Practice Question: In adult patients aged 18 years and older with a diagnosis of depression, will implementing the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) Guidelines for exercising impact depression scores over 8-10 weeks?

Effective leadership is the stronghold and success of every organization. As a leader, a Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) student, a clinical expert, and an advanced practice nurse, I must be well-positioned and prepared to engage with members of both the intra-professional and inter-professional teams to support changes in my organization, nursing, and within the healthcare industry. I must be fully aware of my strengths, my gaps, and my vision for the organization. I must be able to lead, motivate, empower, and guide my team in trusting the vision, and together as a strong team, we achieve the organizational goals.

Leadership Strengths

Some great qualities I hold as a leader include, effective communication, interpersonal skills, and strong character (Johnson and Smith, 2018).  I communicate effectively and powerfully with my team members keeping them abreast of the organizational goals, expectations, and outcomes while encouraging open communication among the team. This helps build better understanding, teamwork, and trust among the team while promoting the company’s goals and outcomes. As a leader, I have well-established interpersonal skills and collaborative ability, being able to collaborate with other members of the interdisciplinary healthcare team to foster healthy living and quality care for our patients. I am respectful of myself and others, I understand the common goals we share as team members within an organization, providing the best quality evidence-based care to our patients. Through respect, I’m able to gain confidence both within and outside my team which creates positive relationships, teamwork, and high productivity.

Strong character with high integrity and honesty has enabled me to lead, motivate, and champion innovation and change, being able to embrace and generate better innovative ways to improve performance among the staff.

I have used my skills as the leader and change agent for my DNP Project. I was able to communicate effectively, sought clinical opinions, and engaged both intra-professional and inter-professional teams in my project goals together as a unified team we have decided to implement my DNP project to improve patient outcomes.

Emotional intelligence is another strong leadership quality I possess. Through emotional intelligence, I’m able to respect, recognize, empathize, and understand, others, being able to recognize the clinical expertise of the interprofessional team and their strong clinical contribution toward the successful implementation of my DNP project (Tiffin and Paton, 2020).

A Leadership skill I need to develop is delegation. I need to be able to leverage the strength of others, being able to assign specific activities to others to promote positive patient outcomes. To achieve this goal, I must become familiar with their strengths, goals, and passions being able to delegate tasks that they are passionate about and skilled to perform.

Provide your instructor and student colleagues with an update on your implementation plans for your DNP Project. Share any successes, challenges, or barriers you experienced this week

Fortunately, I received both my IRB prescreening approval and my Chamberlain’s IRB waiver for project implementation this week. Did your preceptor provide you with timely feedback when you had questions?

Did your preceptor review and provide you with feedback (if applicable)?

Did your preceptor serve as a professional role model for you this session?

My preceptor has been an exceptional role model, has been readily accessible, and responds to my questions in a timely fashion. He is quite eager to see me succeed.

References

Johnson, C. & Smith, C. (2018). Preparing nursing professional development practitioners in their leadership role. Journal for Nurses in Professional Development, 34 (2), 99-100. doi: 10.1097/NND.0000000000000409.

Miao, Humphrey, R. H., & Qian, S. (2017). A meta‐analysis of emotional intelligence and work attitudes. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 90(2), 177–202. https://doi.org/10.1111/joop.12167 (Links to an external site.)

Tiffin, & Paton, L. W. (2020). When I say … emotional intelligence. Medical Education, 54(7), 598–599. https://doi.org/10.1111/medu.14160