” with the Employee evaluation
cost of providing the care that is given, especially Resource allocation
in comparison with the benefit received Hiring and firing employees
from that care and the funding available to Planning
pay for it, whether from insurance, Medicare, Job analysis and redesign
Medicaid, or out of the patient’s own pocket.
Figure 2.2 Keys to effective management.
This is a complex task that requires knowledge
of budgeting, staffing, and measurement of
patient outcomes. Interpersonal Activities
The interpersonal category is one in which leaders
There is some controversy over the amount of
and managers have overlapping concerns. However,
clinical expertise versus business sense that is
the manager has some additional responsibilities
needed to be an effective nurse manager. Some
that are seldom given to leaders. These include the
argue that a person can be a “generic” manager,
following:
that the job of managing people is the same no
matter what tasks he or she performs. Others ■ Networking. Nurse managers are in pivotal
argue that managers must understand the tasks positions, especially in inpatient settings where
themselves, better than anyone else in the work they have contact with virtually every service of
group. Our position is that equal amounts of clin- the institution as well as with most people above
ical skill and business acumen are needed, along and below them in the organizational hierarchy.
with excellent leadership skills. This provides them with many opportunities to
influence the status and treatment of staff nurses
BEHAVIORS OF AN EFFECTIVE and the quality of the care provided to their
MANAGER patients. It is important that they “maintain the
line of sight,” or connection, between what they
Mintzberg (1989) divided a manager’s activities do as managers, patient care, and the mission
into three categories: interpersonal, decisional, of the organization (Mackoff & Triolo, 2008,
and informational. We use these categories and p. 123). In other words, they need to keep in
have added some activities suggested by other mind how their interactions with both their
authors (Dunham-Taylor, 1995; Montebello, staff members and with administration affects
1994) and by our own observations of nurse man- the care provided to the patients for whom they
agers (Fig. 2.2). are responsible.