National Nurses Week 2023: Chief Nurse Van McGrue Freely Gives Younger Nurses Their Due

A 5-part series celebrating nurse leaders who have claimed their place as a strategic partner in their organization's leadership.

Editor’s note: Hospitals and health systems have seen a steady evolution of chief nursing officers taking a seat at the executive strategy table, guiding and participating in operations and policies. HealthLeaders is featuring five of those nurse executives to discuss their experience as an operational leader.

Part 4 of a 5-part series

Vandalyn “Van” McGrue, chief nursing officer of Princeton Baptist Medical Center, Birmingham, Alabama, is always open to hearing what her younger nurses think.

In fact, McGrue, also director of outcomes for the Baptist Health System, seeks them out for their “fresh” set of eyes. McGrue spoke with HealthLeaders about this, and her other management styles.

This transcript has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Van McGrue, CNO, Princeton Baptist Medical Center / Photo courtesy of Princeton Baptist Medical Center

HealthLeaders: What part of being an operational leader has most resonated with you?

Van McGrue: I was a director of operations for large dialysis companies for more than 20 years, but I didn’t get into operations with Baptist Health until 2010.

That has been a learning experience for me, especially since we just went through the pandemic. I’ve gone through pandemics before, especially when AIDS first came onto the scene, but when this COVID pandemic happened, it was truly different because patients of my age were dying. That has turned my entire nursing career around on how I see things.

Now that we’re coming out of that era, I see new nurses who are eager to learn and who were not deterred from the nursing field, even though they did not have a lot of hands-on experience during that time and were, instead, doing a lot of simulation in classes.

That behavior—the readiness to learn—is still there amongst the new grads and so that is the most rewarding thing throughout my nursing career. I love to give back to the younger generation, so I’m trying to mentor and take the young nurses—specifically a couple of them in the intensive care unit—under my wing.

And I must say, it’s very fulfilling to go home at the end of the day to know that you made a difference in someone's life.

HL: Nursing schools are adapting their curriculum to prepare nurse leaders to lead organizationally, but it hasn’t always been that way. How did you accumulate the skills to step into an operational leadership role?

McGrue: I acquired this really through my military school and because in nursing we didn’t deal a lot with the business side when I first started in nursing school back in the 1980s. But now I see where the nursing curriculum has changed, where they are dealing with more finance and critical thinking, and that's going to lead to a better leader role.

I learned a lot from my military background and I've learned a lot through trial and error, too. When I first started, I had my BSN. Later, I was able to get my graduate degree and then my DNP, and I noticed that the curriculum has been revamped compared to when I started more than 30 years ago. It's more focused on relationship building, what we can bring to the table, and cost savings, but not to cut quality.

Healthcare in general has evolved into more of a profitable business. We still have several hospitals out there that are not-for-profit, but the healthcare industry is really becoming a business.

So, I’ve seen a lot of nurses go back to get their MBA to increase their knowledge of the business portion, but I accumulated a lot of my operational leadership from on-the-job training.

HL: What do you, as CNO, uniquely bring to your organization’s leadership team?

McGrue: I’m an out-of-the-box thinker; I'm not just your traditional leader. I have several different leadership styles: I can be very bureaucratic, I can be a servant leader, I can be a transformational leader, a transactional leader, and I've learned to adapt to what would bring more to the table. I always look at the big picture, instead of just looking all into the weeds, to see what we are trying to achieve as a team.

I believe in relationship building, regardless of who is on the team. I want a diversity of people on the team. The one thing that is truly unique with me is I want to be considered as one of those frontline workers and the way I do that is I meet with every new-hire nurse and have one-on-ones with them.

I have charge-nurse breakfasts with all the charge nurses within the hospital because I want them to see myself as part of the team and not just a hands-down leader. More or less, I want them to manage me, so that's what I bring to the table.

HL: Nurses tend to be creative and innovative. How has this served you as an operational leader?

McGrue: 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.

HL: How does your health system recognize CNOs as strategic partners within their own organization’s leadership team?

McGrue: They really promote growth and participation. They want us to have that seat at the table. When we all are talking about earnings and we have more MBAs in the room compared to nurses, they want us to always put patients first, the clinical aspects first.

Baptist encourages nurse leaders to think outside the box and continue to learn. As a nurse, from an operational standpoint, we need to always be willing to learn new things and be open-minded, and Baptist really promotes that.