D218 Task 2 Leadership Skills Reflection Example

Leadership Skills and Mindset Reflection: A Relief Charge Nurse on a Cardiac Step-Down Unit

Student Name

Leavitt School of Health, Western Governors University

D218: Intrapersonal Leadership and Professional Growth, Task 2

Course Instructor

Month Day, Year

Leadership Skills and Mindset Reflection: A Relief Charge Nurse on a Cardiac Step-Down Unit

Introduction

I work on a cardiac step-down unit of 30 beds and take the charge role two or three shifts a week when the regular charge nurse is off. That split has made the difference between managing and leading easy to feel and hard to describe. This reflection separates the two mindsets as they appear in my own practice, names the skills I have and the ones I lack, and sets out how I intend to grow as a leader, including how I would make a unit fair for the patients and colleagues who are most easily overlooked.

Leadership and Management Mindsets

A management mindset is concerned with order: getting the right nurse to the right patient, keeping the numbers balanced and the shift on schedule. A leadership mindset is concerned with direction and people: why the work matters, where the team is going and how each person grows on the way. The American Organization for Nursing Leadership competencies treat both as necessary and distinct, placing business skills beside the leader within and relationship building (Hughes et al., 2022). In the studies of nurse leader behavior pooled by Cummings et al. (2018), relational approaches went with higher staff satisfaction and lower turnover, while task-focused approaches did not, which suggests that a charge nurse who only manages leaves something important undone.

Skills Present in Myself

Three leadership skills I already use are coaching, calm direction during a crisis and advocacy. I coach new graduates by asking them to talk me through their plan before I give mine, which I did last month with a nurse titrating a diltiazem infusion for the first time. During a rapid response I keep my voice low and assign roles by name, and I have been told the room settles when I arrive. I advocate for patients when their plan does not fit their lives, such as asking for a pharmacy consult before discharging a man who could not afford his new anticoagulant.

Three management skills I already use are building balanced assignments, tracking bed flow and escalating staffing gaps. I weigh acuity, telemetry load and isolation rooms when I assign, I keep a running list of expected discharges and admissions so the house supervisor can place patients sooner, and I report short staffing early with the numbers attached. These skills keep the shift safe, but none of them makes anyone want to follow me; they make the shift run.

Skills Absent in Myself

Three leadership skills I do not yet have are articulating a vision beyond the current shift, giving difficult feedback to peers and delegating authority rather than tasks. I can steady a room for an hour, but I have never told my team where I think the unit should be in a year. I avoid telling experienced colleagues when their practice has drifted, and I hand out tasks while keeping every decision for myself.

Three management skills I lack are budgeting, formal performance evaluation and data reporting. I have never seen the unit's labor budget, I have not completed an annual evaluation, and I do not know how to pull our fall or telemetry alarm data into a form a committee could use. These gaps matter less on a single shift but will limit me if I move into a permanent charge or assistant manager role.

Improving the Three Leadership Skills

For coaching, I will move from informal questions to a structured approach, using a short debrief with each new graduate at the end of every shared shift. For example, after a new nurse's first cardioversion I will ask what surprised them, what they would do differently and what they want to practice next, then record one learning goal for our next shift together. Medero et al. (2023) found that a charge nurse development program improved participants' confidence in coaching and conflict management, and I will ask my manager whether our system offers a similar course.

For calm direction in a crisis, I will lead the team's post-event huddles, not only the event itself, so the calm I bring in the room carries into how we learn from it. For example, after the next rapid response I will gather the team for five minutes to review roles and ask who felt unclear about their task. For advocacy, I will move from single cases to patterns by logging each discharge where cost or transport nearly delayed a patient, then presenting the pattern at our unit practice council within three months.

Importance of a Leadership Mindset

A leadership mindset supports long-term personal growth because it asks me to look at my own behavior as something I can change. When I stopped seeing a tense exchange with a cardiologist as his problem and asked what I could have done differently, I began preparing my requests with data, and our conversations improved. The same habit has helped at home: I now approach disagreements with my teenage son by asking what he needs before stating what I want, a small change that came directly from coaching new nurses.

It supports long-term professional growth because leadership, unlike management, carries across roles. The staffing rules I apply as charge nurse will change if I move to another hospital; the ability to coach, to steady a team and to speak up will not. Carter (2018) links frontline nurses' self-concept to their leadership competencies, and my own experience agrees: the more I see myself as someone others can follow, the more often I volunteer for the committee work and precepting that open the next role. My plan is to apply for a permanent charge position within two years, and that move depends on the leadership skills in this paper, not the management ones.

Applying Leadership Skills to Professional Practice

The three leadership skills apply directly to a problem on my unit: new graduates leave within their first year at a higher rate than experienced hires. Coaching gives new nurses a steady person to learn from on hard shifts. Calm direction during rapid responses shows them what composure looks like, which they cannot learn from a policy. Advocacy lets me carry their concerns about assignments and orientation length to the unit council with evidence, rather than as complaints. For example, I would bring three months of exit themes and a proposal to pair each new graduate with a consistent charge nurse on their first 12 shifts.

Leading well also means making the team feel safe enough to speak. Edmondson (1999) showed that teams with higher psychological safety engage in more learning behavior, such as asking questions and reporting errors. On my shifts I will open each huddle by naming one mistake I made that week, which makes it easier for a new nurse to admit an omitted assessment before it becomes a harm.

Ensuring Equity and Inclusivity as a Leader

Equity and inclusivity begin with fair assignments. I will review my assignments at the start of each shift for patterns such as the same nurse always receiving isolation rooms or the most complex family, and rotate those loads deliberately. For patients, I will make sure professional interpreters are used for every assessment and consent conversation with every patient who is more comfortable speaking Spanish, Vietnamese or another language, instead of relying on family members or bilingual staff with no training, and I will step in when I see a shortcut.

Inclusion also requires attention to the biases every clinician carries. Cooper et al. (2022) argue that implicit bias training is one step toward equity when paired with changes in how care is organized. I will complete my hospital's bias training this year and, as a concrete example, add a question to our discharge huddle asking whether any patient's pain, cost or transport concerns have been dismissed. On the staff side, I will invite quieter colleagues and night-shift nurses to lead part of each huddle, because the people least often asked are usually the ones who notice what day shift misses.

Conclusion

Separating my management skills from my leadership skills showed me that I run shifts well and lead people only some of the time. The plan in this reflection builds on coaching, calm direction and advocacy, names the leadership and management gaps I still have, and ties my growth to one real problem on my unit and to a fairer experience for patients and staff. I will revisit it with my manager in six months.

References

Carter, K. (2018). Promoting self-concept and leadership competencies among frontline nursing staff. Nursing Management, 49(9), 7. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.numa.0000538922.91277.c8

Cooper, L. A., Saha, S., & van Ryn, M. (2022). Mandated implicit bias training for health professionals: A step toward equity in health care. JAMA Health Forum, 3(8), e223250. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamahealthforum.2022.3250

Cummings, G. G., Tate, K., Lee, S., Wong, C. A., Paananen, T., Micaroni, S. P., & Chatterjee, G. E. (2018). Leadership styles and outcome patterns for the nursing workforce and work environment: A systematic review. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 85, 19-60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2018.04.016

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Hughes, R., Meadows, M., & Begley, R. (2022). AONL nurse leader competencies: Core competencies for nurse leadership. Nurse Leader, 20(5), 437-443. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mnl.2022.08.005

Medero, K., Goers, J., & Makic, M. B. F. (2023). Evaluation of a charge nurse leadership development program. Nursing Management, 54(7), 22-30. https://doi.org/10.1097/nmg.0000000000000032