Claire's Bio
A dedicated nurse whose clinical background is in haematology and bone marrow transplant. Claire has over 37 years of experience in nursing and leadership within the NHS in both national and territorial Health Boards. Claire has carried her passion for delivering excellence in patient care throughout her career and remains focused on encouraging and supporting her teams in continuous improvement for both patients and staff . Claire is currently the Director of Nursing and Midwifery at NHS Tayside and Chair of Scottish Executive Nurse Directors.
Follow Claire on Twitter (X) here: @clairesmith55
Listen to the episode below
Watch the episode below
Summary of our discussion
In this final episode of the season podcast, I spoke to Claire Pearce she enlightened me with her story of leadership. I broke the ice by asking Claire what made her smile today and she told me about driving to work each day and on this day, she caught up with a friend and colleague and they spoke about retirement plans. Check out the podcast to hear all about this.
Claire then responded to a quote I put to her on leadership. Do check into the podcast to see what this was and her initial response.
Jumping into the main part of the podcast, Claire gave her 3 points about how to be a better leader. Her first was about the sheer importance of reflection as a nurse, as a leader and as a person. It was really interesting to hear about how Claire reflects both formally and informally. Her second point was about building authentic and genuine relationships with people. It is a key skill and attribute to have as a leader Claire tells us. Claire's last post was all about the sheer importance of continuous learning and development. Tune in to hear all about this.
Claire then told us about 2 examples of when leadership has gone well and these were firstly about her choice to allow nursing students onto placement during the heights of the pandemic and her ability to build relationships when challenged and placed in a difficult situation.
Lastly, as Claire's 1 leadership style, she told us about authentic leadership. Give the podcast a listen and you can read more about this leadership style below.
Authentic Leadership
This leadership style is fairly new in the world of nursing and healthcare although some might say long overdue. The style of leadership is about the leader having the ability to show transparency and their personal characteristics which requires a sense of self. These types of leaders are said to be genuine and real, having self-awareness, transparency, trustworthiness and reliability. This is all in the hope of gaining and growing followers where they can then lead by example by doing the right thing. The thing with authentic leaders is they believe they are doing the right thing.
Holroyd (2015) highlights that authentic leaders have four features:
Relational transparency - Openness and honesty
Balanced processing - Objective analysing
Internalised moral perspective - Guided by internal moral and ethical standards
Self-awareness - Based on values, beliefs, emotions and motives
Interestingly there are said to be some disadvantages to this style such as some of the literature suggesting if a leader is not an authentic leader is this suggesting they are inauthentic? Other literature has highlighted it is based on others such as followers perception of the leader and some worry there is a risk of being too authentic.
Further reading on Authentic Leadership
Websites:
Open access journal articles:
Footnotes
Why not take this fun personality test to find out your personality? Check it out here:
And also why not find out your leadership style based on a questionnaire? Try it here:
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