National Nurses Week 2023: Leadership Development Begins at the Unit Level, Chief Nursing Executive Maureen Sintich Says

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 a strategic partner in their organization’s leadership.

Part 5 of a 5-part series.

Maureen Sintich, DNP, MBA, RN, WHNP-BC, NEA-BC, felt like “a fish out of water” when she first joined her healthcare organization’s operations team.

But that was a long time ago, and Sintich, who serves as Virginia-based Inova's chief nurse executive and executive vice president, is part of an administration that carefully prepares CNOs to be strategic partners within their own organization’s leadership team.

Sintich spoke to HealthLeaders about how leadership development has changed dramatically since she first became a nurse leader.

This transcript has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Maureen Sintich, CNE and executive vice president, Inova / Photo courtesy of Inova

HealthLeaders: When did you first become part of a health system’s operational leadership team and what was that experience like for you?

Maureen Sintich: It was many years ago and I was still practicing as a clinician. It was a dual role where I spent part of my time in program development and leadership and was integrated into the broader healthcare operations team, and part of my time was providing clinical services to the patients within our program.

From a leadership perspective, there were many days where I am certain I felt like a fish out of water. One of the benefits though, is that nurses bring to the table every day our practice of nursing. Whether it be thinking about leadership from a relationship perspective, or to be able to listen with empathy, or to be able to make an impact with our teams, there's a component of our nursing background that never goes away.

I also believe that all nurses are leaders, and you don't have to be in a formal leadership role to lead. Having said that, though, there were many days where I felt like I was flying by the seat of my pants, just hoping that I could get through the day, asking questions when I was uncertain and hoping that my leaders and my team would be supportive because I was truly learning along the way.

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?

Sintich: I'm a nurse practitioner by training, so my graduate degree in nursing was very clinically based. There were administrative tracks that had come along later, as you referenced, for nursing administration and very different types of roles, but that's not what I learned in graduate school. I didn't have those skills, so I realized that I needed to go back to school, and I obtained a master's in business administration.

It's probably one of the most difficult things I've ever done, because my background was so clinically based and I had to learn a whole different way of doing things. I had to learn a new language. But I had amazing colleagues in school who came from all different backgrounds—some came from business backgrounds, healthcare, engineers, scientists. It was truly an interprofessional group of adult students where we were all learning together.

But one of the most important components of my personal leadership development journey, and I'm forever grateful, was my organization who supported me while I went through that process.

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

Sintich: Nurses are the largest group of healthcare professionals in the nation, and the representation of the nurse and the work that we do is critically important to the broader leadership of any health system.

Having said that, when we come to the table as leaders within our organization, while we are expected to have our professional roles and our expertise that is specific to our primary role, we are also seen as leaders of the health system. As a member of my CEO’s cabinet along with my colleagues from the health system—whether it be the chief of our clinical enterprise operations or our CFO or chief people officer—we are expected to be able to contribute for and on behalf of the greater good of the health system, which I find personally very rewarding.

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

Sintich: 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?”

HL: How does your health system prepare CNOs to be strategic partners within their own organization’s leadership team?

Sintich:  We have an amazing operating model and it’s a triad structure where we partner nurse leaders with administrative leaders and physician leaders. Whether it’s at the service line level or at the site of care, chief nursing officers, chief medical officers, and hospital presidents work together in teams, and it elevates everybody's role.

When new leaders are identified, first and foremost we want to make sure that they have a mentor that they can work with. We also want to ensure that they are supported through our leadership development programs, but also as a member of the overarching guiding coalition of Innova leaders who contribute to our Innova strategy. Whether it be focusing on purpose and joy, or diversity, equity, and inclusion, or patient safety, we have components of all of those that are integrally a part and parcel of our culture, so that’s how we support our teams and our leaders.

And it doesn't start with the chief nursing officer. We start with frontline leaders so that we are developing people along the way to be ready to step into that next CNO role. It’s important to know that leadership development doesn't start with somebody who's ready to be a vice president; it starts at the unit level.

We start it with our shared governance structures where we partner frontline nurses with their clinical leaders to make decisions that impact their work. So, it’s not about a specific curriculum or program—while we have those—it's about how to integrate the work to achieve the outcomes that we would all expect for our people as well as our patients and communities.