Leadership and Management

Leadership and management are crucial in the delivery of quality care to the patients.
Both concepts have some similarities, but the differences vary in terms of skills and behavior
during dissemination. Leading is the art of motivating people or groups of individuals while
encouraging them to be part of a shared vision or purpose. On the other hand, managing entails
the practice of planning, coordinating, organizing, and putting in place a structure that people
can use to carry out their assigned tasks (Weberg et al., 2019). Leadership and management at
some point intertwine because a good manager should have good leadership skills.
On the other hand, a good leader should also have management skills to enhance
effectiveness in the organization (World Health Organization, 2019). Leaders are the vision
bearers and use skills to communicate expectations to the employees. The leaders generate
strategies, objectives, and targets to actualize the stated vision through maximum resource
utilization and employee motivation. Conversely, the managers organize the available factors of
production and apply them so that the best results are produced. Leading is technically art, while
management is a science that involves using logical reasoning to implement resources to realize
maximum results (Weberg et al., 2019). As a nurse, I have interacted with both leaders and
managers. The leaders formulate the unit’s goals and objectives, and the employees work to
achieve the set targets efficiently. The managers, on the other hand, equally work to ensure that

the set tasks are accomplished. They use all the resources available to ensure that the set targets
are achieved within the stipulated time frame.
As an advanced practice registered nurse (APRN), I have leadership and management
capabilities because I am equipped with expert knowledge and can make decisions on clinical
competencies according to my scope of practice (Lamb et al., 2018). APRNs can formulate
goals specific to patient care. For example, I formulated a goal of reducing infections on
surgical sites. At the same time, I also used management skills to guide nurses on the tasks
they need to implement to reduce surgical infections, such as sterilizing the area before surgery
and proper dressing after the procedure. Further, I incorporated evidence-based care in my
practise to enhance efficiency in care provision. As a leader, I employed policy changes to
implement the strategies to prevent related surgical infections entirely. This was done through
training of staff, provision of the best equipment, especially when handling vulnerable or high-
risk patients. As a manager, I ensured that the staff had been trained and all modules
completed.
Further, I followed up to ensure that the employees were conversant with the new
policies and comfortable implementing them. This process ensured that the new procedures
were sustainable in the long run. Therefore APRNs are essential employees to a health facility
because they can use their knowledge to lead and manage a team of nurses within a unit.

References

Lamb, A., Martin-Misener, R., Bryant-Lukosius, D., Latimer, M. (July 2018). Describing the
leadership capabilities of advanced practice nurses using a qualitative descriptive study.
Nursing Open, 5(3): 400- 413.
Weberg, D., Mangold, K., Porter-O’Grady, T., & Malloch, K. (2019). Leadership in nursing
practice: Changing the landscape of health care (3rd ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning.
ISBN-13: 9781284146530

World Health Organization (2019). Chapter 10: Leadership and Management. Retrieved from
https://www.who.int/hiv/pub/imai/om_10_leadership_management.pdf