The one change to unleash the power of your nurses or techs is to empower them. Empower them to be more than they think they can be and empower them to reach further than they have before. With empowerment comes the belief in abilities and with the right implementation into your business you might just add a new service or income stream as well as maintain happier healthier nurses, keep them for longer and positively impact your business.
How many of you can say you know what your nurses aspire to do in their careers? Have you asked your nurses which area they like most or would like to focus on further – is it frontline? Is it surgery? Is it diagnostics? Is it leadership? Is there something else they aspire to do – Maybe pain, rehabilitation, or even technologically focused the opportunities are limitless and some might even surprise you with their replies.
I can’t speak for everyone but I guarantee there are nurses out there wanting to do more never thought they would be able for it, maybe they need the opportunity to be heard and then the guidance provided to get them to where they want to go. We just need to foster this vision in our nurses so that they can extend themselves and their career abilities – you just need for them to feel they can achieve anything once they set their mind to it.
I know from having spoken to you over the years that many of you are progressive in the utilisation of your nurses. They do play a major role in your business and can be the dynamic force to getting things done and in some instances be the face of your clinic. SO how can you empower them to do more? These are the new leaders in our industry – given the tools they can spread their knowledge not only to the new grads and nurses coming through your clinic but to the greater community.
Our industry is looking for the next leaders, speakers and those willing to be the voice of the future, this is where empowerment comes in – many nurses foster the belief that they’re not good enough, don’t know enough or are too shy or nervous to speak in to a wider audience but if we work towards unleashing them from this mentality, if we support them and if we drive them to believe in themselves – well anything is possible.
Empowerment requires a mind shift on both sides of the spectrum – It requires more listening rather than talking from yourselves or management, it requires a belief and trust in your employees, it requires a foundation to set the path, it requires mistakes to be forgiven and efforts to be praised. So how do we get there?
First we should take stock of the roadblocks that may hinder the ability to empower our nurses:
There can be many roadblocks for various reasons, some may resonate, some may be different but I will touch on three today:
*Limitations – such as
Maybe it’s a lack of skillset of your staff
Maybe it hasn’t been planned for or be in your financial budget
*OR and this is something we all seem to say is not having enough time.
So now that these few have been identified and you might well have identified your own we need to work to change these limitations.
If it’s a lack of skills then that’s your foundation to provide the tools needed for those skills to be gained – whether you can focus on them in house or from an outside source – this is the starting point. It could be simply that every day you ask a question on a certain area for example Tomorrow I want you to tell me why I am using this fluid here? Or tomorrow I want you to tell me about two of the pain receptor pathways and what is important about them? Challenge them to find out the information and present it back. They then have until the following day to look it up and come back to you with an answer. Don’t forget to make sure you get the answer the following day but this is just one idea to start fostering the ability to self learn and build self empowerment through gaining new knowledge.
SO simply ask – what skills would they like to further build on? Or what more would they like to do to enhance their career?
You might find they’d to do more in the practice – this could be anything obviously within ‘legal boundaries’, but once identified – if you teach them the way you want things done – many are very competent, and provide them opportunities – you might just have some extra time to spare by doing so.
Allowing your nurses to do more must come with background knowledge and an understanding of why they’re doing what they’re doing. It’s important that the learning of ‘why comes with the practical doing – we need to support them to do this from the beginning and may come in the form of outside opportunities such as further training or it might be that you suggest they do the VBG/Crampton consulting leadership and management, or it might be they have a special interest area that the American Vet Tech courses support – there is so many opportunities.
Have the discussion and then give them time to do the initial research and you might find some already have a project that they’ve been thinking about. So lets say it might be they’d like to focus more on rehabilitation. So get them to fill out a basic one page justification plan that outlines what do they see they need – to get there. Planning is an important factor to making empowerment a reality – planning provides a clear guide to each party on what happens, how it happens and when it happens.
This will help nurses to start thinking further into what they want to do but also foster a set of goals that can be benchmarked against. It will also identify for you – what the project is, what education is required, what equipment or tools are needed and should outline the benefits to the practise. It allows target dates to be clearly identified and becomes the accountability that forms the learning process and the basis of the project. This may well be something the practice manager can help with but it gives ownership of the project to the nurse that can then be reviewed to as a guide and action plan all in one
Try not to say no to everything as well if the plan doesn’t stack up or the budget isn’t there for the whole project then provide suggestions as to where they can make changes to make it achievable – you never know – you may just get a revolution out of some of the ideas that come through. – Keep an open mind and think on it before saying no….
Like with everything don’t make the initial process too hard it won’t work otherwise and interest and traction is lost.
Trust that you’ve got superstars in your midst, Great managers will drive outstanding performance, you just need to harness ways in which your team can empower each other through encouraged extended learning, collaboration and individual growth.
Share the load across the team – assign a mentor with a common area of interest and provide them with the time to have regular catch ups in order to drive the plan forward and check off milestone targets. Actively encourage and participate in lunchtime peer review of cases that they may have worked on together or have case study challenges or face offs in the practise – by the way I’m always looking for case studies for the veterinary nursing Journal so just putting it out there – send them my way!!
If it’s speaking that they might like to try – support them to present at a lunchtime forum where it’s a safe starting point or suggest submitting for a local VNCA division talk or even outside skills could be provided such as attending toastmasters to help build up public speaking skills and breakthrough those nerve barriers.
Time related:
It is imperative that time is made available for your nurses to achieve these goals it’s so important that they can get this time to apply to expand their knowledge base, it’s no good giving time to study in clinic and then pulling them out to do other work or they are constantly interrupted. They too need to be accountable to the time afforded to them accountability comes with such things as lunchtime presentations
I recently heard of a practise that provides its new grads and vets one day a week with paid CPD leave, it meant that those employees could use that time to further themselves by being provided the time to do research on a particular case or surgery or watch webinars or catch up on any work related learning so long as the time was used in a productive way to enhance their ongoing professionalism. I thought this was great and thought well this could be afforded to a similar extended framework for nurses maybe one day a month – up to you, the possibilities are limitless.
Each of the above is a consideration on creating a culture of empowered team members. Beware of the compromising roadblocks – clear the obstacles from the path and take time to make empowerment a practical responsibility of the whole team. Lead the way – Leadership needs to resonate in order to navigate and once you do this you will promote a culture of belief and ability to do some amazing things with the power you afford them.
Don’t wait until the next round of performance reviews to talk to your nurses – bring it up in conversation on Monday Find out what they want to do what areas of interests do they have, actively engage them in what their aspirations are and find out how they feel they could achieve them – start the ball rolling and get on the path to empowering your nurses to be more than they ever thought they could be!
COMMENTS