How Nurse Executives Bring Creativity and Innovation to the Strategy Table

Nurses' natural ability to look at challenges as puzzles to be solved benefits the broader healthcare team.

When nurse executives take a seat at a hospital or health system’s executive strategy table, they bring the whole of their training with them, or as nurse leader Maureen Sintich says, “There's a component of our nursing background that never goes away.”

HealthLeaders talked with Sintich, chief nurse executive (CNE) and executive vice president of Inova Healthcare System, and other nurse leaders about how the innate nursing traits of creativity and innovation have served them as an operational leader.

Their comments have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Maureen Sintich, DNP, MBA, RN, WHNP-BC, NEA-BC

CNE and executive vice president, Inova Healthcare System, Falls Church, Virginia

Nurses are creative and innovative, and we often look at challenges as, in some cases, puzzles to be solved. Think about the delivery of care during the pandemic and the fact that nurses were changing their model of care almost on a daily basis as we were learning and trying different things.

Those same challenges apply to leadership, when we expand beyond nursing to think about the broader healthcare team and beyond the technical components of the care delivery model to thinking about, “How do we not only take care of patients and families but support each other and not lose sight of meaning and purpose?”

Vandalyn “Van” McGrue

Chief nursing officer, Princeton Baptist Medical Center, Birmingham, Alabama

This goes back to my team and them managing me. I am only as good as my team. I don't have all the answers. I tap into that creativity, that innovation, because with the younger generation, they can think more out of the box than I can, and they can think of ways that can make a process more efficient in ways that I'm not able to.

So, I really depend on my new nurses and my other nurses, too, to look at things from a different viewpoint. I've been nursing for so long, and with someone new coming in, they have a fresh set of eyes and they can see from a different point of view.

I’ve learned from my younger nurses of ways to communicate differently on what works for them in their learning style or in their leadership style. I try to connect with the younger nurses to stay abreast of what is coming up. For example, for Nurses Week, we were thinking of doing the regular, basic stuff, but one of the new nurses said, “How about a TikTok video?” 

Well, TikTok is in the news now and I don’t know how safe that is, but I suggested that I do a Facebook video or something to that nature. So, doing certain things with different ways of communication helps to get our message out to the younger generation.

Kathleen Sanford, DBA, RN, FAAN, FACHE

Executive vice president and chief nursing officer, CommonSpirit, Chicago

Because I am a nurse, I have learned how to be part of innovative teams. It’s helped me understand and be willing to listen to others who may have ideas that seem a little far out. Having worked with other nurses and having to do “work arounds” in order to provide good care, I am able to understand that even when you don’t fully understand what someone else is talking about, you should listen because their innovations may be what we need.

Our own experiences make us—nurse leaders—open to listening to other people’s innovations and also enables us to think about doing things differently. It serves all of us well to be open to new ideas, to propose new things. At CommonSpirit, we’re doing virtual nursing and at one point I had something called a Private Practice Unit where I let nurses hire their own colleagues. You need to try different things to see what works best for your employees, your patients, your organizations, and your communities.

Being creative helps in change management, too. If you’re innovative, you’re a little better at helping people adapt to change.

Innovation has also helped me personally. Years ago, a young pharmacist came to me and said, “Kathy, I really think that nursing and pharmacy should work together, and I want to do an outpatient infusion program with you.” We didn't have one in our community.  He explained it to me, I said OK. Then we put a dyad together—a nurse and a pharmacist—and started the program.

Many years later, I went into that clinic as their patient to get a shot for osteoporosis. Nobody knew who I was. Nobody knew that I'd had the fun of starting the clinic, but I got the benefit of it as a patient. So, see? Innovation is not just what we're doing for other people; it helps us, too.

Lanie Ward, MBA, BSN, RN

Chief nursing officer, Cambridge Health Alliance, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Nurses have to deal with complex and challenging situations and often the buck stops with us and to do that, we always have to be creative in finding solutions. You can always count on a nurse and nurse leader to figure it out and make it happen because there's nobody for them to turn to. Consequently, in my position, I avoid saying we can't do things, but always focus on how we can do it.

And so, I often like to, “go outside of the box” and look at new and creative solutions and to do that, sometimes I say to myself and to my leaders, “Let's start with a blank piece of paper, and design what we think is the best and a new and innovative approach.” This helps me and others avoid assuming that everything must start with where we are and helps us eliminate, “Doing things the way we've always done them.”

There are times when we need to transform and do things more efficiently, and that blank piece of paper, I think, is a great approach.

Carolyn Booker, DNP, RN, NEA-BC

Chief nursing officer, Northside Hospital Forsyth, Cumming, Georgia

Well, I've got to hit you with some kindness now [Booker began The Kindness Initiative at Northside Forsyth, which has changed the health system’s culture]. That started as just a heartfelt desire—and it still is—to change culture within an organization and I have been given a phenomenal amount of support. I shared with you in our last conversation that this initiative around kindness started as a grassroots effort here at the Northside Forsythe campus. However, it is now infused throughout our system.

I am on a kindness-through-communications committee, and we do these 30-minute power meetings weekly, where we talk about implementing all sorts of ideas to make kindness the norm within the organization, and I have to tell you about something that happened just yesterday.

I was talking to the chief operating officer (COO), and she had just spoken at our auxiliary volunteer Appreciation Week luncheon. After the meeting, as she was preparing to leave, she was stopped by one of the volunteers who was a new volunteer with us and wanted to share some of her story.

Her husband had been a patient in our critical care unit about 15 years ago where he had lived for 12 days, and she shared some of her experiences during that time. Then she asked, “Tell me, who started the initiative around kindness?” and the COO shared our journey with the Kindness Initiative.

She told the COO that she had recently been a patient in the hospital and had also come back as an outpatient for several other levels of treatment and she felt that the culture within the organization had changed dramatically. And she could see how the imperative around being kind had just changed, for her, everything and as a result of that, she decided to become a volunteer to be able to share in that.

I was just blown away. That just happened yesterday. So, to me, creativity and innovation are sometimes those things that are tangible—that you can touch and feel—and sometimes they are the things that are just life-changing, but that you can't touch and feel. They're the intangibles.