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1 DCM2 Task 1: Personal Leadership Evaluation Cassandra Marker Western Governors University Ann Leary January 2, 2023

2 DCM2 Task 1: Personal Leadership Evaluation This paper will review my Clifton strengths assessment that outlines my dominant themes within strategic thinking and execution domains, and will review my leadership strengths and weaknesses when compared to the transformational leadership theory. I will create SMART goals to enhance my current leadership practices and provide specific actions that I will take to achieve those goals. Signature themes report See attached PDF of Clifton Strengths assessment. My five assessed strengths are ideation, deliberative, analytical, restorative, and intellectual. Reflection on Clifton Strengths My first strength from my signature themes report is ideation. A quick snapshot of ideation is someone that always has their gears turning looking for a new angle or way of thinking. When thinking of how I exhibit ideation in my leadership practices I think of the charge nurse development program that I created for our emergency department. Our unit had a lot of front-line leadership turnover that resulted in needing to hire charge nurses. As a leadership team we identified that there were potential candidates but as a whole they weren’t ready for the next step due to lack of exposure, experience, and opportunity. I came up with the idea two create a 2-tiered development program for nurses interested in progressing into leadership. The first tier consisted of nurses that needed both clinical experience, and leadership experience. The second tier consisted of clinically strong nurses that were ready to step into a leadership role immediately. This program allowed our department to start growing nurses for leadership very early in their career, which challenged the culture and mentality of needing to “pay your dues” within the department. This program has contributed to my leadership in so many ways. In terms

3 of ideation, I feel that it indicates my leadership has proven that I’m not afraid to go against the grain when it comes to brainstorming ideas to help my team or department grow. Ideation as whole guides my leadership daily. If I’m not thinking of new ideas on how to change, improve, or grow my team then I am disservice by allowing them to stay stagnant, even if they are performing well. As a leader I push my team to embrace change and grow with that change onto even better change. My next strength is deliberative. I am a very reserved, private person, who analyzes everything to try and determine the best choice possible. This is displayed in my leadership when I was offered a manager position overseeing two emergency departments. It was a big step, that I was interested in taking, but there were so many unknowns I didn’t feel as though I was informed enough to be willing to commit to the role. After negotiating we agreed upon me accepting the role in an interim capacity until I could decide if this was the right path for me or not. I feel like being deliberate and informed indicates my leadership style is one that doesn’t make split second decisions. I support my department by utilizing my strength in ideation and applying my deliberative qualities to come up with a process or improvement that makes the most sense. With leadership, this means I’m always putting my team and department first. Specifically related to the interim role, it was a trial period to deliberate on whether the role was a good fit for me and my family, as well as was I a good fit as a leader for the team. My third theme strength is analytical. Taking an idea, process, or statement and breaking it down to its core is something I enjoy doing daily. This especially applies to operations processes. My most recent project that displayed my analytical strength is working together with other hospital leaders to formulate a process for keeping track of our hospital owned iPhones. We have a significant loss problem throughout the hospital of the phones accidentally being

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4 taken home, being stolen, or migrating through the hospital to incorrect units. As we continued to try and streamline a consistent process across all our units, I focused on the most common reason behind why the phones were disappearing. From that point I used the root cause to determine if any of their process ideas were going to make a difference. For example, the biggest reason the phones would be missing would be because someone left it in their pocket, took the phone home, and then never returned it. So, when it was proposed that we have separate day shift and night shift phone inventories to help keep track of them for each shift, I challenged how this would still prevent phone loss regardless of what shift the phone belonged to. We continue to work together as a group to streamline an effective accountability process. My analytical strength indicates my personal leadership is focused on finding and fixing the actual causes of problems, instead of taking initial statements. I prefer to discuss things based on facts and data, and I do that with my team. When we discuss goals, we look at real time data and show the current metric, where it should be, and what the middle data is showing us for barriers. I use actual numbers in my feedback with staff so they don’t get a general statement of “we need to do better”. Instead, they get “we need to decrease our length of stay by 17 minutes”. Leadership thrives off of direct communication, and being able to analyze something only contributes to that. My fourth theme strength is restorative. In the world of emergency medicine, it is always evolving and being able to take a failed, fractured, or declining process and revamp it into a successful one is something of an art. One way I have demonstrated my restorative strength as leader is through standing up my department triage process. I currently manage a small 15 bed emergency department. Throughout COVID the patient volume had decreased significantly. Over the last year the volume has rebounded significantly. With increased volume brings the need to change workflow. With help from the medical director, we initiated a triage process to

5 allow patients a quicker first point of contact with their care team. We took an old process that really wasn’t used anymore, dusted it off, and turned it into a very functional front end care process that decreased arrival to triage times from 112 minutes to 13 minutes. I feel like the strength of being restorative indicates a leadership style the promotes working towards the goals of the team or department. As a leader I don’t try and reinvent the wheel with new ideas. I take what they know and finds ways to improve upon it, or utilize the data from methods to not make the same mistakes again. As a leader this not only demonstrates the ability adapt, but it also shows your unit its ok to try new things, even if they may fail, because in the end you are still learning something one way or another. My last strength from my themes report is intellection. I am a thinker, all the time, my mind never stops. For me, I have a lot of ideas and thoughts that I don’t want to forget, but I can’t always focus them. As a leader it’s important for me to be able to focus and prioritize. With a busy mind I find it hard to follow through on everything, and work it out. An example of this in my leadership is more of a process I use to balance everything. I have to have a notebook with me all the time. Its small, but broken out into sections. I have a section where I itemize daily to dos. I have a section for any ideas or thoughts I need to follow up on, and a section for high priority items. I use this as an example for intellection because it allows me to continue with my flights of ideas, while being able to balance them in my every day practice. This is important to me, because as a leader it is my responsibility to follow through on things staff have requested, and to keep myself on path for new or existing projects. All my previous strengths have been in either the strategic thinking or executing category, and this one is no different. I feel this is a good strength to end on as it is one that ties everything together. Intellection keeps me grounded

6 as a leader, and spontaneous all at the same time. It comes out in my leadership as being able to demonstrate my ability to handle multiple things while still brainstorming new. Personal Leadership Strengths I will be evaluating my own leadership style using the transformational leadership theory. “Transformational leadership refers to the leader moving the follower beyond immediate self- interests through idealized influence (charisma), inspiration, intellectual stimulation, or individualized consideration” (Bass, 1999, p. 11). My first strength I feel I have as a leader is being willing to immerse myself in other departments operations, to understand how they relate to our department. This strength is something that is very important to me. In healthcare there are so many different departments and roles that all work separately of each other, but are all working towards the same goal. Working within the emergency department can be very isolating as we function so differently that the rest of the departments around us, inside and outside of the hospital, exposure to other units is essential to the growth and development of my own unit. One way I utilize this strength is to complete ride a longs with the surrounding fire and ambulance agencies. As a leader it’s important for me to support my staff, but also support their relationships with other departments. By riding along with the local fire and ambulance agencies I am able to market the department, form relationships and contacts, understand their process and protocols, and form that bridge for my staff to develop their relationships and understanding as well. This allows for more partnerships and collaboration down the road, which helps both departments, but ultimately supports our healthcare of mission of providing exceptional care to our community. Sawar et al. (2022) states that the transformational leader’s primary responsibility is to support their organization by exhibiting positive behavior and adopting an appropriate strategy to achieve the

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7 organizations mission in a short period. Partnering with local agencies helps to support this responsibility. My second leadership strength is recognition and positive reinforcement. As a transformational leader, I operate with idealized influence and inspirational leadership. The patient experience is a large focus within my organization. How do we make the patients feel comfortable, satisfied, and overall pleased with an emergency visit? A driving factor in this is communication to the patients, make sure they understand what has been done, what is next, and what they are waiting for. Getting the nurses to communicate those pieces clearly, and regularly, is much easier said than done. As a transformational leader I have a vision of every nurse using our communication white boards for every patient, every time. I present the why behind the usage of them, set the expectation of how often to utilize them, I regularly audit the usage each shift, and I reward recognition and praise to those who regularly complete them and complete them well. This is promoted not only through the department, but to other departments as well. The recognition comes in different forms to make it fun, and inspiring for the nurses. They may get a fun picture and silly props to take with their whiteboards, get their name displayed on screens or boards, or get personalized notes and private recognition. It allows them to continue to communicate to their patients, which is meeting the vision and goal, but also acknowledges the work and effort they put in from an administrative level. Our unit has been recognized as number one in patient experience scores within our division for five straight quarters. My third leadership strength as it applies to transformational leadership is out of the box thinking. As I reviewed above in my Clifton strengths reflections, my mind is going all of the time, thinking of ways to fix or improve our current ways of doing things. This is especially relevant to transformational leadership as it helps my unit to be successful and keep rising up.

8 One of the ways I’m currently demonstrating this in my leadership is redesigning the ER to be a more functional, productive space. The department was built 31 years ago as a freestanding emergency department. In the last few years, we have grown the facility into a 20-bed hospital with a growing surgical program. With this much growth, it has required a significant change. Relying on the feedback of staff has been critical to working together as a team to change the patient flow, and blueprint of the department without major construction. This has been pivotal to staff feeling like their voices matter, are engaged in a solution, as well as being able to do things in a not so conventional way, to be able to deliver high quality patient care. Personal Leadership Weaknesses My first leadership weakness related to transformational leadership theory is my introverted personality. Transformational leadership theory focuses on charisma to engage your team. As someone who is usually quiet and reserved, breaking out of my shell to become excited and motivating in order to lead a team is something that I struggle with, and consumes a lot energy. Although this is a main building block for transformational leadership it is a large undertaking which can be overwhelming at times. According to a study by Lin et al. (2019) transformational leader behaviors have been associated with an increase in emotional exhaustion. This feels especially true for myself when working on exhibiting charisma and motivation for my team. The second weakness I have is finding the ability to focus. As I mentioned within my Clifton strengths reflections, my mind is always going, thinking of the next project or idea. This can make it difficult for me to focus on one project and see it through. I utilize my notebook to try and keep me on track, but I can often deviate from even referring to my notebook, and I can get distracted from things that I truly need to be focusing on or wrapping up. This is a weakness

9 within transformational leadership because it because it can make me appear scattered and unorganized, which does not promote confidence or trust within my team. If you don’t have trust or faith in your leader, you don’t want to follow them, which shows poor leadership as a whole. My third weakness in leadership would be my drive for perfection. This is particularly hard with transformational leadership because it can cause me to be very critical of other people’s work, contributions, or ideas. This behavior does not promote collaboration or growth within a team, so I work very hard to identify when I am being critical and try to reevaluate my perspective. Desiring perfection also leads me to redo my work several times, which prolongs the time it can take me to finish projects. This reflects a weakness within the transformational leadership theory as criticism, and micromanaging doesn’t allow for individualized consideration, and is not motivating for the follow to continue working towards a goal. Recommendations for Personal Leadership My first actionable item to improve the effectiveness of my leadership would be to start having one on one monthly meetings with my employees. This will allow me to have a closed door setting to review personal connections, goals for the department, and what projects or specialties the employee is interested in being more involved in. This applies to transformational leadership with individualized consideration. I can have a focused meeting with a follower allow us to have a connection that will in turn hopefully motivate and engage that employee. My second actionable item is to consistently send out weekly operations reports to the unit. I do this currently, but very inconsistent. My goal is to send them out every Monday. This will give the staff a snapshot of where the department sits, our goals, and projects we are working on. This reinforces the theories of transformational leadership as it allows the department to be aware of how we are performing, add input and feedback, and see how their

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10 efforts are working to create change within the department. Marshall and Broome (2017) discuss how the effective leader recognizes and promotes the contributions of others and creates a culture of sharing, celebration, and unity within the entire team. Who gets the credit is less important than how team members affirm each other’s work. Instead of making decisions for them they will be able to see where they excel in terms of metrics and patient experience, and make their own choices on how they will improve. My third actionable item to improve the effectiveness of my leadership is to start setting specific smart goals for myself, and holding myself accountable to them. When the department is able to see myself creating goals and hitting them, it identifies that I can follow through and be productive for them, but in turn will show them the structure of setting their own goals. As they choose to grow and develop, they will already be familiar with setting measurable goals, and in turn be able to create and follow them effectively with whatever project they are working on. This follows transformational leadership theory with intellectual stimulation for them to work on learning and creating goals, as well as motivation through watching their own leader create and complete them. SMART Goals My first specific goal that I would like to accomplish is to graduate with my MBA in health care administration. This is important to my leadership development because it will allow me to understand the business side healthcare, which often parallels the clinical side. By tying the two together I can speak to the why more confidently, and brainstorm ideas on how to intertwine them instead of working parallel. I will measure my progress of completing my MBA by evaluating my course completion. I must complete one course monthly to stay on track to complete my degree, if I don’t complete at least one course a month I won’t be on track to

11 complete my degree in December. This goal is attainable because I have 4 days or nights per week that I can dedicate to school work in addition to my work and family obligations. This goal is relevant to my role as a nurse manager because it furthers my understanding of the healthcare system as a whole and prepares me more as a leader. I will accomplish this goal over a 12-month period, completing 1 class a month. SPECIFIC Graduate with my MBA in healthcare administration MEASURABLE By completing one class each month ACHIEVABLE With dedicated time each week RELEVANT To my role as an ED manager and leader TIME-BOUND By December 31, 2023 My second specific goal is to build personal relationships with my team members. This will help us create a personal connection, gives me a better understanding of what they are looking for, and what direction they want to take their careers. I will measure the progress by the number of recorded monthly meetings we have. This goal is attainable because it is within my capacity to get to know my employees better personally. This goal is relevant to my role as an ED manager and leader to allow my employees to flourish and grow. I will accomplish the goal during the time span of 20 weeks, meeting with each employee monthly. SPECIFIC Build personal relationships with my employees MEASURABLE Monthly 1:1 meetings ACHIEVABLE Within my capacity to get to know employees better RELEVANT To my role as an ED manager and leader TIME-BOUND During the next 20 weeks Specific Actions My first specific action to completing my MBA will be dedicating Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights to working on school work. By dedicating my time each week, it will give me specific windows to complete work so I maintain a steady pace for completion. My second

12 targeted action will be to have bi-weekly meetings with my mentor so she can monitor my progress, give me goals to complete, provide resources during difficult courses, and be a guiding presence towards the end goal of graduating. My first specific action towards building personal relationships with my staff will be to create calendar invites for all of them so that we have specific days and times to meet, and won’t get lost in the daily shuffle of trying to fit them in. The second specific action I will take towards building personal relationships will be to create a list of questions to ask them prior to the meetings. I want questions that will be standard for all employees but will also have both personal and professional information to create a growth plan for them going forward.

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13 References Bass, Bernard. 1999. Two decades of research and development in transformational leadership. European journal of work and organizational psychology, 8 (1), 9-32. http://techtied.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/bass_transforrmational_leadership.pdf Elaine Sorensen Marshall, P. R. F., & Marion E. Broome, P. R. F. (2017). Transformational Leadership in Nursing, Second Edition: From Expert Clinician to Influential Leader: Vol. Second edition. Springer Publishing Company. Lin, S. H. (Joanna), Scott, B.A., & Matta, F. K. (2019). The dark side of transformational leader behaviors for leaders themselves: A conservation of resources perspective. Academy of Management Journal, 62(5), 1556-1582. http://doi.org/10.5465.amj.2016.1255 Sarwar, U., Zamir, S., Fazal, K., Hong, Y., & Yong, Q. Z. (2022). “Impact of leadership styles on innovative performance of female leaders in Pakistani Universities.” PloS One, 17(5), e0266956. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266956

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