CHAPTER 2 LEARNING EXERCISES

LEARNING EXERCISE 2.3

Effective Leadership
In groups or individually, list additional characteristics that you believe an effective leader
possesses. Which leadership characteristics do you have? Do you believe that you were born
with leadership skills, or have you consciously developed them during your lifetime? If so, how
did you develop them?
Answer: The additional characteristics that I believe that an effective leader should have been
the following: compassion, patience, active listener, and accepts constructive criticism. The
leadership characteristics, as far as objective evaluation of myself, are that I have
cooperativeness, self-confidence and decisiveness, and is always ready to take risk in the
formulating of solutions. I do not believe that I was born with leadership skills as I had to go
through a lot of hardships, sacrifices and experience just to gain these characteristics that I
possess now.

LEARNING EXERCISE 2.4

What Is Your Predominant Leadership Style?
Define your predominant leadership style (authoritarian, democratic, or laissez-faire). Ask those
who work with you if in their honest opinion this is indeed the leadership style that you use most
often. What style of leadership do you work best under? What leadership style best describes
your present or former managers?
Answer: The predominant leadership style that I have is laissez-faire leadership, as I only
become an active leader when my group members would be needing my assistance. The
leadership that I work best under would have to authoritative type of leadership as I would
always need a direction from a leader and also constant supervision from them, the leadership
style that best describes my present managers are authoritative type of leadership as he always
remind us on the things to do, and would constantly provide feedbacks when he notices a slight
deviance in our works.

LEARNING EXERCISE 2.7

What Is Your Management Style?
Recall times when you have been a manager. This does not only mean a nursing manager.
Perhaps you were a head lifeguard or an evening shift manager at a fast-food restaurant. During
those times, do you think you were a good manager? Did you involve others in your
management decision making appropriately? How would you evaluate your decision-making
ability? Make a list of your management strengths and a list of management skills that you felt
you were lacking.
Answer: The time that I remember that I have taken a manager role was when me and my
friends had plan to have our vacation in boracay

LEARNING EXERCISE 2.9

Quiet at Night?
You are the night shift charge nurse on a busy surgical unit in a large, urban teaching hospital.
Surgeries occur around the clock, and frequently, noise levels are higher than desired because of
the significant number of nurses, physicians, residents, interns, and other health-care workers
who gather at the nurses’ station or in the halls outside of patient rooms. Today, the unit manager
has come to you because the hospital’s score on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Hospital
Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey for the category
Always Quiet at Night falls far below the desired benchmark. She has asked you to devise a plan
to address this quality of care issue. The management goal in this situation is to achieve an
HCAHPS score on Always Quiet at Night that meets the accepted best practices benchmark, thus
assuring that patients get the rest they need to promote their recovery. The leadership goal is to
foster a shared commitment among all health-care professionals working on the unit to achieve
the Always Quiet at Night goal.
ASSIGNMENT:
1. Identify five management strategies you might use to address the problem of excessive noise
on the unit at night. For example, your list might include structural environmental changes or
work redesign.
2. Then identify five leadership strategies you might use to promote buy-in of the Quiet at Night
initiative by all health-care professionals on the unit. How will you inspire these individuals to
work with you in achieving this critically important goal? What incentives might you use to
reward behavior conducive to meeting this goal?
3. Discuss whether you feel this goal could be achieved by employing only the management
strategies you identified. Could it be achieved only with the implementation of leadership
strategies for team building?
Answer:
a.) Five management strategies:
  Put a notice/sign in every ward room a mandatory compliance of minimize roaming
around, lowering gadgets volume, and refraining from having loud conversation
every 10pm to 6am.
 Restructuring of room walls in order to maximize wall rebound of sound waves.
 Have the transaction limited around 7pm all throughout the ward.
 Restriction of access to social media application for the nurses, physicians, residents,
interns, and other health-care workers around 10pm to 6am.
 End meetings quickly and avoid side-tracking conversation with unnecessary talks
with co-workers.
b.) Five leadership strategies:
 Establish a clear vision as well as informing the people involve, the benefits of
complying to the set rules in promotion of a quiet night in the ward area.
 Setting self as an example by being discipline and following the management
strategies religiously.
 Listen to the pleas and suggestion of the healthcare workers in the ward and
implement if possible.
 Monitor every meeting, if possible, to make sure that no unnecessary talks are being
done by the healthcare workers.
 Remind the healthcare workers as well as the patient and their significant others the
rules being implemented.

LEARNING EXERCISE 2.10

Leadership as a New Nurse (Marquis & Huston, 2012)
Sally Jones is a 36-year-old new registered nurse (RN) who graduated 6 months ago from a
community college with an associate degree in nursing. Sally worked her way through school as
a licensed practical nurse in a pediatric unit of a local hospital. After passing her RN exams, she
moved to a larger city and was hired to work the evening shift on the pediatric unit as a primary
care nurse. Her patient load is usually six pediatric patients, and she has a nursing assistant
working under her supervision. Sally has been bothered recently by discrepancies regarding the
credits of intravenous (IV) solutions given in handoff report. For example, she was told at report
yesterday that 150 mL remained in one patient’s bag of IV solution, but upon making initial
patient rounds, she found the IV machine beeping and had to hurriedly replace the bag. At the
previous hospital where she had worked, it was a unit policy that all pediatric patients have their
IV solutions observed by both oncoming and outgoing primary nurse at the end of report so such
discrepancies could be discovered and corrected prior to departure of the outgoing shift. She
feels this was a good policy and would like to see a similar policy implemented at her new place
of employment.
If you were Sally, what would you do in this situation? Answer the following questions to help
decide
what to do.
1. Is it appropriate for a new nurse to take a leadership role to address this problem?
2. What are some possible steps you could take in correcting this situation?
3. Would a followership role be better suited to solve this issue?
4. Should you act alone or involve others?
Answer:
a.) In the question of is it appropriate for a new nurse to take a leadership role, I think that even if
one is still a novice in the field, they must consider themselves as a leader when situation arise,
as a saying goes, being a leader does not come to you naturally but you’ll have to work hard for
it, and so Sally should take the manner in to her own hands as she has prior experience to this
kind of situation.
b.) The possible steps that I will take to correct the situation is to first, discuss with my
supervisor my concerns and also share my prior experience when it comes to this, second, is to
draft a formal letter suggesting the policy that I have followed in my previous experience, third,
is to letting them understand the benefits of such policy which in turn would have me wait for it
to be approved.
c.) In the case of this scenario, I think that blindly following the culture that the supervisor used
to would not benefit me in the long run, which is why it is important to take a risk and show
some leadership role in this matter.
d.) I will need to involve others in polishing the policy of my suggestion, since it will not only
involve me in the future but for them as well. Involving others would benefit me greatly as I
would have a plethora of options on what to improve on the policy that I experienced in dealing
this kind of problem.

LEARNING EXERCISE 2.11

Choosing a Leadership Style (Marquis & Huston, 2012)
You are a team leader with one licensed practical nurse/licensed vocational nurse (LPN/LVN)
and one nursing assistant on your team. You also share the unit clerical person with two other
team leaders and the charge nurse. You have found the LPN/LVN to be a seasoned team member
and very reliable. The nursing assistant is young and very new and seems a bit disorganized but
is a very willing team member. At various times, you will be directing these three individuals
during your workday, that is, asking them to do things, supervising their work, and so on.
ASSIGNMENT:
What leadership style (authoritative, democratic or laissez-faire) should you use with each
person or would it be the same with all three? Would you be justified in using only one
leadership style? If an emergency situation occurred, would your leadership style change or
remain the same? Discuss solutions to this scenario in class.
Answer: The leadership style that I will utilize in this scenario would have to be different for
each person, for the LPN/LVN, I will be utilizing a laissez-faire style of leadership, due to the
fact that they possess the skills and experience in situations and for the nursing assistant, an
authoritative leadership style would have to utilize since they are still new to the position.
Although, I think that in emergency situation would occur, I change my leadership style, in an
authoritative leadership style to resolve the emergency situation quickly and in a team manner.