Preparing for Leadership

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Preparation for a leadership role requires the development of new skills, and these skills must be maintained and reassessed over time. Thus, becoming a successful leader requires lifelong learning. By providing self-assessments, tips, and useful evaluations, this book allows readers to think about current work-related challenges and to develop new, well-thought-out solutions. These activities prompt readers to develop new ways to increase their effectiveness as leaders. The book explains that an effective leader helps make an organization resilient, growth oriented, and innovative.

The author begins by defining leadership and encouraging readers to complete the leadership self-assessment that is provided. Readers are then instructed to list their strengths and weaknesses. The author refers to this list numerous times throughout the book to help readers develop new leadership skills, such as developing trust and inspiring others. By using a four-stage process, readers learn how to modify their leadership style to fit the group they are leading. The author discusses how to deal with organizational politics, people who resist authority, and those who underperform. In addition, the author defines difficult personality types such as “The Staller,” “The Emotional Hothead,” “The Complainer,” “The Backstabber,” and “Mr Perfect” and provides methods to handle these problem personalities.

Throughout the book, “scenes” or examples of common work issues are provided with solutions to the problems. Although most scenes are not health care-related, readers can easily adapt the scenes to fit their work environment. Almost everyone has issues with developing trust, using authority, and providing feedback. Because successful nurses frequently are promoted into leadership roles without much managerial training, this book could serve as a resource for the new leader, although it also could be a useful resource for the experienced leader.