Even with the grand purpose of helping those in need, nursing still has its share of difficulties. You can turn these challenges into something either bearable or burdensome, depending on your relationship with your colleagues and even your nurse manager.
A good relationship with them equates to a deeper understanding of your goals and finding the middle ground to work together. Half of your job as a nurse is tied to interacting with patients, while the other half includes contact with other staff members and your nurse manager. This means you should place importance on the latter as well.
With this in mind, you may be asking now, how can you build a positive relationship with them? In this article, we will discuss various factors that can either make or break good relations with your nurse manager.
Good relations must be rooted in clear communication, heartfelt connections, and intentional actions. While there may be frictions and areas for improvement in any organization, once you shed light on these weak areas, interventions to help one another can happen. Such situations thus allow growth in the communication and interpersonal skills between nurses and nurse managers.
Below are some examples of how you can foster good relations with your nurse manager.
Even with responsibilities of varying difficulties, you need to finish your job excellently no matter what. Hence, raising your concerns to your nurse manager as needed may help make the job easier and more efficient. As you air your concerns, be gentle but professional with your words, either in verbal or written form. Expressing your thoughts objectively and politely will bring down walls between professional relationships.
During endorsements: Politely ask questions about managerial matters when new guidelines are implemented and how you can adjust to these. Also, you can tell them if you feel the guidelines are difficult to follow, so they can recalibrate them.
When dealing with vague instructions: Calmly ask your manager if they can repeat said instructions and clarify them to you, so you can act accordingly.
You can see your manager’s actions from the ground up and how their decisions affect your work. Vice versa, your manager knows if your performance elevates or diminishes healthcare quality. When you set one-to-ones with your nurse manager, you can openly discuss the areas you see yourself lacking and where you see their shortcomings, so you can create an improvement plan.
They might appreciate it if you have suggestions on finding sweet spots where you can complement their weakness with your strengths and where your manager can do the same. With a better dynamic, you and your manager can better interact with patients while you build a better rapport.
Charge nurses see the bigger picture of their day-to-day duty. Their actions and perspectives aim to provide the best healthcare without compromising any of the organization’s goals and employees’ needs. They need all the help they can get, which is why you should make time for their vision to be heard.
Once you do, you will find appropriate ways for that vision to materialize. Your manager may even open themselves to you when they notice you are paying attention.
During meetings: Patiently wait for them to lay out their plans. There is no reason to contest your manager’s decisions if it helps everyone involved.
When managing tasks: Cooperate with your superiors and colleagues. This way, you can work effectively without creating unnecessary tension.
Once you and your manager have laid out your concerns, find a middle ground where you can inform your manager of your expectations for them and vice versa. Hear out what your managers have to say and wait for them to do their part before you conclude what their intentions are. If you do this, you will find that their actions intend to help you and improve your competencies in patient care.
As mentioned earlier, nurse managers have a different perspective on determining work shifts, developing an evaluation form for employees, and other issues. However, your nurse manager can act better if they know what it means to work at the bedside. In the same way, you will prioritize the organization and patients’ welfare when you consider problems through your leader’s lenses.
When you and your manager become aware of the comforts and cruelty of the roles being reversed, both of your perspectives widen. A relationship will grow when you become more receptive to the other’s reactions and formulate solutions to improve the service in general.
In monthly meetings or forums: Help your manager create tangible solutions for positive interventions with your department.
When asked for concrete methods to help: Create solutions in consensus with your colleagues. Other registered nurses will not find the task too difficult as it was constructed with everyone’s strengths and weaknesses in mind.
Showing up to offer sincere help matters. Your leaders have a lot on their plates, and it would be a relief if you could find ways to share that weight with them. If you try to understand where your manager is coming from, you may find it easier to work with them instead of against them. At the same time, you can pay attention to your nonverbal form of communication. Make your gestures, eye contact, and your tone of voice show that you aim to connect with your manager.
You can show respect for your manager’s authority by being proactive not in getting things done but also in ensuring your quality of work. Once your manager notices that you give everything with your work, they may communicate more with you and tell you their take as a manager in different situations.
What it means: Working proactively means intentionally aiming for the results you want and giving all you have as a nurse to achieve it.
When a plan is set: Remind yourself of that plan. With the correct plans laid out, your actions are geared towards better results.
Controlling emotions is an important point to remember. This is a professional relationship, and no matter what victory or conflict your organization goes through, everything is best resolved in a professional method of communication.
When disappointments arise, addressing your superiors calmly and collectedly is a skill to master. Concurrently, when reasons for celebration abound, you can practice conversing and enjoying each other’s company as long as within the bounds of the workspace.
A work environment that encourages free-thinking, open communication, and refined actions make everyone feel that they are heard, allowing everyone to act with their best interests in mind. The best way to create good relations with your superior is to consider them to the same degree you would do yourself.
Take time to evaluate everything. Know the strengths and weaknesses you, your nurse manager, and your workplace have. At the same time, know that being gentle with the people involved in the process is as important as the creation of good relations itself.
We ensure every healthcare organization that our nurses are top tier and ready at a moment’s notice. At the same time, it is our job to ensure that you thrive in a workspace that will encourage and enlighten your nursing career path. With our help, the places you will go to, the process of acquiring a job, and the benefits will inspire you to work better.
We want you to create bonds that will deepen and help you with your professional goals. These bonds will best be formed if you are with the right people in the right workplace. At PRS Global, we aim to find you a job and a work circle that you can contact, relate to, and act with. This opportunity is yours to take. Contact us now!