Self-Assessment of Leadership, Collaboration, and Ethics

Section I: Leadership and Collaboration Experience

My personal experience with leadership began in 2017 when I became a nurse supervisor
for an infusion company. I had 20 nurses working under me. Some of my roles included
collaborating with the pharmacy, facilitating visits, and payroll. The work was challenging, but
the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 made it even more difficult. The pandemic
completely changed the working environment as I now had to work with limited resources and
inspire my overwhelmed, stressed, and overworked team. However, through effective leadership,
I managed to handle the crisis competently and keep the team motivated throughout the highly
challenging period.
Leadership of The Project
Throughout the period that I have had to lead other nurses, I have not had any preferred
leadership style. Instead, I have often considered the most suitable leadership approach
depending on a given context and the outcome that I intend to get. According to James & Bennet
(2021), there are three factors that one should consider when choosing a leadership style:
purpose, people, and performance. The leadership style must be one that helps in the
achievement of my vision or purpose. Secondly, it must be suited to the people that I am leading
with regard to their skill level, experience, and motivation. Third, it must be one that helps to
improve the performance of the team, not hinder it.
To this end, my leadership style was compassionate style. This style is characterized by
four key pillars: empathizing, helping, understanding, and attending (West et al., 2017). As
Covid-19 created a lot of stress for both nurses and patients, I figured out that a compassionate
style of leadership would be the most appropriate in the prevailing circumstances. The nurses

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were often overwhelmed by the number of sick people that they were attending, were fearful of
their safety and health, and lacked adequate motivation.
My goals or vision were to help my team of nurses copes with the extreme stress of work,
work in harmony, and provide patients with the highest quality of care. To this end, I found the
compassionate style of leadership to be quite effective in achieving these goals. First, it led to a
high buy-in for the decisions that I made because one of the key tenets of compassionate
leadership is collaborative decision-making, where everyone’s concerns are adequately
addressed. The buy-in was also achieved because the nurses understood that I cared for them
deeply and understood the stressful environment that they were working in. Therefore, whatever
decision that we made took into consideration their interests.
The leadership style also fostered effective communication. Dealing with Covid-19
required effective communication of not just my vision but also of the latest research findings to
help us in dealing with the crisis as we always tried as much as possible to use evidence-based
practices in the management of the crisis. Being always in close touch with the team, I was able
to quickly communicate any new information with the nurses and have a healthy discussion over
the same.
Approach to Fostering Collaboration and Motivation Among Stakeholders
To foster collaboration within my team, my approach involved collective decision-
making and sharing of responsibilities. Such an approach created an environment where there
were no unnecessary blame games. Additionally, it made everyone know that we either failed or
succeeded as a team. Apart from increasing collaboration, I also had to find ways of motivating
my team. Nursing is generally a stressful profession because of the heavy workload that nurses
often have to manage. However, the Covid-19 pandemic added another angle to their stress. Due

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to its high contagious nature, many nurses were genuinely worried that they could contract the
virus and even die from it. This fear for their personal health and safety made the situation even
worse and greatly reduced their motivation.
In order to motivate my team, I used two tactics. First, I regularly sent them messages of
appreciation for their work and sacrifices. I made them understand that they were not just doing a
job but serving humanity at the highest level possible. Secondly, even though we were
overwhelmed by patient numbers, I tried as much as possible to create time that they could rest
and partake in an activity that they loved. Any time they come back from such activities, they
would be highly energized and ready to do their job with vigor and motivation.

Section II: Ethics Experience

Ethical Dilemma
Ethical dilemmas occur when all available options for dealing with a given situation are
not ideal (Levitt, 2014). When faced with ethical dilemmas, it is not easy knowing the right
course of action to take as there is no clear-cut good or bad action. Apart from leaving one in
moral distress, they can also lead to a decline in the quality of care that patients receive or even
expose one to legal and professional problems.
Even though I have been leading my nurse team for more than four years, the period that
I faced the most ethical dilemmas was during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. In the early stages
of the pandemic, there was an acute shortage of personal protective equipment (PPEs). No one
had anticipated that we were going to have a pandemic of such scale. Neither had anyone
anticipated that the pandemic would require hospitals and other care facilities to have large
stocks of various types of PPEs. Unfortunately, Covid-19 proved to be very contagious.
Additionally, there were extremely high levels of fear of contracting the disease, both among the

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nurses and the patients. These factors made having PPEs absolutely necessary. Nurses were
reluctant to attend to patients without PPEs, and patients too were reluctant to be attended to by
nurses without appropriate PPEs. This situation presented a serious ethical dilemma to me
because the two options that I had involved either exposing the patients and nurses to Covid-19
or denying the patients care for their health conditions.
Even though the options were tough, I decided that under no circumstance would a nurse
attend to a patient without appropriate PPEs. This decision was meant to safeguard the health and
safety of both the patients and the nurses. With this decision, many nurses could not care for the
patients as much as they wanted. However, I felt that it was the right decision. In making the
decision, I was guided by ethical principles and guidelines from my workplace and profession.
The American Nurses Association (ANA) has a Code of Ethics that it adopted in 1950 (Haddad
& Geiger, 2018). This code has been regularly updated over the years to match changing legal
and technological environments as well as new research findings. However, at its core is the
need to uphold, among others, confidentiality, human dignity, and treat quality healthcare to
patients as their right (Haddad & Geiger, 2018). These are pretty much the same ethical
guidelines that we have at our workplace. Quality care to patients characterized by high safety
standards and commitment to the best healthcare outcomes is non-negotiable. That is the reason I
decided to ensure that even though we had serious shortages of PPEs, nurses could only attend to
patients with the appropriate personal safety equipment. That was the only way that I could
guarantee the safety of the patients and the nurses as well.
The decision I made was not just supported by my workplace and professional code of
ethics but also by two of the key ethical principles in healthcare – beneficence, and non-
maleficence. According to Levitt (2014), the principle of beneficence requires that at all times

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healthcare professionals make decisions that advance the best interests of patients. In the context
of Covid-19, the overriding interest of patients was to stay safe from the virus. Closely related to
beneficence is the principle of non-maleficence. According to this principle, healthcare
professionals should take measures that patients are not exposed to any harm or no harm is done
to them (Levitt, 2014). Based on this principle, my decision to ensure that only nurses with the
appropriate PPEs attended to patients avoided exposing the patients to the harm of contracting
Covid-19. Therefore, it was one that adhered to the principle of non-maleficence.

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References

Haddad, L. M., & Geiger, R. A. (2018). Nursing ethical considerations.
James, A. H., & Bennett, C. L. (2021). Effective nurse leadership in times of crisis. Nursing
Management, 28(3).
Levitt, D. (2014, July). Ethical decision-making in a caring environment: The four principles and
LEADS. In Healthcare Management Forum (Vol. 27, No. 2, pp. 105-107). Sage CA: Los
Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications.
West, M., Eckert, R., Collins, B., & Chowla, R. (2017). Caring to change. How compassionate
leadership can stimulate innovation in health care. London, UK: The King’s Fund.