Month: March 2022

After the interview with my dad, he gave me a great insight in what it means to be a leader in nursing. The number of working parts that need to come together to be a successful nursing leader were a lot more extensive than I first imagined. He told me that he would really made sure that he tried to take into consideration who he was working with that day and what those people’s strengths and weaknesses were while making assignments. He found that once he was able to know the people, he was really working with helped him to try and avoid conflict and made the flow of the floor was very positive. However, he did say that this wasn’t always an easy thing to do. There would be times when nurses wouldn’t be happy with their patient assignments or nurses were having a bad day and it would throw the flow of the floor off completely. He liked to say that “if one gear is out of place, the rest of the machine can’t run”. If he noticed that people were upset, he would try to make sure they could get some time to try and collect themselves to make sure that the patient is getting the best care possible. This could even be covering their patients for just 5 minutes while they went and got a cup of coffee or went and grabbed a snack. After this interview it gave me a new respect for my dad’s leadership skills. Before the interview I always knew he was a natural leader and people liked his leadership skills. Watching him do things like coach soccer games to becoming a captain in the Navy it was very clear that he knew what he was doing. This interview gave me an insight to how he made sure that the people he was in charge of grew to respect him as a leader. In regard to my future nursing career, I while make sure to apply some of the positive leadership skills I was able to obtain from my dad as he showed me that this was a very effective way of running a floor. I always had interest in becoming a nursing leader and after this interview it only has increased the want to become a leader and I now know some successful skills that can help me do so.

            The nurse that I found to interview was fairly easy to find, it is my dad. My dad has been one of the charge nurses on a cardiac floor for 5 years. While I think that my dad has great qualities as a parent, I was able to witness his leadership skills when I was floated to the floor he worked on as a PCA. I was not expecting my dad to be the charge nurse when I arrived to the floor but when I did he quickly demonstrated his skills as a leader. The first thing I noticed was that he treated everyone on the floor as equals. Even though he was working with his son, he never missed a beat and treated me the same way he did everyone else. He made the staff feel that they were respected, and he wasn’t going to have favorites. The second quality I found that made him a good leader was his leadership style. He has a combination of an authoritarian and lassiez faire attitude. He allowed for the staff to do what they needed to get done for the day but if things weren’t getting done, he seemed to make sure that people were getting back on track. I could tell this made for the rest of the staff respect him and his leadership, so they listened to him and followed his instruction. While he is my dad, I am still excited to interview him and see him in a light I have not seen him before. I am interested to learn how he was able to get comfortable leading and taking charge of the floor, how he deals with any conflict that may have come up, what is the biggest challenge he has had to face while being a charge nurse. I have talked to him plenty about some of the experiences he has had as a nurse, but he never really talked about the specifics of being the charge nurse. I think that at the end of this interview I will have a better idea on what it took for him to become a charge nurse of the floor and a better insight on his leadership skills.