Good Example Of Leader Story Essay

Leadership is one of the traits a person should have if he or she wants to succeed in life. It is a process of social influence where a person can ask the aid and support of others to accomplish a common goal. In any organization or group, a leader is very important in attaining the goals that everyone shares (Marquis and Huston 5). This is also applicable to one’s career where they can be a leader in their own small way so that they and the other people around them (teammates, officemates, or co-workers) can accomplish one or more of the goals that they have planned out from the start. But just like in anything else, there are good leaders and bad leaders. Anybody can be a leader; it is just up to them on how they exercise their leadership.
In the article “Leader Story” by Mary Ellen Doyle, she describes the type of leadership they employ in order to make St. Luke’s Hospital effective in the field of medical care. For them, the best leadership style is working together and being partners in making the services and the whole organization better (Doyle 57).

What Does the Leader Exhibit?

St. Luke’s Hospital always has shared governance since 1988 where a collegial and collaborative relationship always existed among the NCO, nursing leaders, and clinical staff (Doyle 57). Everyone is actively involved in decision-making and how care is delivered to patients. So while there is a leader in the organization, there are “no walls of authority” and staff members work together in an empowered environment. Everyone, even the physicians, is a partner in improving patient care and foreseeing medication errors.
Transitional leadership is what they do, where the leader is charged with identifying the needed change (Marquis and Huston 30). Here, the leader and his or her team create a vision to guide the change through inspiration and execute it in partnership with the dedicated members. It also serves to enhance the motivation, morale, and job performance of followers through a variety of mechanisms. Here, the leader is the role model that members follow in order to be inspired and have an interest in the project.

Leadership Style

St. Luke’s Hospital uses the Baldridge Model/Philosophy, where members understand their environment and the significant issues facing their organization (Doyle 57). They look at significant issues that will affect the organization over time and develop these strategies to address these issues. Since nursing is a very meticulous job, they are very focused and disciplined about what they work on and what would have a significant impact. By combining this model and transitional leadership, they want to achieve the following goals (Doyle 58):
establish a culture of cooperation and learning
create an empowered workforce
be fully aligned
manage by fact
be flexible
be able to respond quickly in the ever-changing environment

Is the Style Effective in the Story?

The traditional leadership and the Baldridge Model/Philosophy is all about partnership among the leader and its team/members/followers. In St. Luke’s Hospital, they partner together to get feedback from individual practitioners and their peers to talk about the performances (Doyle 58). If employees fail to do their duties, the leaders ask them to leave. The nurses are expected to live on the core values of quality, excellence, teamwork, customer focus, and resource management (Doyle 58). Even if the organization has a nursing shortage, the leaders make sure that they are focused and that they perform their work well, providing quality patient care. In addition, they let their nursing leaders develop their leadership skills in order to help everyone in the hospital to give the best care to the patients.
With this partnership style of leadership, the staff partners with executives to co-lead the balanced scorecard perspectives. For them, information is power so they share important information with each other as much as possible. They work together to ensure medication errors are addressed and see what needs to be improved. It is very important for a hospital to improve their patient care because it involves their health and life. One person cannot run everything, so everyone should cooperate and share ideas for their benefit. It may take a long time, but based on the article, I think St. Luke’s Hospital is slowly making progress. Soon, they will be able to achieve their goals and really live up to their motto “The best place to get care, the place to give care” (Doyle 57).                                                                                                           
I think this style is very effective for the hospital because everyone is helping the leader achieve their goals. Being a good leader is not about thinking of yourself, but thinking about your members and the whole organization. This is the kind of leadership I would expect from a hospital, which main purpose is to take care of their patients to the best of their abilities. Everyone should really be partnering up with each other to achieve the goals they want. A good leadership is about empowering others and St. Luke’s Hospital is doing a good job at this. I hope they continue this kind of leadership style because, for sure, they will turn out to be successful.

Works Cited

Doyle, Mary Ellen. "Leader Story". Leadership and Management Tools for the New Nurse: A
Wilkins, 2012. Print.
.Marquis, B. L. and Huston, C. J. Leadership and Management Tools for the New Nurse: A