Leadership Development in Nursing: Planning from the Bedside to the Executive Suite

Nurses comprise the largest portion of the healthcare sector workforce over 4 million professional nurses licensed in the United States (National Council of State Boards of Nursing, 2019). Leading within a vast workforce such as nursing requires the nurse leader to have the expertise of the nursing profession along with leadership and business skills to maintain competitiveness in the complex healthcare industry. Consequences of effective leadership include improved patient outcomes, decreased staff turnover, and decreased costs to the organization related to patient outcomes and turnover costs. These results suggest the importance for organizations to ensure their leaders are properly trained and can improve their skills across the continuum of their leadership careers. The purpose of this project was to develop a comprehensive leadership development program for a six-hospital health system in the Las Vegas Valley, which was built upon the premise that leadership skills must be developed for the informal leaders at the bedside up through formal leadership positions in senior management. The scope of this project was only for the creation of the leadership development program. The activities that occurred during the program development included identifying core competencies of nursing leaders and aligning those competencies within Kouzes and Posner’s framework. The identified core leadership competencies were categorized into the appropriate role including bedside nurse, charge nurse/clinical supervisor, manager, director, and nurse executive. The objectives, curriculum, and learning strategies were developed for each stage of the development plan, culminating into one comprehensive leadership development program. The program will be evaluated using the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) of Kouzes and Posner. The self-form of the LPI will be completed by each participant in the leadership development program as a pre-post-post test assessment. The observer-form of the LPI will be completed also as a pre-post-post assessment by a minimum of five people who are familiar with the participant’s behavior, which may include managers, co-workers, peers, and others. Other outcome measures that will be evaluated by facilities who implement the program may include a decrease in RN turnover, decrease in nurse leadership turnover, a qualified pipeline of leadership candidates for the various leadership positions, and improvements in the employee engagement bi-annual survey in the questions specific to their manager and direct supervisor. Patient outcome measurement includes reductions in mortality and morbidity rates, hospital acquired conditions (HAC) such as infections and falls, improved patient satisfaction, and reductions in length of stay