Crucial Conversation with your nurse leader/manager

How to have a Crucial Conversation with your nurse leader/manager

Conflict or confrontation on any level can be difficult, especially when it involves leadership.  It is important that all nurses feel empowered to voice concerns or issues to both nurse leaders and nurse managers.  As nurses, advocacy is an integral part of our professional role.  We advocate for ourselves, for our patients, for our colleagues, and for our profession across continuum of employment settings and roles (Tomajan, 2012). Our job as leaders is to be a resource for staff, support and encourage staff, support open communication, provide education, create a healthy work environment, and be viewed as a role model for our staff.  As your nurse leader, it is important that I am informed in a positive and constructive way if there are any concerns, issues, or conflicts with any member of our team (this also includes me personally).   Nobody is perfect, but change cannot happen without a voice.  As nurses, it is crucial that we develop that voice and have that crucial conversation to advocate for ourselves, patients, and colleagues.

Below are helpful tips to utilize in having crucial conversation with your nurse manager (O’Keeffe, 2012)

Do	Don’t
Write an email or personally request for a private sit-down meeting with your leader/manager	Confront your nurse leader/manager in the hallway or at a staff meeting and start discussing the issue or concern.
Offer to your nurse leader/manager if there is anything you can do to help or change the situation	Just make statements like: “why do you not like me?”
It is important that you remember that we are all humans who have feelings	Attack or lash out in a personal manor
Ask your nurse leader/manager for their view or see if they have any suggestions to help the situation, in order to create an positive result both parties’ opinions should be bright to light	Try not to overrun the entire conversation
Communicate that work relationships and creating a health work environment are important to you	Dismiss or attack your nurse leader/manager’s ability as a leader
Communicate that your work is important to you and that you take our job very seriously	Lead your nurse leader/manager to believe that you are not serious about your job or your responsibilities
Give specific examples to deliver your point	Go off on tangents or make general accusations without facts to back it up
End the conversation in a positive note or with a handshake, even if it did not go the way you had expected.	Just walk out or end the conversation in a negative manor

References:

O'Keeffe, M. (2012). Difficult conversations: Getting along with the boss. Nurse.com. Retrieved from http://scrubs.nurse.com/blog/?p=541.

Tomajan, K. (2012). Advocating for nurses and nursing.  The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 17(1), 1-9. Retrieved from http://nursingworld.org/MainMenuCategories/ANAMarketplace/ANAPeriodicals/OJIN/TableofContents/Vol-17-2012/No1-Jan-2012/Advocating-for-Nurses.html.