What Nursing Leaders Must Master...
According to the dictionary, leadership is the ability to organize a group of people to achieve a common goal. The leader may or may not have any formal authority. And students of leadership have produced diverse theories involving traits, situational interaction, function, behavior, power, vision and values, charisma, and intelligence among others. The one thing that all the theories and all the students - and for that matter - all the pundits say, is that leadership is important, crucial. Nevertheless, most schools and colleges of nursing today give little thought to leadership beyond the first-line level-and what's more, they never have. For a short time in the 1980s, some colleges developed masters degrees in nursing administration, but they fell out of favor within a decade or so.
Yet, today we need nurse leaders more than ever before-a fact acknowledged clearly in a recent study of the Institute of Medicine on the Future of Nursing, it identified the need for prepared leaders and the important role they must play in implementing their recommendations. Moreover, nursing leaders need a "world mindedness" to function in today's global environment. Disney's theme, it's a small world after all-hits the nail on the head-and it's getting smaller every day. Recently we have seen an increase in the number of schools and the types of programs that are preparing clinicians for a more active role in global health, but not leaders.
In this issue, I assembled articles about several academic and professional development programs focusing on nurse leaders from the nurse manager to the nurse executive. Each manuscript presents some new insights or approaches that can provide some interesting ways of preparing nurse leaders. Also, in this issue, I interviewed 3 well-known nursing leaders, all of whom were involved, at varying levels and to varying degrees, with the educational preparation of nurse executives. I selected these particular leaders because they were among the presenters or attendees of a 1979 invitational conference, sponsored by The Kellogg Foundation and convened by Dr Muriel Poulin, RN, FAAN, that focused on the educational preparation of nurse executives. In fact, Poulin served a guest editor for an issue of Nursing Administration Quarterly devoted to the papers presented during that conference. I conducted the interviews to capture their experiences during and following the conference-and to determine whether or not they have seen a change over the 40 years since the conference-with some room for speculation about why things changed; and if so, why, and if not, why not. Some major themes concerning the positioning of nurse executives emerged among the interviewees. At any rate, these leaders-Muriel Poulin, EdD, RN, FAAN, Leah Curtin, MS, MA, ScD(h), RN, FAAN, and Margaret McClure, EdD, RN, FAAN-spoke clearly, frankly and candidly to the author as they shared their thoughts. I enjoyed reading them, and I think you will, too.
Currently we are seeing an increasing number of nurse leaders enrolling in the DNP programs with a corresponding decrease in those enrolling in PhD programs. Certainly both programs have merit, but it is hardly news to anyone that preparation for advanced practice of nursing does not necessarily prepare one for the kinds in knowledge nurse executives need to be successful. Both the interviewees, and the authors of the various articles, share insights with us about what nurse leaders need to master to properly prepare for this role, and to lead the profession into the future.
-Franklin A. Shaffer, EdD, RN, EdD FAAN, FAAN