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National Nurses Week 2022: A Feature With Maria Knecht on How to Grow Nurse Leaders

Analysis  |  By Carol Davis  
   May 12, 2022

A series celebrating nurse leaders who go above and beyond.

Fewer nurses appear to be stepping into leadership, as just 11% of nurses say their idea of a successful career involves advancing into nurse administration and leadership roles, a recent survey said.

It's up to today's nurse leaders to improve those numbers by understanding what the current workforce needs and adjusting those leadership roles to focus on quality rather than quantity, says Maria Knecht, vice president of nursing and clinical operations at NorthShore University HealthSystem's Glenbrook Hospital.

Knecht spoke to HealthLeaders about how nurse leaders can attract nurses to one day fill their roles.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

HealthLeaders: Why do you think so few nurses want to become nurse leaders?

Maria Knecht: There are a couple of things. Generationally, a lot of people are seeing how hard their parents worked and the world in a lot of ways has become very complicated, and I don't know if we've always done our best to nurture and grow those nurse leaders from the get-go, so what's really critical is how do we, as executives, do our part to respond to the needs of the current workforce.

When you look at work-life balance and all of those issues, sometimes folks of my generation and in the role that I am in are not always the best role models, so we, as a leadership team have to change that. I think we have to think about what the current workforce needs. How can we be creative in our own expectations, in matching them with the expectations of this workforce?

Historically, we tend to look at people who have the time to commit to leadership roles, but recently we filled a role here at my hospital with someone who is a young mom with four kids at home. We need to start looking to this younger generation who typically would not have taken those jobs in the past because of work-life balance issues and make them attractive—helping them realize it's the quality of time that you do as leaders, not necessarily the quantity of time.

We have to abandon this whole notion of seven days a week, and 10- and 12-hour days, and give people permission [to be away], like we do here. My leadership team does a good job of saying, "I'm out tomorrow. I don't want an email. I don't get paged. My co-workers are going to cover me."  And there's a lot of peer support to get that balance.

HL: What can nursing schools do to increase interest in being a nurse leader?

Knecht: A lot of people have excellent relationships with their community partners, but we have to be more diligent in doing that. We need to be more entrenched in each other's houses and visit each other's houses more. Their clinical rotations should be more deliberate in a leadership component to help them realize that leadership, especially when you're a new nurse, doesn't have to be a formal leader role.

You can start to identify that in your students or in your orientees in their first nursing job of who those people are that you can see exhibiting those leadership traits. They want to go a little bit above and beyond, they take their peers under their wings, they inspire their peers. There's lot we can do with that.

HL: What are some of the attributes of an effective nurse leader?

Knecht: It's important to know what, as a nurse leader, you value and what you stand for, and that you always connect to your "why." I look for people who are enthusiastic and have a desire to make a difference. People who listen, they understand, and they're driven by simply wanting to do the best thing for patients, which is creating a work environment where the staff can be their best and they can be their best.

To be an effective nurse leader, the most important thing is you have to build trust with your team. When the staff feel they can trust them, they're engaged. Leadership [requires] positive realism. It's positivity, but not to a flaw. I worked with people who are positive to the point where they're just not realistic and they're not hearing people, and as leaders we have to be courageous and self-aware and know to admit when we don't know everything. Leaders have to never lose that perspective of "patients first."

HL:  How do you recognize leadership potential in nurses?

Knecht: You always should be assessing and observing, and you look to observe those things I just talked about. Who is the passionate one, who is the one to say, "Hey, you guys, we've got this," or who's the one whose staff wants her to be their preceptor? Those behavioral traits that I talked about earlier is what I look for.

HL: Once you've recognized a potential leader, then what?

Knecht: You have to give them opportunities by saying, "We have this opportunity for this one-time task force," or "I need someone to help lead this project; could you be part of that?" As leaders, we have to be very deliberate about giving them more opportunities to get them to understand there is a life beyond those five patients and to help them understand their voices make a huge difference.

I think the one thing we've not always done well in nursing is good succession planning. We're having those conversations here about how you identify those people very early—maybe it's years ahead of time—and put them on a very formalized path to get them to where they need to be.

HL: What would you say to nurses who are on the fence about becoming a nurse leader?

Knecht: It can be scary to go into leadership and that you don't grow when you're comfortable.

As a nurse, when I had five patients, I would take really good care of them, but in management I realized that in the course of a day in that unit I could take care of 30 people, and I multiply that by all those patients every day, every month, every year. That's the piece we always have to remind ourselves as leaders: we make these teams, and they take care of the patients and that's why we all do what we do.

See the other nurse leaders featured this week:

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“We need to start looking to this younger generation who typically would not have taken those [leadership] jobs in the past because of work-life balance issues and make them attractive—helping them realize it's the quality of time that you do as leaders, not necessarily the quantity of time.”

Carol Davis is the Nursing Editor at HealthLeaders, an HCPro brand.

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