NURS 489 Week 3 Servant Leader Interview Example

Servant Leader Interview: A Night Charge Nurse on Listening, Stepping In and Developing Others

The Interviewee

I interviewed a night charge nurse on our medical-surgical unit who has worked there for fourteen years. When I asked several coworkers whom they most wanted as charge nurse on a hard night, every one named her. She has no management title. The interview took fifteen minutes in a quiet conference room before her shift, and I took notes with her permission and read them back to her afterward to check accuracy.

Questions and Answers

Question 1: How would you describe your leadership style? "I'm the one who works for everybody else tonight. My job is to make sure my nurses can do their jobs. If someone's drowning, I get in the water."

Question 2: Tell me about a time you put your team's needs ahead of your own. She described a night when two admissions arrived at once and a new graduate was in tears. She took one admission herself, even though as charge nurse she had no assignment, and sent the new nurse on a ten-minute break. "Nobody learns anything while they're panicking."

Question 3: How do you help staff grow? "I ask more than I tell. When a new nurse calls me about a patient, I say, 'What do you think is going on?' before I give my opinion." She also recommends nurses for committees and precepting roles.

Question 4: What is the hardest part of leading this way? "Saying no to myself. Sometimes I want to fix everything, but if I do, nobody else learns. And sometimes serving the team means telling someone something they don't want to hear."

Analysis

Her answers show four behaviors associated with servant leadership: listening, working alongside staff, developing others and placing the team's needs first. Finkelman (2016) describes leadership as something any nurse can exercise, not only those in formal positions, and this charge nurse leads entirely through influence and example. De Pree (2008) writes of leadership as a kind of service in which leaders owe their followers the conditions to do their best work, and her description of making sure "my nurses can do their jobs" is that idea in practice.

Recent research gives these behaviors more definition. Hall and O'Malley (2026) developed and tested a 13-item scale of servant leadership behaviors among 200 nurse leaders in three Magnet hospitals, aligning the items with the Magnet model and finding strong reliability; they note that servant leadership is linked in the evidence to healthy work environments and nurse well-being. Her habit of asking new nurses what they think, before offering her view, reflects the developmental emphasis such scales measure. Waseem et al. (2026) surveyed 269 nurses and found that servant leadership had both direct and indirect positive effects on nurses' innovative work behavior through trust in leadership and knowledge sharing. The trust her coworkers expressed in naming her, and her practice of recommending them for new roles, fit that pathway.

Her answer to the fourth question is important too. Servant leadership is sometimes misunderstood as never saying no. She described serving the team sometimes by having difficult conversations, which matches the course's emphasis on speaking honestly when stakes are high.

Servant Leadership and Keeping Nurses

Her style may matter for more than morale. Bolt et al. (2025) interviewed 56 nurses who had left an employer and found that motives for leaving arose at several organizational levels, with job demands and the quality of the relationship between nurses and their leaders among the theories that best explained why distinct groups of nurses left. When I asked our unit's newer nurses why they stayed through a difficult first year, two mentioned her by name. A charge nurse who sends a panicking new graduate on a ten-minute break and takes the admission herself is changing the job demands that new nurse faces that night, and she is building the kind of relationship that makes staying worthwhile. Servant leadership at the point of care may therefore be one of the least expensive retention strategies a unit has.

Biblical Principles

Scripture's picture of leadership is service. Jesus described his own mission as serving rather than being served and told his disciples that greatness among them would look the same way (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Mark 10:43-45). Peter urged elders to shepherd the flock willingly, not as domineering over those in their charge but as examples (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, 1 Peter 5:2-3). The charge nurse's choice to take an admission herself while a frightened new nurse caught her breath is that kind of example, leadership exercised from beside rather than above.

What I Learned

I became a charge nurse six months ago, and I have been leading mostly by directing. This interview showed me another way. I will ask more questions before giving answers, take a patient myself when the unit is overwhelmed and look for chances to recommend others. I will also ask my manager whether I can shadow her on a busy night, since watching how she decides when to step in and when to hold back will teach me more than the interview could. Her staff did not describe a nurse who gave good orders; they described a nurse who got in the water with them.

References

Bolt, E. E. T., Ali, M., & Winterton, J. (2025). Why nurses quit: Job demands, leadership and voluntary nurse turnover in adult care in the Netherlands. Social Science & Medicine, 365, 117550. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.117550

De Pree, M. (2008). Leadership jazz: The essential elements of a great leader (Rev. ed.). Doubleday.

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Finkelman, A. (2016). Leadership and management for nurses: Core competencies for quality care (3rd ed.). Pearson.

Hall, H., & O'Malley, P. (2026). Development and psychometric testing of an instrument to measure servant leadership behaviors in Magnet nurse leaders. Worldviews on Evidence-Based Nursing, 23(5), e70178. https://doi.org/10.1111/wvn.70178

Waseem, M., Hassan, R., Habiba, U., Khan, K., & Malik, M. H. (2026). Servant leadership and nurses' innovative work behavior: The serial mediation role of trust-in leadership and knowledge sharing. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 58(2), e70081. https://doi.org/10.1111/jnu.70081