Nurse leaders and managers address nurse staffing challenges by following set
staffing guidelines and ratios. The nurse leaders and managers hire, promote, develop,
discipline and schedule the nursing staff. The two have different approaches to address the
issue. Leadership entails influencing, motivating and aligning the nurses to achieve shared
goals. On the other hand, a nurse manager has four main functions that include planning,
organizing, leading, and controlling. Notably, staffing is a primary function of management
thus addressing the issue of nurse staffing is a nursing management prerogative. While
managers organize and staff, the leaders seek to align the organization. While leaders coach
and guide followers, the managers tend to just strive to direct their subordinates (Azad et al.,
2017).
Manager copy and mimic learn competencies while a leader will uniquely define
their own leadership style. As so, nursing managers just simply adopt the stipulated nurse
staffing ratios. A leader in this case will create a staffing vision and inspire followers to make
it reality while the manager will fixate on controlling the staffing situation to attain set
objectives (Azad et al., 2017). A transformation leader will go the extra mile to tailor the
nurse staffing ratio to fit the organizational culture and align with every team member’s
needs. A leader takes risks and innovates better ways to schedule the workers to minimize
possible burnout and adverse patient outcomes. This shows that leaders seek personal growth
while nurse managers aim to perfect existing skills.
EFFECTIVE APPROACHES IN MANAGEMENT
6
As transformationalform of leadership fixates on changes, nurse leaders can utilize it
to come up with proper nurse schedules and ratios by communicating with and involving the
staff members. This form of democratic leadership is also practical for participative
leadership whereby the nurse leader involves the team members in decision making
concerning work schedules. In addressing the staffing issues, a manager will delegate
authority while the leader influences development of teams to grasp and execute the shared
vision of optimal nurse staffing.