The Difficult Conversations
14 years after getting my nursing degree, I find myself in a management position in the NHS. Gone are the days where I was holding a patient’s hand during their procedure, or running around the department gathering equipment for a case. Now, my days are filled with e-mails, paperwork, electronic paperwork, incident reports, investigations, difficult conversations, nursing anxiety, and the like.
Nursing management is like being a corporate manager on steroids. Working with different kinds of patients is a given in healthcare, as well as working with different kinds of personalities in colleagues. It would be a dream to be the manager for a team of robots that just follow instructions, but that is not the case for the humans that we work with.
I do think that it’s a good thing to have such diverse personalities in a team, because the opportunities for you to grow as an individual and as a nurse is vast and varied. You get to appreciate your growth in every difficult conversation you have with a team member. The hesitation when challenging poor practice fades the more you become consistent at it. The ability to brush off criticism as part of the job is probably one of the most powerful skills I’ve learned, as not taking everything so personally makes you better at listening to other people and what they mean to say. However, there are always those moments where you think you handled a difficult situation really well and then your manager comes to you and says that the way you spoke to a staff member had led them to tears. Ah, the sweet slap in the face with a chair from reality. This should be included in the nursing management survival guide… how to provide your staff with emotional support when they are being challenged.
If I was in my baby nurse era, I probably would have ended up in tears hearing that feedback about me as well. But, as time would have it, I am now in my zero fucks era where I come to work for my patients and my role rather than to be liked and make friends. I do accept that perhaps my communication could have been better to avoid coming off too strong, but truly, I am not able to control how someone reacts when I raise an issue with them. All I know is that I saw behaviour that was not up to the standards I set for my team and I challenged it without any judgement or prejudice.
After my manager informed me about the feedback, I saw no point in trying to convince her that I did not feel like that was how I came across, and accepted that my approach had not been taken the way I intended it to. So, I said that I would speak to the staff members again and apologise about how I challenged them had made them feel a certain way. So I call their shift nurse-in-charge and inform him that I intend to speak with the staff in question after they come back from their lunch break. When I got there, they were in the middle of receiving a patient and clearly had no time to entertain me so I informed the nurse-in-charge that I would try to speak to them again later or tomorrow. Let’s see how it goes in the next entry.
