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Management and Leadership Skills Essay

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Introduction
Management and leadership skills in nursing and other healthcare professions are becoming a more and more widely spoken of subject, as they are essential skills for everyday practice in delivering care (Gopee and Galloway, 2009). Effective management requires the nurse to be able to draw on evidence based knowledge and experience to develop the ability to manage competently during practice. Skills without knowledge, appropriate attitude and understanding will not equate to competency (Watson, 2002).
This piece of work will critically explore the theories about management and leadership in health care. At the beginning it will provide a base understanding of both topics and accountability importance. It will then concentrate …show more content…

However leadership, as suggested by Cook (2001), can be seen as a cost effective way to improve patient`s care in times of limited resources, as a good leader can demonstrate certain behaviours and roles to influence others, as to empower others and provide direction and change. Faugier and Woolnough (2002) support these ideas, but also believe that there is a difference between management and leadership, as they contrast managers to be planners, where as leaders are looked upon as people who can communicate vision, motivate, inspire and empower in order to create organisational change. Mullin’s (2007) idea of leadership can be seen as the ability of one person to influence the behaviour or actions of other people.
Murphy (2005) maintains that leaders are accountable for helping their follower’s to become efficient and support them to develop their strengths and abilities. Distinguishing and categorising between different leadership styles can be done in several ways, (Gopee and Galloway, 2009). In this essay traditional classification of authoritian (autocratic), democratic, permissive (laissez-faire) and bureaucratic styles of leaders will be discussed.
Accountability, as stated by Sullivan and Garland (2010) means accepting ownership for the results whatever they are. The NMC (2008) defines accountability as an important part of professional practice as nurses and midwives often have to make judgements in a wide variety of circumstances, using their

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