NURS 524 Week 1 Reflective Exercise 1 on Leadership and Management Example

Reflective Exercise 1: Managing the Assignment Board or Leading the People on It, a Charge Nurse's First Look at Leadership

The Experience

Six months into my role as day charge nurse on a 30-bed telemetry unit, I had a morning that I still think about. I arrived early, reviewed every patient, balanced the assignments by acuity, flagged the two patients likely to need rapid response, and posted a board I was proud of. By 0900 the shift was unraveling. One nurse refused to take a fourth patient because "the board always does this to nights," two others were not speaking because of a disagreement the day before, and a new graduate was quietly drowning with a patient whose heart rate kept climbing. Every task on my board had an owner. Nobody was working as a team. I spent the morning reassigning patients, answering call lights and doing the new graduate's medication pass, and I went home exhausted, fully convinced that the staff were the problem.

Interpreting the Experience

The chapters this week by Kelly and Tazbir (2014) changed how I see that morning. They distinguish management, which is concerned with planning, organizing, coordinating and controlling resources to accomplish work, from leadership, which is the process of influencing people toward goals and building the relationships that make shared work possible. By that definition, my morning was an exercise in management without leadership. My planning was sound, but I had not built the relationships that would have made the staff trust the board. The nurse who refused a fourth patient was not reacting to my assignment so much as to months of feeling that night shift's needs were ignored, and I had never asked about that. I had organized the work beautifully and never once asked the people doing it what they needed.

Porter-O'Grady and Malloch (2016) add a second explanation. In their account, a hospital unit behaves less like a machine a leader can steer and more like a living network, where results grow out of how people relate and respond to one another. In such systems, a charge nurse who tries to fix problems by controlling more tightly, as I did by reassigning and taking over tasks, may solve the immediate crisis but weakens the team's own ability to adapt. When I took the new graduate's medication pass, I solved the backlog but missed the chance to ask an experienced nurse to coach the graduate through it, which would have strengthened the team for the next difficult morning.

What the Research Suggests

Recent research supports the idea that how staff feel about their unit's climate matters as much as any single leader's behavior. In a survey of 306 ward nurses in Japan, Hontake et al. (2026) found that the organizational climate of the ward was positively associated with psychological safety, the sense that nurses can speak openly and seek help, and that psychological safety in turn was associated with work engagement. In their model, servant leadership by itself did not show a significant effect once climate was considered. For me, that finding is humbling. It suggests that my good intentions as a charge nurse matter less than whether the unit feels like a place where the new graduate can say "I am in trouble" at 0830 instead of hiding it until 1000.

Communication is where a charge nurse can shape that climate day by day. González-García et al. (2026) reviewed studies of communication competence in nurse managers and described it as a foundation for coordinating teams, keeping a unit in step with its hospital, deciding together and protecting patients. Looking back, I communicated plenty on that morning, but almost all of it was direction. I gave instructions, I did not ask questions, and I did not explain why I had made the assignments I did. A two-minute huddle at 0700, explaining the reasoning behind the board and asking who needed help, might have prevented most of what followed.

What I Will Do Differently

I am making three commitments for the next month. First, I will start each shift with a brief huddle in which I explain the assignment logic and ask one question: "Who is worried about their assignment, and why?" Second, I will check in individually with the two newest nurses before 0900 each day I am in charge, so that asking for help becomes routine rather than a sign of failure. Third, when a problem arises, I will try to connect people who can solve it together rather than solving it myself, for example by pairing a new graduate with an experienced nurse rather than taking over the task. I will keep brief notes on each shift so that by Week 6 I can reflect on whether these changes made a difference.

Looking Ahead

I expect this course to help me move from being an effective manager of shifts to being a leader whom staff trust. The servant leadership readings at the end of the term interest me most, because my morning on the telemetry unit showed me that my instinct is to serve by doing tasks for people rather than by developing them. I want to learn the difference. I also want to understand how a charge nurse, who has responsibility but little formal authority, can shape a unit's climate. The research on psychological safety suggests that climate is built in small exchanges, such as how a charge nurse responds when someone admits a mistake or asks a basic question, and those exchanges are entirely within my control. If I can learn to treat each one as a chance to make the unit safer to speak in, I suspect the assignment board will take care of itself far more often than it did on that morning.

References

González-García, A., Marqués-Sánchez, P., Martín-Vázquez, C., Serrano-Gemes, G., Bermejo-Martínez, D., & Pérez-González, S. (2026). Characteristics of communication competency in nurse managers: A systematic review. Healthcare, 14(17), Article 2814. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare14172814

Hontake, T., Nishi, M., Kuzushima, S., & Kamizawa, N. (2026). Effects of organizational climate and servant leadership on work engagement among Japanese nurses: The mediating role of psychological safety. Journal of Nursing Management, 2026(1), Article e5755950. https://doi.org/10.1155/jonm/5755950

Kelly, P., & Tazbir, J. (2014). Essentials of nursing leadership and management (3rd ed.). Delmar Cengage Learning.

Porter-O'Grady, T., & Malloch, K. (2016). Leadership in nursing practice (2nd ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning.