Management and Leadership - Empowering Leaders and Managers

Nursing Management and Leadership
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
Nursing Management and Leadership
Competence in leadership and management in nursing practice plays a significant role in facilitating patient care. Nurses have to involve leadership and management strategies in dealing with patients to ensure patient safety, make care decisions, and establish a plan of care that includes both patients and their families. While both leadership and management contribute to the betterment of patient care, the two terms differ in several ways. Nurses have to utilize both the two traits in different circumstances for the welfare of their patients. The ability of a nurse to interchange between the various leadership and management traits depends on the support from the parent organization. Empowered nurses can make more crucial decisions that may save lives and improve their patients' health outcomes. On the contrary, less empowered nurses lack the necessary leadership and management skills to make rational decisions and may risk the lives of their patients.
Leadership refers to the skill of guiding people and inspiring them in a given direction. It is an interpersonal process that entails conducting an individual’s towards achieving the set goals. On the contrary, management is an approach used to deal with and manage different groups of people to work together to achieve a common objective. One main difference between leadership and management is that the former is a virtue of guiding people through encouragements, whereas the latter refers to the process of directing the activities of the company. Leadership is based on trust, while management requires the power to manipulate the subordinates (Surbhi, 2018). Leadership advocates for the establishment of principles and guidelines, whereas management focuses on the implementation of policies and procedures. Leadership is also a proactive exercise whereas management in reactive. A proactive exercise implies eliminating problems before they get an opportunity to appear, whereas a reactive exercise involves responding to events as they happen. While leadership brings change, management helps bring stability in a business. Therefore, while the two terms may appear similar, they are different in minute details and have to be applied differently depending on the prevailing situation.
Effective nurse management is important to the healthcare team to ensure motivation, performance and job satisfaction. The various nursing leadership styles recognized by the American Association of Nurse Assessment Coordination (AANAC) include transformational, democratic, Laissez-Faire, autocratic and servant (Žydžiūnaitė, 2015). Transformational leadership is one where the management motivates employees to assume the ownership of their individual roles with the organization. A transformational leaders does not assign...