NUR5043 Module 6 leadership philosophy and development plan example

I Stopped Calling After Friday at 1530: A Charge Nurse's Leadership Philosophy and a Twelve-Month Development Plan Built From One Delay

Student Name

American College of Education

NUR5043: Nursing Leadership: Organizational Systems

Module 6 Assignment

Instructor Name

November 16, 2026

Where This Philosophy Comes From

For two years I worked as night charge nurse on a medical-surgical unit where getting a pressure-redistribution mattress for a high-risk patient took, on average, 19 hours. For the first few months I called the equipment desk every time a patient scored 12 or lower on the Braden scale. Somewhere in that first year I quit calling after 1530 on Fridays, because I knew the request would wait for the wound nurse on Monday. I told new nurses the same thing. I did not think of that as a leadership decision at the time, but it was one: I taught a unit that a system problem was a fact of life, and nurses who trusted my judgment stopped asking too.

This course asked me to look at that delay as a system, then as a leadership problem, then as a change to plan. Doing that work, and taking part in the practice experience that brought nursing, finance and supply chain into one room for the first time, changed how I understand my role. The philosophy below is the result, and every belief in it is one I can connect to something I did or failed to do.

Four Beliefs About Leadership

First, a leader's silence teaches as much as a leader's words. When I stopped calling, I communicated a norm without saying anything, and the staff learned it faster than any policy. The practice environment scores on our units later showed the same pattern at the level of the whole staff, with participation in hospital affairs scoring lowest of all five subscales. I believe a leader's first responsibility is to notice what she is teaching by what she no longer does.

Second, most of the problems that frustrate nurses were built by reasonable people solving a different problem. The approval rule that delayed our mattresses came from a finance director who had been told to control a budget overrun and did. Seeing the problem as a system, rather than as someone's failure, is what made it possible to sit at a table with her. Senge (1990) called this kind of pattern a fix that fails, and I now look for the earlier fix behind every current frustration before I look for someone to blame.

Third, influence that crosses department lines is built through relationships before it is needed. Cummings et al. (2018) pooled the findings of 129 quantitative studies and saw the same direction again and again: when nurses described their leaders as relational, their satisfaction, commitment and working conditions were better, and a style concerned only with getting tasks done did not produce those results. The change we planned worked because the director had spent months building trust with the wound nurse and the budget analyst before she asked them for anything.

Fourth, a leader without formal authority can still create the conditions for others to solve a problem together. Uhl-Bien et al. (2007) called this enabling leadership. As a charge nurse I will never own a vendor contract, but I can bring the right people's information to the same place, which is what the combined monthly report finally did. My philosophy, in one sentence, is that I lead by refusing to let a known problem become normal, and by building the relationships that let other people fix what I cannot.

Strengths and Gaps Against the Competencies

The nurse executive competencies published by the American Organization of Nurse Executives (AONE, 2015) group what nurse leaders must be able to do into five domains. Two concern people and context: building relationships through communication, and knowing the health care environment. The other three are leadership itself, professionalism, and the business principles and skills of running a service. Assessing myself against them, with feedback from my unit manager and two staff nurses, produced a clear picture.

My strongest domain is communication and relationship building within the unit. Staff describe me as the person they come to when a new process is introduced, and during the pilot planning the director asked me to lead the night huddles for that reason. My professionalism is also sound; I hold specialty certification and I mentor new graduates. My clear gaps are in two domains. In business skills, I could not read a rental budget report when this course began, and I did not understand why a 40% overrun would lead a finance director to add an approval step. In knowledge of the health care environment, I did not know that our equipment contracts were held at the system level rather than by the hospital. Both gaps had the same effect: they made me treat a solvable problem as a fixed condition, because I could not see where it came from. A smaller gap sits in the leadership domain itself: I am comfortable leading my own staff and uncomfortable raising a problem with people above me.

Development Plan

The plan has three goals for the next 12 months, one for each gap, each with actions and evidence.

Goal one, business skills: by the end of month six I will be able to explain my unit's monthly labor and supply variance report to my staff without help. Actions: attend the hospital's budget orientation for new managers with my manager's approval, meet monthly with the budget analyst who produces the mattress report, and present the variance report at two staff meetings. Evidence: my manager's written confirmation that my explanation was accurate, and staff questions I could answer.

Goal two, knowledge of the health care environment: by the end of month nine I will complete a map of which departments and contracts control the five pieces of equipment my unit waits for most often. Actions: interview the supply chain contract manager and the biomedical engineering supervisor, and review the equipment policies with the house supervisor. Evidence: the completed map, reviewed for accuracy by the supply chain manager and shared with the unit's practice council.

Goal three, upward influence: by the end of month twelve I will have raised two system problems with a leader outside nursing, using data and a proposed next step, and I will record what happened. Actions: use the structure the coalition used with finance, which was the problem, the cost, the patient effect and a bounded request, and ask the director for feedback before and after each conversation. Evidence: two written summaries of the problems raised and their outcomes, and the director's feedback on my approach.

Kouzes and Posner (2017) argued that leadership is a set of observable practices that can be learned, and the plan is built on that assumption. Each goal is a practice I can repeat and someone else can observe, and each has a date. At month twelve I will repeat the self-assessment with the same three colleagues and compare the results.

Conclusion

I began this course believing that leadership belonged to people with titles, and that a charge nurse's job was to help her unit cope with the organization it had. I end it believing that the coping was part of the problem. The delay that shaped this course was built by reasonable decisions in several departments, sustained by silence on the units, including mine, and changed when someone brought the pieces together. My philosophy and plan are aimed at making me the kind of leader who does that bringing together earlier, with better knowledge of how the organization works and more willingness to speak to the people who run it.

References

American Organization of Nurse Executives. (2015). AONE nurse executive competencies. Author.

Cummings, G. G., Tate, K., Lee, S., Wong, C. A., Paananen, T., Micaroni, S. P. M., & Chatterjee, G. E. (2018). Leadership styles and outcome patterns for the nursing workforce and work environment: A systematic review. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 85, 19-60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2018.04.016

Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2017). The leadership challenge: How to make extraordinary things happen in organizations (6th ed.). Wiley.

Senge, P. M. (1990). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. Doubleday.

Uhl-Bien, M., Marion, R., & McKelvey, B. (2007). Complexity leadership theory: Shifting leadership from the industrial age to the knowledge era. The Leadership Quarterly, 18(4), 298-318. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2007.04.002