Transformational leadership in nursing is changing healthcare in a variety of different ways. These management tactics are leading to improved employee performance and increased patient satisfaction. Reduced costs associated with medical errors, outdated strategies, and employee turnover lead to community-wide change.
Table of Contents
- What is Transformational Leadership?
- 13 Characteristics of Transformative Leaders
- 5 Management Practices of Transformational Leadership in Nursing
- Visualizing Healthcare Through the Lens of Transformative Leaders
- How Nurse Leaders Can Change Healthcare Through Transformational Leadership
- Improving Patient, Employee, and Organizational Outcomes
- Transformational Leadership Quotes
- Conclusion
What is Transformational Leadership?
Transformational leadership as a style shifts the focus from more traditional, transactional, autocratic, and task-oriented approaches to leadership that aims to inspire and motivate through collaboration, collective change, and goal-oriented strategies.
Transformational leaders foster an empathetic alliance with employees that allows them to hone in on the values that matter most to their company. By being more employee-centric as opposed to a hierarchical structure, leaders can create meaningful, engaging relationships with their teams to promote healthy change and growth.
13 Characteristics of Transformative Leaders:
- Inspiring
- Collaborative
- Mentors
- Motivated
- Engaging
- Charismatic
- Empathetic
- Greater sense of openness
- Relationship-oriented
- Strategic
- Creative
- Innovative
- Advocates
5 Management Practices of Transformational Leadership in Nursing that Keep Patients Safe
[Keeping Patients Safe: Transforming the Work Environment of Nurses]
- Leader’s ability to balance tense situations to maintain efficiency and reliability.
- Creating a sustainable environment of trust in the organization
- Actively managing and adjusting to change
- Collaborating with their team on decision making
- Using knowledge of management to create a “learning organization”
Through transformational leadership in healthcare, nurse leaders can enact these 5 practices to ensure patient safety and avoid unnecessary medical errors related to lack of communication amongst the team, unexpected circumstances, and poor collaboration.
Visualizing Healthcare Through the Lens of Transformative Leaders
In healthcare, transformational leadership focuses on envisioning the desired outcome, analyzing what’s occurring, and discovering new opportunities for improvement within healthcare delivery. In this way, leaders recognize that the only way to achieve a healthy community, organization, team, employee, and patient is through collaboration and communication.
Transformative leaders have the personality, abilities, visions, and motivation to lead by example and effectively articulate their goals and challenges to the team. By improving morale through relationship building and empathy, these nurse leaders are changing healthcare by aligning their communities with the mission and collective identity of the organization.
How Nurse Leaders Can Change Healthcare Through Transformational Leadership
- Becoming role models for their team and patients
- Focusing beyond the bedside
- Nurse leaders who focus on their patients’ and employees’ lives beyond the clinic walls have a well-rounded understanding and collective mission to lead by improvement.
- Using interdisciplinary approaches to leading
- Building bridges and filling in gaps to ensure streamlined patient care and enhance trust
- Maintaining consistency
- Continuously aiding in the improvement of the organization
- Staying accountable
- Engaging with staff and growing the team
- Being a mentor
- Embracing the shift between the old and the new
- Becoming a community partner
- Creating relationships with other organizations and community members would benefit both their healthcare organization and patients.
- Strategically planning
- Proponents for employee and patient satisfaction assessment
- Working creatively to solve complex challenges and overcome barriers
- Advocate for change in improving the quality of care instead of the quantity of care.
Improving Patient, Employee, and Organizational Outcomes
Transformational leadership is the common denominator in healthcare that contributes to improving healthcare outcomes, patient experiences, and reducing costs. The organization’s entire health can improve through this leadership style, leading to more positive outcomes.
Nursing
On a nursing-unit level, transformational leadership is associated with improved staff retention rates, stability, and structural empowerment. This retention increase reduces the turnover costs associated with hiring new employees and losing a staff member. This also gives nurses who have increased job satisfaction the chance to improve their skills and grow within the organization.
Patients
At a patient level, transformational leadership is correlated with improved patient safety, quality of care, patient satisfaction, improved patient experience, and even lowered patient mortality rates. All of these aspects of improvement contribute to better patient health outcomes.
Organization & Community
On an organizational and community level, transformational leadership improves community engagement and collaborative initiatives that positively impact the community as a whole. This, in return, lowers costs related to the public healthcare system and improves access to care for all. In its entirety, the ripple effect of transformational leadership, even at a nursing-unit level, can impact communities holistically- bringing them together and keeping them healthier.
Transformational Leadership Quotes
“Transformational leadership and justice are interconnected. Where there are transformational leaders, there is a quest for justice. Any lack of justice is a clear sign that transformational leadership is required.”
― Gift Gugu Mona, The Effective Leadership Prototype for a Modern-Day Leader
“Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish.”
– Sam Walton
“Transformational leadership is about relating well with the people. It is when a leader manages relationships with a great deal of humility in order to transform humanity.”
― Gift Gugu Mona, The Effective Leadership Prototype for a Modern-Day Leader
“Culture does not change because we desire to change it. Culture changes when the organization is transformed – the culture reflects the realities of people working together every day.”
– Frances Hesselbein
“Transformational leaders don’t start by denying the world around them. Instead, they describe the future they’d like to create instead.”
— Seth Godin
“To lead, one must follow.”
— Lao Tzu
Conclusion
Adopting transformational leadership in your organization can be done through small, actionable, and intentional steps or more significant policy changes in management. In many ways, your nurse leaders may be doing many of these steps and withhold similar standards aligned with that of a transformational leader.
Seyzo Health’s Digital Nurse Leader Rounding Rounding Platform allows nurse leaders and organizations to align their goals with actionable steps to create lasting positive change from bedside to C-Suite. With Seyzo’s ability to enable healthcare staff to communicate within the platform and praise staff recognition, you can take the necessary steps to transform your organization.
