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Only the trained survive

Nurse Leader Weekly, February 13, 2006

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Hold onto nurse managers with core competencies training

Teaching nurse managers how to partner across teams, follow up with people, inspire others, and take appropriate risks in a culture that does not always reward them are just a few of the training efforts put forth by the staff education department at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) to develop its midlevel leaders.

Staff educators at UPMC worked in conjunction with Development Dimensions International (DDI), a Pittsburgh-based human resources development company, to determine the competencies essential for nurse manager success. Together they identified the following core competencies for effective managers:

1. Coach and develop staff for results

2. Inspire loyalty and trust

3. Manage work (e.g., resources, time, and budgets)

4. Partner within and across teams

5. Influence through personal power (rather than using position power or professional rank)

6. Drive performance (i.e., set and uphold performance expectations for staff and leaders)

7. Select talent

Along with the seven core competencies, UPMC identified five leadership skill areas in which nurse managers must excel to be successful:

1. transformational leadership

2. planning and decision-making

3. developing people

4. innovation and change

5. healthcare economics

The seven leadership competencies and five skill areas combined create the framework for the courses UPMC developed to train its nurse managers, says Judith Bradle, director of the Beckwith Institute for Innovation in Patient Care at UPMC. Such courses are taught during a weeklong training program referred to as the Health Care Leadership Academy (www.hcleadershipacademy.org). Participants are then assigned a project which they must complete within approximately six months.

Projects may include implementing a patient education strategy or looking at emergency department throughput. The project must deal with a real problem within their current role, says Bradle. Managers are assigned a mentor and receive ongoing support.

Advice for training nurse managers

Training programs for adults must be as active as possible, says Bradle. For example, if you present a four-hour-long module about conflict, most of the presentation should involve role playing, hands-on case studies, and working through examples with the participant or the entire group. It should not be a lecture, Bradle cautions. "We spend a lot of time developing the action piece of [training programs]."

Source: Adapted from The Staff Educator, February 2006, HCPro, Inc.

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