Nursing is not a typical profession.
Being a nurse becomes engrained in the fabric of an individual’s existence. As a nurse you are the first to be called on by your friends when their children are sick, by the coaches on the little league field when a knee is scraped and by your aging parents as they enter a new phase of life and depend on help. It is impossible to turn off being a nurse and separate professional existence from the personal world.
This idea is magnified as a nurse leader. Nursing leadership is a profession that sets high expectations of presence, visibility, and availability. Nurse leaders are accountable for large groups of employees responsible for delivering care with expertise and compassion to people every moment of every day. The burden of that responsibility is massive.
As a leader to other leaders, one of my core principles was advocating for work life balance. I believed that leading with this value expressed my sincere gratefulness and appreciation to my leaders while emphasizing them as individuals. I thought that I prioritized this ideal and tried to promote innovative approaches to being a nurse leader.
- Put your loved ones above the job. Prioritize them.
- Take the time you need outside of work.
- Promote your own health and physical well-being.
- Step away when you need.
- Turn your phone off.
However, while we consistently spoke those words, often the reality of putting them into action failed. Instead, I saw leaders compelled to their profession and put the idea of balance to the side due to obligation.
- Leaders missed key personal milestones and events.
- Leaders checked in on vacation – sent emails, attended meetings, and answered calls.
- Leaders did not live healthy lifestyles – they did not exercise, they did not eat well, they did not prioritize wellness.
The next generation is looking at us and making decisions about leadership based on our actions and not our words. I believe they want something different for themselves, and I believe our behaviors are contributing to the difficulty in filling key leadership positions. To solve this problem, we must ask the question why and be willing to change the norm. We must shift our thinking and change our rules through innovation and disruption.
Shift our Thinking:
Promoting the idea of a work life balance will never work. A balance suggests equal components of a professional and personal life. However, being a nurse is embedded in an individual’s foundation. This doesn’t change when becoming a nurse leader. In fact, it is magnified. It is impossible to achieve an equal divide.
What if we considered a work life blend. A blend suggests an ideal that our work and our personal lives are brought together in a friendly coexistence. A blend acknowledges that you are always a nurse in every aspect of your life – it grants permission to state that it is impossible to separate the identities.
Changing our Rules:
If we change our thinking – we must change our rules to be truly successful. Without that it is merely a flavor of the month of philosophy shifts. The rules need to acknowledge that we cannot separate our personal and professional lives. They need to be established to support a blend.
We must change expectations around visibility, presence, and availability. Great nurse leaders will never separate from responsibility. Let’s allow leaders that get the job done to set realistic schedules for presence versus expecting them to be in person Monday through Friday from sunup to sundown. Would things break if we allowed them to work from home one day per week or encouraged them to take lunch off campus?
We need to revisit the perks of leadership and be innovative. Consider ideas that promote a blend like a paid day off on their birthday, subscriptions to online wellness or fitness platforms, standing desks and fitness watches, paternity leaves, passes to take their family to a movie, or time off to volunteer. What if we provided unlimited PTO or didn’t keep track of those hours as they likely are working at some point during that time anyway. There are likely unlimited creative solutions to change what is done today to promote ideal blends. We must begin to implement these types of new ideas.
The future of nurse leadership is already here. The future nurse leader is the new nurse fresh out of school, the high school student choosing college, or the young child watching a parent go to work every day. The choices we make today as nursing leaders impact their future decisions and we must commit to creating a profession that they will aspire to. Our chances of successfully recruiting the next generation of nurse leaders into our roles will only be successful when we acknowledge that there must be a blend to promote a healthy coexistence between professional and personal lives.
