NURS 626 Week 3 Leadership Development Project Part 3: Group Discussion Board Forum on the Leadership Practices Inventory Example

Leadership Development Project Part 3: Reflecting on My Leadership Practices Inventory

NURS 626 Nursing Administration IV: Nursing Administration Capstone, Leadership Development Project Part 3: Group Discussion Board Forum

Thread by [Student Name]

The scores, the writer's unit and the group members replied to are composites written for a model forum.

Here are my self-scores on the Leadership Practices Inventory, each out of a possible 60:

What surprised me most was not my lowest score but how far below my highest it fell. Fifteen points separate Enable Others to Act from Encourage the Heart. I predicted in my leadership style reflection that encouraging the heart or inspiring a shared vision would come out lowest, and both did, but I had not expected the gap to be this wide. Kouzes and Posner (2017) describe Encourage the Heart as recognizing contributions by showing appreciation for individual excellence and celebrating values and victories by creating a spirit of community. When I scored the six items for that practice, the lowest were the ones about public recognition and celebrating milestones as a team. I thank people at the end of a shift, but I almost never make a nurse's good work visible to the rest of the unit. Last month a nurse on my shift caught a heparin dosing error that would have reached a patient, and I told her she did well in the hallway at 3 a.m. That was the end of it. No one else on the unit heard about it, and the catch never appeared in a huddle or a staff meeting, which means the lesson in it was lost along with the credit.

My scores mostly match how I see myself and what I heard in a 360-degree review two years ago. My staff rated me highly then on fairness and support, which fits my score for Enable Others to Act, and lower on direct feedback, which the inventory does not measure directly but which relates to encouraging the heart, since honest feedback and genuine recognition both depend on paying close attention to a person's work.

I am cautious, though, about how much a self-assessment can tell me. Alharbi and Almansour (2025) gave the Leadership Practices Inventory to 342 nurse managers in Riyadh and found very high self-reported scores across all five practices, with averages near 4.57 on a five-point version of the scale for every practice. Scores that high and that uniform may reflect how managers want to see themselves as much as how they lead. My own numbers could carry the same bias. By contrast, Emam et al. (2024) randomized 80 head nurses to a six-week leadership program built on 360-degree feedback or to a control group, and they gathered ratings from staff nurses and supervisors as well as from the head nurses themselves. The intervention group improved on every practice in self, supervisor and staff ratings. A self-score tells me where I think I stand; only the people I lead can tell me whether they agree.

For those reasons, my Performance Development Plan will focus on Encourage the Heart, and I plan to ask six nurses on my unit to complete the observer version of the inventory so I can compare their view with mine. When Paul urged the Thessalonians to keep encouraging and strengthening each other, he added that they were already doing it (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, 1 Thessalonians 5:11), so the instruction itself came wrapped in praise. Encouragement is part of how believers care for one another, and I have treated it as optional.

Reply to Tasha

Tasha, your highest score was Challenge the Process at 57, and you wrote that you are proud of being the person on your unit who questions every outdated routine. I want to push on that a little. Kouzes and Posner (2017) describe Challenge the Process as searching for opportunities and experimenting, but they pair it with learning from mistakes and building small wins, so that change does not wear people out. A very high score here might mean you are an energetic improver, or it might mean you start more changes than your unit can absorb. You mentioned that your Enable Others to Act score was your lowest at 42, and I wonder whether the two are related, since a leader who drives many changes personally may leave less room for others to own them. When I led a bedside report change by myself a few years ago, it failed for exactly that reason. One way to find out would be to ask your staff which of the changes you led in the past year still feel like yours rather than theirs. If most of them still feel like yours, your development plan might aim at handing the next change to a staff nurse from the start, with you as the coach rather than the driver. That would let you keep your gift for questioning routines while building the very practice that scored lowest, and it might also leave your unit with a second person who knows how to lead change when you are not on shift.

Reply to Brandon

Brandon, I appreciated how candid you were that your scores are all between 50 and 56 and that you felt uneasy about how evenly high they came out. I think your unease is worth trusting. Hafsteinsdóttir et al. (2025) used the 360-degree version of the Leadership Practices Inventory to evaluate a leadership mentoring program for PhD-prepared nurses in the Netherlands, and fellows improved on all five practices over the program, while also moving into higher positions and becoming more productive in research. Part of what made the program useful was that it used observer ratings and mentoring, not self-scores alone. If all five of your scores are high, the self-version may simply not be sensitive enough to show where you could grow. You might ask your manager and a few staff nurses to complete the observer version before you choose your development focus, and then pick the practice where their scores fall furthest below yours. Proverbs observes that faithful are the wounds of a friend (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Proverbs 27:6), and the honest ratings of people who work with you may be the most useful data you collect this term. There is also a practical reason to do it now. Our development plans are due in Week 8, and a plan built on observer scores gives you a baseline you can measure again in six months, whereas a plan built on uniformly high self-scores gives you very little to measure against. Would your manager be willing to complete the observer form this week?

References

Alharbi, S. M., & Almansour, A. M. (2025). Leadership behaviours and practices assessment among nurse managers in Riyadh Second Health Cluster. BMC Nursing, 24(1), Article 969. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-025-03618-4

Emam, S. M., Fakhry, S. F., & Abdrabou, H. M. (2024). Leaders development program by 360 degree feedback: Reflection on head nurses' leadership practices. BMC Nursing, 23(1), Article 772. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-024-02395-w

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

Hafsteinsdóttir, T. B., Huntink, E., & Schoonhoven, L. (2025). Leadership mentoring in nursing research influencing leadership development, career development, and research productivity of PhD prepared nurses: A pretest-posttest study. Nursing Outlook, 73(2), Article 102359. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.outlook.2025.102359

Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2017). The leadership challenge: How to make extraordinary things happen in organizations (6th ed.). Wiley.