Nurse Manager Skill Inventory is a tool used to evaluate the skills and expertise of a nurse manager in three primary areas: managing the business, leading the people, and creating the leader in yourself. Each skill is marked out of four points where one is novice level of experience, whereas four represents expert practice. The last section of the Inventory is concentrated on various leadership qualities and skills, particularly regarding reflective leadership.
Personal and Professional Accountability
The first subsection evaluates the accountability of a nurse manager in terms of four fundamental skills: personal growth and development, ethical behavior and practice, professional association involvement, and certification. I rated myself as competent in all areas except for professional association involvement. I feel like I do not participate in the life of professional associations as much as others, which affects my networking skill and development. However, I work hard towards my certification and attempt to develop my personal abilities and talents by continuing education and conducting self-assessment on a regular basis to identify areas for improvement. Moreover, I believe that ethical behavior is one of the most important practices in working with people; therefore, I aim to make choices that support the ethical standards of nursing practice. Overall, despite the fact that some aspects of my professional accountability would benefit from further development, my overall apprehension and application of this set of skills can be described as ‘competent.’
Career Planning
I perceive myself as having a firm position regarding my career planning. I am aware of the specifics and basics of my current role, and I try to fulfill the expectations of my position at the current level of practice. However, when it comes to future planning and career options, I prefer to have some flexibility instead of choosing a certain fixed goal. To me, working in a medical facility requires flexibility and sometimes it might be hard to make the right choices if you have already determined your career path and do not expect it to change or deviate from the chosen direction. Despite having a vision of where my career interests might lie in the future, I tend not to build any specific plans or create any expectations related to my future position, which is why I rated myself as a novice in the “Knowing your future” category. “Positioning yourself,” on the other hand, is a skill that requires both flexibility and insight, which is why I rated myself as competent in this skill. Overall, my career planning process and choices depend rather on the outside influences than on a particular set of skills, which could prove to be useful in a fast-paced nursing environment.
Personal Journey Disciplines
The following section refers to the specific skills and qualities that assist in developing the individual strengths of a leader. For instance, I rated myself as two on the shared leadership scale, because I have not yet studied shared governance in detail and hence I only know the basic principles and applications of this management practice. Action learning, on the other hand, is a more familiar concept to me. Over the years of learning, I have found that action learning is, indeed, the best practice for me, as it allows me to understand not just the theoretical base but also the practical application of a concept or tool. I rated myself as three in both action learning and reflective practice, which promotes active use of reflection in leadership.
Reflective Practice Reference Behaviors/Tenets
I feel like I have a competent level of experience in all areas of reflective practice, except for the appreciation of ambiguity and keeping commitments to oneself: there are times when I find it challenging to function in an ambiguous or uncertain environment, while at the same time I do not exactly understand the concept of unity between the spirit and body and its contribution to our development and growth. Nevertheless, I tend to apply other reflective skills and principles in my work, as well as in everyday life, as I believe that these skills can be used to achieve a substantial change in my workplace. For example, promoting diversity of staff is important as it can help to overcome the cultural barriers between the patients and nurses, which could potentially undermine the effectiveness of service. By developing an understanding of various cultures, nurses can achieve a better knowledge of how to communicate with patients of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Hence, a culturally diverse workforce would be able to attend to the needs of a wider variety of patients, irrespective of their culture and spoken language.
Conclusion
Overall, I believe that the main area for development for me is my involvement with professional associations. In order to engage more, it will be necessary to find out which professional associations my fellow employees are part of and to involve myself with these associations. Networking with other professionals can help me to increase my professional accountability and increase my awareness of certain trends and news of the nursing practices worldwide.