Assessment on "Professional Development for Strategic Managers"

Assessment 9 pages (3107 words) Sources: 10

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Professional Development for Strategic Managers

The nursing profession has seen a large amount of development over the last century or so. The nursing role has become a multi-faceted one, where a single nurse can play multiple roles or develop a single skill set in such a way as to specialize in a specific nursing direction (Mason, Isaacs & Colby, 2011, p. 147). Today's nurses face many challenges, including fatigue, maintaining a sense of professionalism, and maintaining ethical standards. For many nurses, their profession has also become one of strategic management. This means that they need to develop themselves in such a way as to maintain the ethical standards of their profession in general and the strategic goals of the particular institutions within which they work.

Crossan (2003, p. 334) mentions the need for nurses to become more active in policy development and how they need to function more prominently in the wider world of politics. This is a significant development in terms of the profession and how it has related to the field of politics in the past. However, the involvement of nurses in this field is logical, since health policies affect their profession on a very direct level. In fact, nurses have a very particular understanding of the health care needs of individuals and the social groups within which they provide their services. Hence, as strategic managers, nurses can focus their attention both inwards, towards their particular organizations and goals, while also focusing outwards, towards how particular organizations relate to the broader world of health policy and politics in general. In this way, a particular personal development program will be useful to help individual nurses and strategic managers find their position in their particular organizations and to fulfill their goals in these. Such plans will also help nurses to broaden their focus to the outside world of politics and health policy. In order to create such a plan, a variety factors will have to be taken into account, including the nurse's personal and professional skills, the strategic goals of the institution, as well as the nurse's personality traits and learning styles. These will all play a role in the personal assessment that must be performed to create an effective personal development plan.

Personal and Professional Skills

According to Burton and Ormrod (n.d.), certain professional skills are required to be an adequate nursing professional. The first of these is to be a leader in care management and care delivery situations. Second, a nurse should maintain standards of care in all situations. The nurse should also be able to make ethical and legal decisions, be accountable, and be able to work in teams. Ultimately, the nursing manager should be able to teach others.

Personally, I feel that I am well on my way to developing these skills. However, these are not skills that can ever be static. Skills like leadership and ethical decision-making, for example, are subject to the situations in which they are used and applied. Hence, only experience can really ensure the adequate development of such skills. In a personal development plan, however, specific situations can be set up to develop these skills to a certain extent, and to make the nurse aware of critical thinking to develop these skills.

Personal skills tend to be more static, but can also be developed as experience is built within the nursing field. Heacock (2012), for example, lists eight key skills that nurses will need to effectively practice their profession. What struck me as particularly important among these are a sense of humor, professionalism, diligence, and compassion. Personally, I feel my sense of compassion is very strong, which is why I entered the nursing profession in the first place. This compassion does need to be tempered with a sense of humor, since the health care field can so often be infused with tragic situations. A sense of humor helps a nurse to keep her emotions under control and also relieves the stress inherent in the profession. Professionalism and diligence are also qualities that no nurse can be without. The fact that these traits are relatively static, since they should be part of the personality to begin with, does not mean that they cannot be developed further or enhanced. Hence, part of a personal development plan should also include enhancing those personality traits that are most important for the nursing profession.

Strategic Goals of the Organization

When thinking about the strategic goals of the institution, it is important to approach this from more than one angle. On the one hand, there is the nursing profession in general, where there are particular ethics and standards to adhere to. On the other, there is the particular strategic efforts of the institution itself, and how it relates to its community of clients. Finally, there is a still wider angle, where the institution and its goals need to relate to the wider world of health policy and politics. The latter area has the most potential for strategic development, and nursing leadership is particularly needed in this field.

The institution where I work has a strategic focus that is closely related to that offered by the Kona Community Hospital (2008) in Hawaii. The major priority for most hospitals, in fact, is the safety of patients and the quality of care that they receive, while security and safety are secondarily also important to insurance companies and the general public, both of which are direct and indirect stakeholders in the quality of care provided by the institution. Indeed, insurance companies are dependent upon the quality of are provided in order to maintain financially viable and to continue providing their clients with the security in health care that they need. The public is dependent upon the institution when they become ill or indisposed themselves, or when family members are in need of health care. Hospitals and the quality of care they provide have therefore become an integral part of civilized life.

In recent years, however, there has been increasing strain upon the resources available to the hospital and the quality of care it is able to provide to all clients who need it. Many, for example, cannot afford health care, making it difficult for the hospital to meet demands in terms of equipment and staff. There has been a dwindling supply of funding and professional nurses while there has been an increase in demand for health services from an increasingly aging population. Hence, strategic managers have been faced with significant challenges in terms of keeping their services running adequately to meet these increasing demands while adhering to the ethics of the profession.

By nature, the provision of registered nursing services is to provide "safe, competent and ethical" services (CARNA, 2008). This adheres to the general principles and ethics of nursing in terms providing the highest quality of care possible while doing as little harm as possible. Concerns like patient autonomy and freedom of choice, as long a these minimize potential harm, are also important principles that must be kept in mind.

Strategic management becomes important when it is recognized that not only the profession of nursing, but the nursing environment itself and the community it serves, is changing. This creates tension between the ideal of nursing and the reality of what can be provided. Nursing managers will need to make strategic decisions regarding how nursing will be provided to communities who need unlimited services, while only limited services are available (Burton and Ormrod, n.d.).

As such, one of the strategic goals of my institution is to liaise with both the public and policymakers in terms of leadership to create strategic ways of providing as many members of the public as possible with adequate and high quality nursing services. At the same time, as Burton and Ormrod (n.d.) suggest, specialist services are becoming increasingly regionalized. This is another important area of strategic management, where nursing leaders need to assess the particular health care needs in their communities and focus on specializing in those areas in order to provide adequate care. A community that has a large community of elderly citizens, for example, will need a higher specialty concentration of geriatric nursing specialists. Other communities may require mental health nurses or paediatric nursing professionals. While general adult nursing is the most common type of nursing focus, nursing leaders should recognize the need to specialize beyond this general field.

A further strategic goal of my institution is therefore to make regular assessments of the immediate surrounding community to determine the specialist needs within it. More distant communities are also assessed, as far as these fall within the jurisdiction of the hospital. It is the strategic manager's task to use these assessments for the professional development of his or her staff. Critical and professional decision making are essential components in this process. In my personal development as a strategic manager, this area will therefore be one of my major focus points.

Personality Traits and Learning Styles

I think the most important personality traits I have… READ MORE

How to Reference "Professional Development for Strategic Managers" Assessment in a Bibliography

Related Assessments:

Strategic Management of Huntington Ingalls Industries, Inc Case Study

strategic management of Huntington Ingalls Industries, Inc., and analysis of the company strategic position reveals that the company provides the strategic product and services for the U.S. government. The report… read more

Case Study 16 pages (4836 words) Sources: 16 Topic: Business / Corporations / E-commerce

---

Manager's Likeability Literature Review

Manager's Likeability

on Leadership Success

Assessing the Impact of a Manager's Likeability on Leadership Success

The likeability of a manager will determine how effective they are on transactionally-oriented tasks while… read more

Literature Review 20 pages (5811 words) Sources: 30 Topic: Leadership / Mentoring

---

Professional Development for Strategic Managers Term Paper

Marketing Strategy Job Opening Letter

I am writing to you in the hopes that your company is currently seeking an experienced and dedicated marketing manager, strategist, and innovator to help… read more

Term Paper 4 pages (1065 words) Sources: 8 Style: Harvard Topic: Advertising / Marketing / Sales

---

Strategic Human Resource Development Essay

Strategic Human Resource Development

Strategic Development of Human Resources

Organizational effectiveness depends on several factors. Companies' efficiency and productivity relies on their ability to invest in technical resources, in the… read more

Essay 9 pages (2867 words) Sources: 9 Topic: Business / Corporations / E-commerce

---

Strategic Management of Human Resources the Case Term Paper

Strategic Management of Human Resources

The case study presents a particular process of organizational change in a specific organization - Macquarie Bank. The case study makes explicit the steps taken… read more

Term Paper 10 pages (3084 words) Sources: 1+ Topic: Management / Organizations

---

View 100+ more related papers  >>